by | 21 November 2005 · 5:29 pm

The Satisfying Pleasures of Hatred

Paul Berman has a long and fascinating review article (free registration required) in The New Republic on several books by French authors whom he characterizes as “anti-anti-Americans.” Here’s a bit of what he has to say about André Glucksmann’s Le discours de la haine (‘the discourse of hatred’):

The wildest of hatreds do not need a cause outside of ourselves. This is Glucksmann’s point. Hatred’s causes may merely be hatred’s excuses. We hate because we choose to hate. We could equally choose not to do so. And why choose to hate? On this question, Glucksmann reveals himself as the disciple, as no one could have predicted, of Sartre. In Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre wrote that people who give in to the pleasures of hatred do so because they cannot abide their own frailties. Weakness and imperfection are the human condition. But weakness and imperfection leave us unsatisfied, maybe even disgusted with ourselves. Hatred, however, can make us feel strong. Hatred is thrilling. Hatred is reassuring. When we choose to hate, we discover that, by hating, we overcome our own disappointment at ourselves. We choose to hate because we want to feel the exhilarating vibrations of power instead of weakness, the perfect ideal instead of the imperfect reality. And so, in order to hate, we hold aloft a glorious vision that can never exist: the vision of a perfect mankind unstained by weakness and flaws, a vision of purity and power. And we give ourselves over to the satisfying pleasures of hating everyone who stands in the way of the perfect vision.

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by | 20 November 2005 · 12:10 pm

Smithsonian Scholars at Work, 1918

I can remember sitting in Harrington‘s office typing, but I cannot remember what I typed. Surely we must have made a pretense of at least putting the Chumash material in order, since most of his vouchers had been made out for paying Chumash informants. At home we worked exclusively and almost frantically on the Tanoan material. Harrington bought a roll of butcher’s paper, which he meticulously divided into sheets that would lie nicely on our combination kitchen and dining table. On the sheets he diagrammed all the ramifications of the Taos pronoun: the various pronominal postfixes in combination with free standing forms, also with verbs and nouns. I never quite saw the sense of these oversized diagrams, for they contained nothing that could not be shown on sheets of ordinary writing paper. But Harrington enjoyed making them–it was about the nearest he ever came to having fun. Ultimately, he had a stack approximately six inches high. Before I left Washington I pulled the stuff together and wrote a paper on “The Taos Pronoun.” With amazing generosity, Harrington presented it for publication under my own name, and Dr. J. Walter Fewkes, Chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology, accepted it. I believe I was even paid something. The number “twenty-five” comes to mind, but whether I received twenty-five dollars or produced twenty-five pages of stilted and incomparable dullness, I couldn’t say. There must still be copies filed away in musty archives….

Harrington had another Indian colleague in the Bureau, a Huron (if I remember correctly), a sluggish type who had not gone into the field for years and had no desire to do so. He published, however. I seem to remember the texts of myths with dull translations which shifted into Latin whenever they promised to become interesting. His name is a blank to me.

Still another colleague whose name I do not recall was a short, red-faced, balding man who held the theory that life in America tended over the course of several generations to make the descendants of all immigrants dolicocephalic, no matter how round-headed their ancestors had been. As I was learning, this man and many others who devoted themselves to the pursuit of science tended to evolve fantasies into theories and then to find or twist facts to support them. The first question put to me by this anthropologist was how long had my people been in America? When I replied, “Five generations,” nothing would do but that he must get his calipers and measure my head immediately. To his disappointment, I was brachycephalic. In fact, he found me excessively, inordinately brachycephalic, more round-headed than any one of my ancestry had any right to be. I remembered that my father’s head looked rather long, my mother’s decidedly round, and I refrained from telling him that I had been a stubborn baby who refused to sleep in any position except on my back….

