The White Peril 白禍

Wow. Imagine being confined to an airliner for 18 hours, and then stepping out and finding yourself at Newark Airport. Of such forebearance is innovation born. I'm not entirely sure I could stand it, though. I take three or so trips out of Japan per year, all but one of which usually involves a flight of 10 to 12 hours. These flights tend to activate what my old boss calls the Rule of Seven: A man can keep himself amused on a passenger jet for 7 hours, tops, before he's ready to go bananas from cabin fever. Totally true in my case.

Besides the sheer patience-shredding length of today's Singapore Airlines flight, the interesting thing is that the Airbus used was configured to hold fewer than 200 passengers. A lot of recent stories about developments in passenger jets have suggested that the future is not in monster 700-seaters but in smaller jets that go longer distances. I suppose one big issue is that any weight occupied by passengers can't be used for the fuel needed to travel for 18 hours, so once you get above the capacity and distance of a 747, you have to keep making tradeoffs. It will be of interest to see whether and how this new Singapore-New York route affects the way Asian airlines compete for customers.

I was rereading a Virginia Postrel article from a decade ago, and it got me thinking. Maybe one of the reasons the American "return to civility" is taking a while to get off the ground--have you noticed?--is that it requires accomplishing two goals that, I'd imagine, seem contradictory to a lot of people. They aren't in reality, but assessing which value is ascendant in a given situation requires discrimination.

One thing we need to do is get rid of the idea that using different behavioral patterns in different contexts is somehow ipso facto insincere. Nowadays, behaving formally is something people do if they have to--as when there's a difficult but lucrative client to deal with--but the assumption seems to be that it wouldn't be necessary in a world of perfect, just-folks honesty. Different styles for different arenas as a way of life has an image of being suitable only for actors and PR types.

There are lots and lots of problems with this way of thinking, but one of the most important is one that gets little play: If you don't establish low-stakes, essentially content-free ways for people to show goodwill and allegiance to the group, you can't distinguish between friend and foe until you see them react to a real emergency. At that point the knowledge may come too late to be useful. In America, we want to make room for idiosyncrasy, which does make enforcing social custom more difficult than it is in societies that have no qualms about being openly conformist. (Not to mention any names.)

But is it really that hard? I'm not talking about censorship; I firmly believe that no expression, no matter how repugnant, should be flat-out suppressed--with exceptions for treason or falsehoods that cause immediate danger, obviously. And personally, I like boisterous conversation with lots of four-letter words and smutty jokes as much as anyone. I like Madonna videos. I like pictures of naked men. (Which of those three is my absolute favorite, I will delicately pass over. The point is....) In America, women don't show their tits in public, and men don't walk around on the street in leather underwear, because...well, just because. World cultures have a variety of ways of conveying businesslike public modesty, and that's ours.

I've never found such arbitrary rules to be all that inhibiting, but I'm no choirboy. When they showed the footage from the gay pride parades yesterday, I was craning my neck to see which of the barechested guys were especially hot just like every other queer with a television. I also wasn't traumatized, a few months ago, at the irrefutable proof that Janet Jackson's breast is equipped with the standard-issue nipple.

But the issue isn't just uptightness or prudery. The issue is also whether people who visibly flout expectations that take minimal effort to fulfill can be trusted with the big responsibilities. If gay guys can't restrict thong-wearing to the beach or indoor clubs, is it any wonder that people shudder to imagine how we act when we're actually out of sight? If Justin and Janet can't find choreography that keeps everyone's parts covered when they're performing at a nationwide event watched by millions of families, why wouldn't some parents decide it's best to avoid any further surprises by avoiding their output altogether? (A related question, which probably doesn't trouble, say, Michelle Malkin, but is of great interest to me: Now that twelve-year-old honor students and members of the 4-H club are wearing halter tops and hot pants, how does a bona fide slut distinguish herself as being actually on the make?)

I've been talking about pop culture partially because these events have made for evocative news lately. But the problem of running all of life's venues together has infected politics and the life of the mind, too. And that leads to the second thing that needs to happen: once we've reestablished the boundaries between the public and the private, we have to make free expression the highest priority in the appropriate areas, and then deal with it.