On a bitterly cold night we went to visit a group of Kiowas who were in Washington on official business for their tribe. Harrington said it was our opportunity to contact authentic Plains Indians. He was so enthusiastic that I shared his excitement. The Kiowas were housed in a hotel that had seen better days. It was now a combination of fleabag and firetrap, catering to Indians with little money to spend. We walked along the narrow, smelly, dimly lit hallway with its threadbare red carpeting, and knocked upon a certain door. Although our visit had been prearranged, the response was so slow in coming that it seemed as though we were not to be admitted. At last the door was opened. We entered a hot, musty room where three or four Indians sat draped in blankets. Harrington took out his basic questionnaire and proceeded to ask for certain words in the Kiowa language. Responses to these questions and to all attempts at conversation were so deliberate as to make it appear that the speakers lived in another time-world where a day was as a thousand years, or at the very least two seconds were as five minutes. Even the words were spaced out, with gaps between words and also between syllables. The answers, if one had the patience to listen for them, were coherent and intelligent, but always interminably drawn out. An hour of interviewing produced almost nothing. After we left, Harrington said the Indians had been under the influence of some drug, probably, he thought, peyote.

SOURCE: Encounter with an Angry God, by Carobeth Laird (U. New Mexico Press, 1993), pp. 80-86

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by | 19 November 2005 · 5:02 pm

Now Where Was I?

Over Veterans Day weekend, I vowed to finish revisions to a linguistics paper provisionally accepted to a volume in memory of a departed colleague–and to stop blogging until I had done so. Well, the revisions dragged on for a week, for no particularly good reason. Generalist blogging is just so much easier than finalizing words to be printed in indelible ink on acid-free paper for the benefit of an obscure bunch of academic specialists.

The other reason for light blogging has been my reading matter lately, which has not easily lent itself to excerpting:

Here’s a short paragraph from Days of Obligation (p. 29) that captures one of my favorite things about Rodriguez. He has a keen sense of tragedy, and no desire for utopias.

I have never looked for utopia on a map. Of course I believe in human advancement. I believe in medicine, in astrophysics, in washing machines. But my compass takes its cardinal point from tragedy. If I respond to the metaphor of spring, I nevertheless learned, years ago, from my Mexican father, from my Irish nuns, to count on winter. The point of Eden for me, for us, is not approach, but expulsion.

In the wake of Veterans Day, that passage seemed especially appropriate.

UPDATE: While I’ve been reading about John Peabody Harrington, Impearls has posted huge chunks of Harrington’s contemporary (and my dissertation advisor’s teacher) A. L. Kroeber‘s Handbook of the Indians of California, with some great maps, too.

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by | 19 November 2005 · 4:05 pm

Death Rattle vs. Flatline

We were by then fully into the Depression. Hoover closed the banks, including a very insignificant one in Coleman, Texas. My father had helped to found this bank, and in a sense it had been a more satisfactory child to him than his flesh and blood daughter. He survived its closure by just one week, dying quite literally of a broken heart. The night he died we were all together in the home in San Diego. He lay on a hospital bed set up in the alcove off the living room that we called the “music room.” My mother sat beside him, holding his limp hand and sighing heavily at intervals, doing her duty to the very end of their life together. The children were upstairs, except the three-months-old baby, who was in her basket in the dining room, where George and I lay sleepless on a quilt. The folding doors into the living room were partially open. Soon after midnight we heard the death rattle, then the final expiration, and then, no more….

We purchased a lot for ten dollars in the unkempt old cemetery at Poway. There on a day of driving November rain we buried my father under the catalpa trees. Mother said this was appropriate, for his mother, the mother he had scarcely known, lay under the catalpa trees somewhere near Uvalde, Texas. The gloom of the brief graveside ceremony was broken for an instant when one of the Laird children piped up, “Did we forget the bananas?” To him, the trip to San Diego meant an opportunity to purchase bananas, not the loss of a grandfather.

SOURCE: Encounter with an Angry God, by Carobeth Laird (U. New Mexico Press, 1993), p. 178

How many people in developed countries these days die at home, surrounded by family, with final expiration heralded by the sound of the death rattle? Nowadays, the flatline on the EKG has replaced the death rattle, and artificial respirators have to be switched off by unrelated experts.

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by | 10 November 2005 · 8:32 am

How Not to Quell a Riot: Los Angeles, 1992

In November 2004, the Suburban Emergency Management Project issued a three-part series of biots on “The Flawed Emergency Response to the 1992 Los Angeles Riots”:

Part A

Editor’s Note: This case report is well-written and eminently valuable because it provides keen insights into how the 1992 LA riots actually got started (beyond the obvious cause of the [Rodney King] verdict). If I had to finger one cause beyond the verdict itself, it would be the abdication of civil leadership during a time of severe social stress. What is stunning about the 1992 LA riots is their uncanny resemblance to the LA Watts riots of 1965, which the civil leadership of 1992 (e.g., [LAPD Chief Daryl] Gates, [LA Mayor Thomas] Bradley, [Congresswoman Maxine] Waters) must surely have experienced as young adults. Experienced and informed leadership is at no time more important than during social stress situations when managers and line staff require effective and timely direction and support.

Part B

Editor’s Note: Absent a functioning police force, the riot spun out of control.

Part C

Editor’s Note: It is easy to be appalled at the flawed organization response to the 1992 LA riots. If one views the situation through the lens of emergent collective behaviors during disasters, it is easier to comprehend. Command and control models of organization response do not work well during times of severe civilian social stress. From the original leadership vacuum created in particular by the personality and flawed leadership of Chief Gates, the events escalated beyond anyone’s control until finally the rioters were tired and spent and there was not much else left to destroy. That is when the riots stopped, even though we may wish to believe that the massive organizational response finally brought about this desired result.

Here are some illustrations of how not to proceed.

1. Paralyze your leadership.

The conflict between Gates and Bradley in the months leading up to the verdict “had transformed [police] department dynamics, with some assistant and deputy chiefs disillusioned, others trying to win approval as possible successors, and others on their way out. Indeed, by the time of the jury’s deliberation, the leadership for the LAPD was in a state of near paralysis,” reports Rosegrant. Further, both Gates and Bradley reached the conclusion that “the LAPD should not make a public show of mobilizing” (p. 14) should violence occur. “This sense of cautiousness had already seeped throughout the department: LAPD arrests had dropped significantly during the previous year as police changed tactics and avoided problematic arrests that might lead to discipline or a charge of excessive force. The feeling that ‘I get paid the same for not making arrests, and am less apt to get in trouble,’ was almost a guiding rule,’ rued one police officer.” Bradley, Maxine Waters, and other black leaders opposed a highly mobilized LAPD both because they feared police might overreact and create another Rodney King-like incident, and because they worried that the mere sight of riot-ready police could incite a violent reaction among already tense residents.” (p. 14)

2. Put your own political interests first.

Chief Gates, who appeared unaware of the seriousness of the disturbance, had left at 6:30 pm for a political fundraiser outside of LA. Gates thought there were sporadic problems, but his attitude, according to one observer, was “By God, get in there and deal with it. It’s not going to take the chief of police of the city of Los Angeles to run this operation, and if it does, I’ve got the wrong people below me. There was no centralized direction.” (p. 4) In response to a flood of 9-1-1 calls, a lieutenant at headquarters finally declared a tactical alert at 6:45 pm, a step that many believed Gates should have taken much earlier. When Gates returned to headquarters after 10 pm, he “took [Hunt] absolutely apart in public,” according to one observer. (p. 8) Gates later remarked, “Since I’d been though it, I kind of though that fellow members of the top command knew what to do. They didn’t.” Fire Chief Manning said, “We all know that a plan that people don’t know about is as bad as no plan at all—in fact, it’s probably worse. In this case, I think Daryl [Gates] believed that they had a plan. He may well have believed that his people were fully trained in it. In the real world, they weren’t.” (p.8) Later when the LAPD tried to isolate the Florence-Normandie area, the effort came too late to be effective.

3. Let the media set your priorities.

During the first night of the riot on April 29, 1992, the emergency operations center (EOC), though officially activated, became “kind of an isolated island of non-information” according to the LAPD’s Commander Bayan Lewis (B, p. 6). Officers gleaned information from the television coverage of the riots and tended to dispatch resources to locations being featured on television to the detriment of other areas of the city that also had needs. The EOC communications system, which consisted of handwritten notes sent by runners to various officials in the main room or satellite rooms, rapidly became overloaded so that many requests were never delivered.