Willfully offensive speech helps to keep us from solipsism and complacency. The freedom to shock others encourages us to stretch our imaginations, and confronting in-your-face challenges to our own beliefs encourages us to question them. And the ability to blow off steam is a safety valve; using words aggressively helps us calm down before we're worked up enough to go the whole way and reach for a knife or gun, as Virginia Postrel pointed out. Of course, there are conditions attached. If all you ever do is throw verbal or visual Molotov cocktails, without developing an argument or having a sense of humor about yourself, you just turn people off. This, to me, was the problem with Al Gore's Brownshirts remark. There are plenty of people who are up in arms about it that don't seem to have any difficulty tossing around words like feminazi or Gestapo tactics, so how much partisanship is involved in all the condemnations is hard to judge. The problem with Gore is, everything he's said and done for the last four years makes it all too easy to believe that he wasn't exaggerating when he said that he thinks of Bush supporters as equivalent to the Brownshirts.

Isn't everything I've written here so obvious as not to be worth remarking on? I would have thought so. Maybe behavior is slow to change because people just have a hard time resigning themselves to the fact that there's no way to eliminate misunderstandings. Agreed-on patterns of surface behavior can allow a clever villain to slide through society undetected, and they can put nice but ungainly types at a disadvantage. A rant, even in a forum in which no-holds-barred expression is clearly expected, can alienate even some people who aren't determined to be offended. But the alternative, to judge from empirical evidence, is a society in which a lot of people feel that their beliefs are stymied while opposing beliefs are enshrined in policy, and in which no one trusts anyone who isn't already on his team to behave without being coerced into it. Not good. I do think that American good-heartedness and common sense will fix things eventually, but we're at such a critical juncture right now that I can't help hoping it happens faster.

A lawyer in Yokohama has had his license (is that the way to refer to what the bar association gives you?) suspended for three months because of a sexual harassment charge:

弁護士会によると、青木弁護士は2002年7月3日、債権取り立てに絡んで依頼を受けた女性を夕食に誘い、ドライブに連れ出した車内で性的な会話をし、ホテルに連れ込もうとしているのではないか、との不安を女性に抱かせた。

According to the [Yokohama] Bar Association, on 3 July 2002 Aoki invited a female client involved in a debt collection case to dinner, then in the course of a drive made sexual conversation and caused the client to fear that he was planning to take her to a hotel.

Sexual harassment in Japan is a big issue, of course. With more and more women putting off marriage until their early thirties, many offices have a bevy of pert, fresh-faced girls in their twenties...and a senior layer of men in their 50's who came of age when women only worked until they married. To complicate things, today's women often meet their future husbands at the office (as opposed to the old method of getting introductions to approved men through parents or other elders), so there is a sense in which many are on the lookout for a man.

Throw in Japan's idiosyncratic brand of sexual uninhibitedness, the tension of living in a 30-million-person megalopolis, and an educational system that hammers at people not to make waves, and you get some grossly fascinating varieties of sexual offenses. Example: some of the more crushingly-crowded commuter lines here, though the difference between the worst and the best is minimal in that regard, have instituted women-only train cars during rush hour. The reason is epidemic 痴漢 (chikan): in this case, groping of breasts and buttocks when people are so smashed up against each other that one can be confident of being unobserved or passing it off as unintentional.

I once spent a horrified 40-minute cab ride back to my old apartment in Yokohama during which the driver casually explained his theory of how to get away with chikan when the train was not quite crowded enough to keep people from lowering their chins and thus seeing what you were doing: You choose a woman in the more crowded section of the car and keep your hand flat. If you cup it, she'll know what you're up to and may protest. I swear, he had it all worked out and talked about it as blithely as if he were recommending his favorite ramen place. And he wasn't particularly at the extreme. While rapes of the knife-wielding-stranger variety are uncommon here, a lot of Japanese women I know admit pretty freely that there's pressure to feel flattered and respond favorably if a management-level man at the office issues an invitation. Conversely, there's little pressure to stand up for yourself, since it inevitably involves ruffling feathers higher up the hierarchy.

Yes, I know: These things are as old as the integrated workplace, and they exist in the States, too. But the attitude toward men's thinking of women as mindless sex objects is so blasé here that...well, when I read the article above, I wondered what on Earth had caused this particular lawyer to be singled out. Not that he doesn't deserve it if he took advantage of a client's trust to get her into an enclosed space and come on to her. But if everyone in his 50's or 60's who pulled something similar since July 2002 were punished for it, it's hard to imagine who'd be left to run the Japanese economy. Maybe the client was one of the few women brave enough to file a formal complaint, or maybe someone has it in for Aoki and decided to make a play.

Ass kissers.

Most of the time since 9-11, I've had to remind myself that we're up against atavists who will stop at nothing to destroy us all. I don't take the casualties or questions about mismanagement lightly, but it's a war, after all. Things are proceeding in fits and starts, but they do seem to be humming along.