4. Allow the riot to spread.

Meanwhile, approximately 50,000 young men in South Central flooded the streets, many with new weapons looted from gun stores and pawn shops, which had remained unguarded by police officers. The riot demographics changed after the first night, which was dominated by enraged members of the African-American community, e.g., the attacks by young black males on Reginald Denny. But by the second day, people of all races, ages, gender, and income levels were looting and other illegal behavior.

The media coverage seemed to exacerbate the looting. One African-American woman, for example, told a media person that “watching television convinced her to go steal diaper, cans of food, and produce because she … ’didn’t know if there were going to be any stores standing.’” (C, p. 7) A fire department battalion commander noted, “You could almost get a game plan off television, because they would gather concerns from the local officials about where it was happening and what was happening. I think that gave a lot of direction to the rioters.” (C, p. 7)

5. Deploy unprepared Guard troops.

By 4 am on April 30, 1992, 2,000 Guard troops had reported to about ten armories in the city area. The goal of getting the troops on the streets by 4 pm, April 30, was hindered by failure to assign which agency would coordinate the Guard’s involvement, deciding what its missions would be, and estimating how many more troops ultimately might be called up. Unknown to Thrasher and Wilson, most of the troops weren’t really trained to respond to a riot. As a result, commanders at the armories trained the troops on the spot. Troops had to read and sign a copy of the Rules of Engagement, which emphasized the importance of restraint, so that soldiers “wouldn’t leave themselves open to charges, such as those that arose after the Watts riots, of having fired on rioters without adequate cause.” (C, p. 5)

6. Send in the Marines to quell domestic disturbances.

The 1992 LA riots were officially over when Mayor Bradley lifted the curfew on May 4. But city officials and residents were reluctant to see federal and Guard troops leave. General Covault wanted his troops to leave as soon as possible. For example, one incident in particular alarmed him. “Police and Marines were responding to a disturbance, which turned out to be a domestic dispute, when two shotgun rounds were fired through the door. One of the police officers shouted, ‘Cover me,’ meaning that the Marines should have their weapons ready to respond if necessary. But the Marines, understanding ‘cover me’ to mean providing cover by using firepower, shot off what was later estimate to have been more than 200 rounds.” (C, p. 21) Remarkably, no one in the apartment was injured. Finally, on May 9, federal troops began to depart. Five days later, the Guard also began to disengage. On May 27, the last solders headed home.

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by | 9 November 2005 · 9:29 am

Who Riots? Those Downtrodden or Those Ascendant?

Chicago Boyz contributor Shannon Love identifies some misconceptions on rioting.

In reading a lot of commentary on the French Riots, I repeatedly see a lot of commentators repeating the idea that people riot because they feel weak, powerless and helpless. This is exactly backwards. The real pattern is that people tend to riot when they feel both entitled and empowered.

This counterintuitive aspect of rioters explains why in sports riots it is the fans of the winning team who are much more likely to riot than those of the losing team. The team’s victory creates both a sense of entitlement, “we won so we get to celebrate excessively,” and a sense of empowerment, “we can beat anyone!”

Other forms of rioting follow the same pattern. Until the 1960s, African-Americans were almost always the victims of riots, not the perpetrators. The race riots of the late-’60s did not occur because of increasing oppression of African-Americans but because of decreasing oppression. The political changes of the ’60s made African-Americans feel both entitled to strike against the larger society and strong enough to do so. The riots were expressions of strength, not weakness.

Political riots tend to arise from populations who follow the ascendent political doctrines of their times. Riots in the ’60s world-wide were almost always young leftists rioting against the rightist status-quo. Being in sync with the dominant political zeitgeist of an era gives the rioters their needed sense of entitlement (moral justification in the case of political riots) and their sense of empowerment (the people are with us!).

So what does all this tell us about the French riots?

First, the rioters feel entitled or justified in rioting. Perhaps they feel entitled because they feel economically cheated, but they may also feel entitled for cultural or ideological reasons. The mostly Arab and Islamic rioters may be striking out at the white French in a manner similar to the American race riots of the 1800s, only in this case it is a belief in cultural or religious superiority that drives them.