The last few days, my feelings have been more in the vein of, Exactly why are we wasting our citizens trying to fix these people's problems again? Yes, that's unfair, and no, I don't really mean it. But I have been sorely in need of a reminder that the era when Islam and civilization could be mentioned in the same sentence isn't past.

So I've been thinking about the twin towers. Not the twin towers that were lost three years (!!!!) ago, but these:





(The photograph is from the official Kuala Lumpur Center City website.)

Atsushi and I went to KL the December after 9-11. When we landed at the airport, I steeled myself to enter a Civic Development theme park, with shiny public transportation and a few showy skyscrapers awkwardly jabbed into the city center. The Petronas Twin Towers, then the world's tallest buildings, I expected to be impressed but left cold by.

But our taxi rounded the last bend before you could see the city, and I got that jolt you get when something is so beautiful it hurts. And then I laughed. The photographs I'd seen had been no preparation at all for what the towers actually looked like in nighttime Kuala Lumpur. They were...adorable. They reminded me of the Martians on Sesame Street. They reminded me more literally of Liberty Place in Philadelphia. Their surfaces were craggy and interesting to look at, like draped cloth. They looked as if they'd risen from the ground, like ice columns through clay, rather than having been dropped on KL from on high. From the observation deck of the older KL Tower, they looked like soft-serve ice cream cones.

I know I'm getting kind of silly here, but living in Tokyo...I love this place, but outdoor Tokyo has to be one of the most aggressively ugly cities on Earth, and the fact that so much money and crack engineering goes into all the ugliness only makes it worse. It's as if someone had sprinkled Albert Speer spores over the bay shore. Seeing skyscrapers that looked as if they wanted humans to use them, that alluded to something besides the architect's own ego and the commissioning company's expense account, was an experience I hadn't had for ages. And people in KL really did seem to love the twin towers; they positively beamed with pride when we complimented them, or the city in general. And the ground-level shopping arcade and surrounding park were always jammed with people of all kinds.

There actually is a point to this. The Petronas towers were designed by an American firm; they're concrete-framed to minimize vibration, and their shape in cross-section is drawn from Islamic patterns. The construction contract for one tower was awarded to a consortium led by Hazama Construction here in Japan, the other to one led by Samsung Engineering and Construction in Korea. It's not as if old rivalries were invisible; the Samsung tower went up with far fewer hassles than the Hazama tower, and we heard about it.

But still, at the end of a century that began with colonization and occupation and world wars, you had Americans, Japanese, and Koreans doing a massive development project for an Islamic country with prominent Buddhist and Hindu minorities. It's important to feel the proper revulsion toward people who offer to hack off heads and blow things up because they're still stewing over Andalusia this and Ottoman that, but we also need to remember what it is we do and what's so great about it. Westernization is not a tradeoff-free proposition, but at its best, it gives you both monumental achievement and human-scale improvements to daily life. And they keep happening.

So this is what it's going to be like looking at the morning headlines now: One of the Olsen sisters has an eating disorder, Clinton said something or other about the Lewinsky affair, and another hostage has been beheaded in the Middle East. The South Korean guy was an Evangelical Christian of some kind. I'm no longer a believer myself, obviously, but--I hope this doesn't sound hypocritical--I hope his last moments were at least made less traumatic by thoughts of meeting his creator.

Holy sh*t! The neighborhood I just moved out of had a shooting this morning:

23日午前8時45分ごろ、東京都渋谷区道玄坂2ノ1、東京メトロ半蔵門線・東急田園都市線渋谷駅の9番出口付近の地下通路で、東京メトロの職員が右腹部を拳銃で撃たれて重傷を負った。

At 8:45 on 23 June, in the underground pedestrian walkway near Exit 9 for the Hanzomon-Den'en Toshi lines at Shibuya Station (Dogenzaka 2-1), an employee of the Tokyo Metro subway lines was shot in the right side of the abdomen and seriously injured.

It's not that shootings and murders never, ever happen in Japan, of course. But Shibuya Station is the fourth-busiest in the world. That particular arm of the station is less busy than the giant intersection of JR and Tokyu lines at the center, but this couldn't exactly have taken place without anyone around. That's unusual--the broad-daylight aspect, I mean. Hope the guy's all right; the report doesn't say anything about what led up to the shooting.