Second, the rioters do not feel desperate or afraid. Instead, they are rioting because they believe that a power shift has occurred in their favor. They are attacking less out of aggrievement than out of contempt. They feel ascendent. This suggests they do not perceive the French state as being willing or capable of opposing them.

This certainly fits the pattern of the anti-Korean riots after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. A student paper in Compass Online suggests several factors that prompted Japanese citizens to riot against immigrant Korean laborers after the earthquake:

  • The Japanese government proclaimed martial law, ostensibly to quell Korean riots.
  • The postwar depression after 1918 caused Japanese workers to resent competition from Korean immigrants.
  • Japanese citizens felt superior to Koreans, whose weak government had easily yielded to Japanese colonial control.
  • Japanese feared their colonial subjects after the Korean nationalist uprising in 1919.

The Japanese rioters felt aggrieved, to be sure, but one would be hard put to prove they were more oppressed than the Koreans they slaughtered.

One could make similar observations about the countless instances of large demonstrations, whether violent or peaceful, led by students from elite universities in capital cities, some of which have toppled governments, while others have been violently suppressed. The students and workers who demonstrated for weeks in Tiananmen Square in 1989 didn’t do so because they felt weak. They felt empowered, on the crest of history, protected by the eyes of the world, and far more legitimate than the corrupt government they unsuccessfully challenged.

UPDATE: Shannon Love had an earlier post entitled Bread Alone that addressed issues of material vs. psychological welfare, the latter principally focusing on jobs and control of one’s own destiny.

In the modern developed world, the basic material needs of even the most poor are easily met. Even the most die-hard libertarian must give some attributes of the welfare state, such as universal education, some credit for getting us to this point. However, just because a concept met the needs of the past doesn’t mean it meets the needs of present or the future. The point of diminishing returns has long since been passed. What the poor now need, and what the welfare state cannot provide, is an environment that lets the individual gain control over their own destinies. The very degree of micromanagement that the welfare state requires to function means that it must strip the ability to choose from the individual. People in such situations do begin to feel like cattle, cared for but ultimately herded .

In the 80’s, a great shift occurred in American thinking about welfare. Americans grew less concerned about the material aspects of lives of the poor and instead began to pay attention to their psychological well being. We made the decision that long-term dependence on the state was destructive to both individuals and communities. Americans think it’s better for a community that 100% of people capable of work are able to get a job a $5 an hour than it is for only 50% of workers to get jobs paying $10 an hour. We have decided that giving people active control over their own lives is ultimately better than providing a higher level of material benefit. I believe that is why in recent years, when disasters like blackouts or massive hurricanes disrupted the functioning of centralized authority, America’s poor did not riot or prey on others. Instead, overall, they reacted with great civility, even when abandoned by the state.

Well, perhaps that understates American troubles a bit, but not as much as French coverage of Hurricane Katrina overstated the ensuing troubles.

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by | 8 November 2005 · 6:04 am

Scoring Political Points Through Fire and Flood

Like many bloggers, I’ve been reading voraciously about the escalating outbreaks of gang violence in in France, and now elsewhere in Europe. I must say, I am utterly disgusted with the amount of political point-scoring that permeates the blogosphere (Left and Right), just as it does the international media (mostly Left) whenever disasters strike or “mistakes are made” by anyone in a position that requires them to make hard decisions that have real-world consequences. The world seems no longer to be inhabited by fallible humans, only by omniscient demons who seek to turn Our utopias into Their counterutopias.

In general, the level of analysis in the blogosphere is infinitely superior to that purveyed by the traditional broadcast media, but you sure as hell need a powerful, uh, “wastewater management” filter to find it anymore. During the political-point pachinkofest that was Hurricane Katrina, I just tried to tune it all out. The Paris riots are more difficult. They are pretty much a man-made (and, frankly, boy-made) fiasco, and not an act of God or Nature. There are many lessons to learn, whether or not they score political points.

My own fairly inarticulate political philosophy (to the extent I have patience for such matters) tends toward utilitarianism, pragmatism, or–better yet–experimentalism (or empiricism, synonymous with quackery in an earlier era, and even nowadays to proponents of Theory). Perhaps I could call it Dengxiaopingism, whose followers recite the ideology-exorcising Any-color-cat-echism. (Yes, I know Deng bloodily suppressed peaceful demonstrators, quite unlike those torching the French banlieues.)

In my ideal world, different nations, states, or communities would have the freedom and imagination to try different solutions to problems they identify, and we would all learn from the mistakes of others with whom we share similar goals. Sort of the political equivalent of bottom-up Quality Circles, endless tiny improvements, marginal revolutions. (Please, no major revolutions! They usually mean you have to chuck all received wisdom and learn every old lesson anew. Does this make me a “conservative”?)

In that spirit, I’d like to extract pieces from a thoroughly utilitarian, but far from unimaginative website, the Affordable Housing Institute (via Chicago Boyz), whose post on 7 November is entitled L’horloge orange, citing Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel Clockwork Orange.

In grim fulfillment of my prediction, the slums inside have exploded and the riots are getting worse: more places, more sophistication, more evil intent …

Once failure cracks into violence, it spread like a hateful epidemic until it plays itself out, usually in a small-scale atrocity that shocks the mass of bystanders into newfound courage. But end the riots will — the law will have the last word — and when they are over, what then?

France’s entire urban housing policy has failed, massively failed. The riots are proof.

In a world of scooters, cell-phones, and satellite television, no longer can poverty be isolated in high-rise blocks. No longer can the poor be kept ignorant of the riches next door….

Regardless of its founders’ good intention, severe destructive income concentration is almost always the fate of public housing — those people are put out of sight, out of mind.

When first envisioned in 1937, US public housing was a slum clearance tool: the housing was intended for truly working families, with income mixing and ethnic distribution. But whenever there is too little affordable housing, the tension arises, whom do we house?

Naturally, say the compassionate, we must house the neediest. Entirely understandable. But who are the neediest? Other than the elderly, whom most housing authorities separate in their own high-rise properties, the neediest are those who have no job. And who chooses to live with those who have no job? Those who have no practical choice.

The result, slowly but inexorably, is progressively more severe income concentration….

As in Old New Orleans, poverty was the distiller of an ethnic ghetto: it’s not that Muslim became poor, it’s that poor became Muslim….

Concentrated grinding poverty and idleness brew violence. You simply cannot warehouse young men in unemployment, welfare, isolation, boredom, and xenophobia, and expect them to learn anything else….

With all due deference to minister Sarkozy, violence is the solution to the problem of non-existence. Violence is heady stuff, intoxicating the more so because it goes unpunished and it is an inchoate revenge on all those who have more …

Anger and hate are unfocused, but those who act on hate become demagogic clay to be molded into instruments of political terror….

This is not yet a political or organized assault on French society … but it could rapidly become one. Where there is free-flowing violence, there are megalomaniacs ready to use it….

In the coming days I’ll post on what France’s plan should be, and we can compare it with the political vaporware the esteemed prime minister proposes.

Read the whole thing. It’s illustrated with quotes from the book and stills from the movie Clockwork Orange, plus a good variety of supporting quotes.

Another post about political calculations outlines a list of self-evident truths that are thoroughly utilitarian:

1. No program is ever created whose sole benefits are long-term. Every program must generate some short-term political benefits.

2. Pilot programs reduce political cost and political risk (because they give the experimenters permission to fail). Additionally, because pilots have a quicker payback, they fit better with the political cyclicality.

3. If you want macro change, you must drive away political cover because if elected officials can address an issue with political cover (which has minimal downside risk), they will prefer that to political commitment (fraught with political cost and risk).

4. Vaporware, no matter how patently absurd, is political cover for the weak-minded. This is why fluff vaporware is so harmful — in a political Gresham’s law, vaporware drives out policy reform.

5. Macro change seldom arises when things are merely declining. For macro change, things have to be truly desperate (this is why catastrophe is a precondition of fundamental reform). (FHA arose out of the Great Depression. HUD came about after the 1960’s urban riots.) Hence the saying, “before it can get better, it has to get worse.”