Happily, still no word that the organisms that kidnapped Sun-il Kim in Iraq have beheaded him, at least on any of the sites I read. I'm not much more hopeful than others that he'll be released. Still, in the last few months, some hostages have been, including two Japanese and all but one of the Italians. CNN's newest posting on the abduction features a picture of protesters agitating for South Korea to pull its soldiers out and says,

Overnight, hundreds of South Koreans gathered in central Seoul on to condemn the dispatch of South Korean troops to Iraq, but the government is so far not backing away from its decision.

Hundreds? In a city of 12 million that's the capital of a country of almost 50 million? That isn't very many. I think I've shared a single Seoul subway car with hundreds of people at one time or another. It's hard to tell what the mood of the public is, of course, especially since I don't live there. On the other hand, unlike the Japanese, the Koreans do not hesitate to pour into the streets when they're angered by the latest corruption scandal or evidence of fiscal mismanagement. (This is Asia, so there's always some such thing to get het up over.)

The real shame--besides, that is, the outrageousness of having thugs from willfully backward loser societies strike poses of superiority over a country that used grit and industry to become the twelfth-largest economy in the world (and a free, safe democracy, despite the proximity of the most hostile neighbor imaginable) a mere half-century after it was humiliated by occupation and then ravaged by civil war...[deep breath]...besides that, the shame is that South Korea is one of the best sources of exactly the sort of engineering that a rebuilding country needs, and the government's pulling its citizens out (while I sure as hell don't blame it for doing so) means seeking other providers.

Added at 1:38 a.m.: The Nikkei is reporting that the deadline for Korea to pull out its troops has been extended and that the same intermediary who helped secure the release of the Japanese hostages in April is working with the Korean embassy in Iraq and has had a face-to-face meeting with Kim. Maybe there's hope after all.

I would like to take this opportunity to announce that, under the guidance of my spiritual mentor, Madge the Fully-Realized Being and Pillar of Modesty, I have decided to adopt the name Vashti. This is not a gesture of disrespect toward the Beatles rhythm section, for whom my parents named me. Rather, I feel a higher-plane identification with Vashti because (1) I'm an insolent queen and (2) my lord is constantly having to say things like, "We were supposed to leave twenty minutes ago, darling. If you don't get out here this minute, I swear I'm going to kill you!" My hope is that the energy of this new name will help me make people forget that I only became a Jew after I made a pile and tried to take over the world.

I would like to interrupt my recent streak of asexual commentary to make two pressing faggotry-related announcements:

(1) I normally don't go for Korean guys particularly, but the actor who just strolled into the subtitled drama I'm watching on TV totally needs to have my love child. If that's not going to happen, I'll settle for a plot development that has him taking off his shirt.

(2) Eric Scheie economically makes a point I've been gassing verbosely about ever since I began posting here:

If that's the case, I must disagree. Homosexuality is not heterosexuality. There are many differences between gay and straight relationships. The laws and social mores designed for the heterosexual scheme of things reflect these differences. I see no reason why homosexuals should feel the need to ape heterosexuals, and even less reason why they should be forced to do so. This is my biggest objection to same sex marriage. It would place undue pressure on what were once private relationships outside the sweep of society's radar. It would allow gay palimony, gay divorce, and bring the heavy hand of the state where it does not belong. Same sex marriage would not be limited to a "right" chosen voluntarily, because it would create new duties and causes of action which could be used even against homosexuals not wishing to marry. I realize that many do not share my concerns, but I think that to call people who neither need or want the state to enter their lives in such a manner lacking in self respect is a bit of a stretch.

However, the FMA is another issue, because it would, by making incidents of marriage a suspect category, bring the state into private relationships in another, horrendous, way. I vehemently oppose the FMA, and I disagree wholeheartedly with Bush's support of that ill-written amendment. Why, though, would Bush's support for the FMA make homosexuals who vote for Bush lacking in self respect? What about the many heterosexuals who don't support the FMA? Are they too lacking in self-respect if they vote for Bush? Or must "self respect" touch on important, personal, hot-button issues?

My only quibble is with the "outside society's radar" part, since the wording sounds as if it collapses together government and culture. I think having our relationships recognized by the circles we move in socially, with the attendant pressure to behave ourselves, is a good thing. But the more Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch and others use that reasoning to promote the legalization of same-sex marriage, the more they reinforce the idea that we just resent being different and want to force people to like us. Speak of lacking self-respect!

Wow. Lookit this:

Bill Clinton says in his new autobiography that his wife looked as if he had punched her in the gut when he finally confessed to his affair with Monica Lewinsky, and he slept on the couch for at least two months after that.