6. Sometimes the most effective step is a small increment that changes the political environment. Enough such small increments may tip the political arithmetic. This is a virtuous ‘slippery slope.’

7. There are times when the political environment for change is hopeless. In such cases, it is better to do nothing other than create intellectual ammunition. Spending political capital on a gutless Congress is merely wasting effort.

8. Just as the seasons turn, so too do the tides of aggregate political capital and political risk tolerance. The closer an election looms, the more likely elected officials are to plump for political cover, vaporware, and nostrums. So if you want to make a major push, do it with plenty of time before the next election!

9. Sometimes your best champions are those grizzled veteran elected officials who have seen parliaments come and go but problems remain. Newcomers are blank slates, terrified of political risk.

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by | 7 November 2005 · 10:45 am

Diary of an Japanese Schoolgirl, 1945

June 17, 1945

Today we went over what we’ll do at the presentation assembly, and this time we had Hachikuwa-sensei decide. Today was a spiritual training day for the whole school, and we did something different–we did hand-to-hand combat. Iwamaru-sensei told us many different stories. Then we piggybacked the person across from us and ran and did other things. The next station was Akuzawa-sensei’s hand grenade-throwing class. We used small balls for hand grenades and imagined that the large ball we used for the intergrade meet was the enemy’s head and threw the small balls at it. We threw the hand grenades with all our might, but they didn’t hit their target. Then we moved to Hachikuwa-sensei’s station, where we practiced striking and killing with a wooden sword. We faked to the left and faked to the right. Then after some time we went to Ishida-sensei’s station. We took our clothes off and practiced spearing someone. We used our foreheads to butt the chest of the person in front of us, thrust our hands into their armpits, and pushed with our feet firmly planted on the ground. In the end, only one person was still thrusting. Then when that was done, we went to Yoshikado-sensei’s station, where we practiced spearing. Yoshikado-sensei said, “They’re still there. Spear them! Spear them!” and it was really fun. I was tired, but I realized that even one person can kill a lot of the enemy.

August 16, 1945

Today at breakfast we heard very sad news from Miyaji-sensei. At long last, Japan was forced to surrender unconditionally to the Soviet-American-British alliance. It was because of the atomic bomb. On August 15, His Majesty said, “We have endured hardships and sadness, but we have been defeated by that atomic bomb, and all Japanese could be injured and killed. It is too pitiful for even one of my dear subjects to be killed. I do not care what happens to me.” We heard that he then took off the white gloves he was wearing and began to cry out loud. We cried out loud too. Watch out, you terrible Americans and British! I will be sure to seek revenge. I thought to myself, I must be more responsible than I have been.

SOURCE: Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese, by Samuel Hideo Yamashita (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005), pp. 289, 307

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by | 6 November 2005 · 10:33 pm

Diary of a Kyushu Schoolgirl, 12 April 1945

Today will be a clear-weather attack. They loaded us into a car with the divine eagles who will attack and not return, and we drove straight to the waiting aircraft along Guidance Road. On the way we sang “Sinking from the Sky” over and over. Together with our teachers we pulled the camouflage netting off the squadron leader’s plane. The revolutions of the propeller on his plane, the one with a bomb on its belly, were fine. Motoshima’s plane made a buzzing sound. That was probably the exceedingly kind squadron leader. We climbed onto the starting car (in those days, when aircraft started their engines, their propellers would not always turn automatically, so many had to be started with a starting car) and went to the control tower to send off the pilots. When I turned around, the squadron leader and Motoshima, both wearing pretty Chinese milk vetch necklaces, boarded their aircraft and looked back at us. A plane covered with cherry blossoms taxied by right in front of us. We thought that we, too, should shower the planes with cherry blossoms and ran back to the barracks. On the way we met Kawasaki, who was riding a bicycle.

We picked as many cherry blossoms as we could and ran back as fast as our legs would carry us, but the planes had gone to the starting line and were about to begin taxiing down the runway. They were far away, and we were sorry we couldn’t run out to them. Motoshima’s plane was late and went to the starting line right in front of us. Then the squadron leader’s plane took off. It was followed by planes piloted by Okayasu, Yagyu, and Mochiki. The Type 97 fighters wagged their wings from left to right, and we could see smiling faces in all the planes. The plane piloted by Anazawa from the Twentieth Jinbu Squadron passed in front of us. When we waved branches of cherry blossoms as hard as we could, the smiling Anazawa, his head wrapped in a headband, saluted us several times.

Click! … when we turned and looked behind us, it was the cameraman taking our pictures. When everyone of the special-attack [“kamikaze”] planes had taken off, we just stood there for a long time, gazing at the southern sky, which seemed to go on forever. Tears welled up in our eyes.

We didn’t feel like talking, and when we were about to return together, we discovered Motoshima and Watai. Motoshima was crying unashamedly … when I asked, “What’s wrong?” he said, “My bomb dropped off, and I couldn’t take off. When I ran over to our squadron leader, he said, ‘Motoshima, come later. I’ll go ahead and will be waiting for you in that other world.’ I didn’t expect this, and I’m so upset! After squadron leader’s plane took off, I just sat alone and cried to my heart’s content.” Teary-eyed Watai added, “It is really a shame! I’m sorry.” All at once, the tears we had been stifling welled up, and we all cried together. They said that tonight was a wake for the squadron leader, so sake couldn’t be drunk. Horii, who came today, told jokes, and the men listened, but their minds were somewhere else. Since they cried whenever they thought about their squadron leader, who had such deep affection for his subordinates, and about the way he’d say “Motoshima, Motoshima,” they asked us not to say anything at all.

It was unfortunate that Motoshima and Watai weren’t able to body-crash together with their splendid squadron leader or to participate in the second general attack.

SOURCE: Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese, by Samuel Hideo Yamashita (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005),
pp. 230-231

Motoshima got his wish 4 days later. The diarist was among the high school girls “assigned to the quarters of the special-attack [“kamikaze”] pilots and told to look after them, which meant cleaning their quarters, doing their laundry, and mending their clothes” (p. 221).

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by | 4 November 2005 · 10:16 am

A North Korean Renegade in Seoul

Seoul’s Christian community offered me enormous material and emotional support. Religion is very attractive to North Korean renegades. The atmosphere of quasi-religious adoration in which we were raised in North Korea only partially explains this phenomenon; more important, I believe, is the thirst for affection–for love, even–every renegade feels. I don’t know whether I am profoundly religious, but I wanted to be baptized.

I was also lucky enough to receive support from a bank, which gave me a scholarship for the duration of my studies. Add to that the money I made from giving interviews and writing the occasional article, and I had few material worries.

Since my integration into South Korean life ultimately would have to take place through steady work, I joined Hanyang University. Its founder, Kim Yon-jun, was a strong advocate for human rights in the North. Many renegades had enrolled in his university, and I was encouraged to do the same. I chose international business as my major. All the students were much younger than I was, but they accepted me as they might an older brother. They liked me a lot and tried to help me however they could, especially with English, which I spoke poorly. Despite our amicable relations, many things they did put me off. They were always going out to cafes and restaurants, as though getting a soda from the dispenser and lying on the grass weren’t good enough. They were throwing money out the window! Life in the North had made me a bit of a Spartan. When students sat down cross-legged in front of me and started smoking, I had a hard time holding my tongue; you don’t do that in front of someone your senior. The North is hypertraditionalist. Friendships between members of the opposite sex is not the norm. When a man speaks to a woman his own age, he employs the familiar form of address, she the formal. Relations follow a strict hierarchy. Here, we were equal! Some of the female students were so self-confident, they hardly paid me any attention when I spoke to them.

I eventually got used to all this. I have fond memories of my days at the university, even though the leftist students often riled me. They always tried to make me see the shortfalls of the South Korean system of government. At least the North wasn’t corrupted by a fierce, never-ending battle for profit! Though I lacked the theoretical arguments to counter their claims, I wasn’t impressed. “Go to the North,” I told my contradictors, “and you’ll stop trying to excuse all Kim Il-sung’s failures. Go find out for yourselves.”

SOURCE: The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, by Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, translated by Yair Reiner (Basic Books, 2001), pp. 227-228

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