In "My Life," a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, the former president wrote that the affair with the White House intern revealed "the darkest part of my inner life."

Fascinating. You know, you think super-cool people like Presidents are on this, like, totally high pedestal, but it turns out Hillary made Bill sleep on the couch, just the way dear old Mom would have if Dad had gotten blow jobs from a fresh-faced intern at the office! Guess they really are just folks, like the rest of us.

Gag me with a spoon. Though I have no high regard for the man, I'm not a Clinton basher. But is it too much to ask that someone in the great publicity chain exercise a willingness to let all the soap-opera details of the Lewinsky affair recede into the mists of time? He was President, not Peter in Chief. Surely he said something, somewhere, about welfare reform, the balanced budget, or the economic boom that's worth leading with.

I'm unable to get as foulmouthed here as I can be in intimate conversation because I post under my own name. Good thing Rosemary Esmay doesn't have the same constraints. I heartily concur.

May I also say that if just one more person talks uncritically about how Muslims of whatever stripe are driven to film themselves hacking the heads off American civilians, blow up Israeli cafés with nail-filled bombs, or hang bodies from bridges by their "sense of honor," I will not be responsible for my behavior? Certainly, given the cooperation of Western governments with morally cloudy regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere, the degree to which we're reaping what we've sown is a legitimate topic for debate and self-reflection. But I'm sorry, honor is an English word being used among Westerners; it loses all meaning if you define it as something others do to you but you don't have to do back. That simply is not what it means.

And I'm doubly revolted as someone who lives in Japan. It's not that the Japanese are innocent of atrocities against civilians, of course. But I'm reminded in these cases of the story of the 47 ronin. The story is world-famous, but people often forget that the man the 47 samurai killed had not actually killed their lord. They held Kira responsible for Lord Asano's death because his merciless goading provoked Asano to commit the breach of protocol that got him executed, but Kira wasn't technically a murderer. They stormed his house and offered him the chance to commit seppuku to preserve his honor; he froze, and they beheaded him. After laying Kira's head on Asano's grave, they went to Sengaku Temple and waited for the inevitable: an order from the shogun to commit seppuku themselves. Bear in mind that seppuku involves slicing your own intestines open and is about as painful a way to die by dagger as can be imagined. In other words, the 47 ronin avenged their lord's honor with a willingness to die more painfully than the man they killed.

No one is ever going to convince me that civilians are properly thought of as equal to combatants, but to the extent that I can even imagine such a thing, I can only do so under such circumstances: If those who attacked the unarmed pledged to sacrifice themselves in a fashion that involved suffering equal to their victims', and then did it. That's why I think the dead-in-a-flash suicide bombers in Israel look like milquetoasts, and those who off civilians and just move on to the next task shouldn't be mentioned in the same sentence as the word honor.

(Of course, I didn't realize until after posting this that that was Dean's post on Rosemary's site. Whoops.)

You know, most days I wake up and go about my business and come home and turn in and think, You know, the world has plenty of problems, and they take a while to sort out, but most people are really pretty decent and on the ball.

Days like today, however, I think, My, but people are stupid. Erin O'Connor reports that a student in a San Diego high school decided not to go along with the administrator-approved lesson in loving us fragile, downtrodden queers and was suspended. Her summary of the story she links to (As Joanne Jacobs is wont to say, Is your blood pressure too low?):

Chase Harper, a sophomore in the Poway Unified School district, was offended when his school recently participated in the "Day of Silence," a national event sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network. GLSEN describes Day of Silence as �an annual, national student-led effort in which participants take a vow of silence to peacefully protest the discrimination and harassment faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth in schools.� About 300,000 school kids participate in the event each year. According to Harper and his lawyers, the school sponsored the event and administrators worked with the Gay-Straight Alliance, a student group, to coordinate it.

To protest his school's promotion of a viewpoint he, as a Christian, finds immoral, Harper commemorated the Day of Silence by coming to school in a homemade t-shirt protesting homosexuality. The next day, he did so again, wearing a shirt bearing the words �Be Ashamed� and �Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned� on the front, and reading �Homosexuality is Shameful� and �Romans 1:27� on the back. That's when the trouble began.

Harper's Christian friends warned him to lose the shirt, but he wouldn't. When school administrators found out about it, they attempted to "counsel" him into taking it off. A vice principal advised him that, in Harper's words, �When I come to school, I leave my faith in the car, and you should leave your faith in the car when it might offend others.� The principal initially told Harper that the problem was that he wore a homemade t-shirt to school, but he quickly came clean about what the real issue was: "It wouldn�t have mattered whether it was homemade or not," Harper reports him saying. "It�s your viewpoint that you�re expressing on your T-shirt that is offensive and inflammatory.� When Harper refused to remove the shirt, he was suspended.

The problem was that the T-shirt was homemade? You know, it used to be that even if you couldn't depend on public school adminibots to see to the education of children, you could depend on them to dredge up half-plausible, ass-covering lies under pressure. Apparently, they can't even do that anymore.

And what on earth, can someone explain if you think it won't finish me off, is one supposed to do to make good on a vow to "peacefully protest the discrimination and harassment faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth"? Hold sit-ins where everyone sings "I Will Survive"? What about having a day on which students vow to treat everyone with civility, even if provoked to do otherwise, along with a few civics-type lessons about how our etiquette system evolved from its more stylized, formalized antecedents in England and Europe? It would be better at solving the problem, but of course, it wouldn't benefit any activist groups with federal pity grants and friends in the education bureaucracy.

Japan's latest close shave with air travel disaster: two passenger jets (a KLM Boeing 777 and an Asiana Airlines A321) ending up facing each other from opposite ends of a runway at Narita Airport. The KLM plane was just landing, and the Asiana plane was about to take off. Takeoff was aborted, naturally, and the runway shut down for a while. A few years ago, air traffic controllers engaged in a comedy of errors (a comedy because there was no accident, but 700 people's lives hung in the balance), mistakenly guiding a JAL 747 and a JAL DC9 closer together, rather than farther apart, so that they passed each other at a midair distance of 30 feet. Shintaro Ishihara, Governor of Tokyo and famed xenophobe, blamed the air traffic patterns necessitated by US military presence in the area. And hey, that could be a factor.

But it's also true that Narita Airport is old, tiny, unwieldy, and in the middle of bloody nowhere. It takes an hour and a half to get there by express train from central Tokyo. If you're coming in by air, landing requires all kinds of corkscrewish turn-while-descending maneuvers, especially fun during the summer, when the heat and humidity make turbulence a given. The waits for takeoff are ages long, even if you fly most-favored carriers JAL (mine) or ANA (Funny thing about that name: it stands for the English All Nippon Airways. The Japanese pronounce it "Ay-En-Ay," but of course, to a native English speaker it looks like Ana, pronounced like the Spanish form of Anne. The funny thing is that ana 穴 in Japanese means "hole," which when plastered on the tail fin of an airliner has a subtle but unsettling suggestion of augering in hard. Not exactly the image of effortless loft you'd think an airline would want to project, but no one seems to mind. The fact that ANA hasn't had a crash for thirty years probably helps). Like every other public facility in Japan--especially those that show its transportation system to foreign visitors--the Narita Airport Authority gets cash by the tankerful, so the place is always being resurfaced, repainted, and retiled. But the routing problems remain, so it seems likely that we're going to keep having these nail-biting near-misses and eventually--though I hope I'm wrong--a real disaster when luck runs out.

I was shocked by President Reagan's death, needless to say; we were so busy getting ready to go to the airport that I didn't really have time to think about it. The first time I cried was on the plane, when we were over the Equator and I was listening to True Blue--a document of the optimistic, Americana-loving Reagan Era if ever there was one. It was going from "La Isla Bonita" into "Jimmy Jimmy" that got me, the shift from yearning for a utopia in the inaccessible past to affectionately speeding a dreamer on his way to better things. I wasn't heaving and keening, or anything, but I was glad that most people around me were sleeping with their reading lights off.

The heaving only started in the last few days, when the state funeral and later the arrival at the Reagan Library were broadcast. I'm never ashamed to be an American, but I'm sometimes embarrassed at the way our forthrightness makes us indifferent to formality or symbolism when it matters. This time it mattered, and things came off beautifully. It may have seemed different for people who were there, but the funeral was perfectly done from the standpoint of television. That's not a slam: TV is the way public figures communicate with the people now, both at home and abroad. The secondary colors are my favorites, but the red, white, and blue of the American flag have both real dignity and real vitality. Tucked over the casket, all they needed was the field of concentric stone circles to be memorable to the imagination.

They were also the perfect background for mourners to convey real heartbreak. The Japanese know this: when ceremonial composure is deployed well, you don't need to go bananas to convey utterly devastating emotion. (Alex Kerr has called this the "flash to the heart" that one gets when an old-school Japanese person uses a turn of phrase, like the sun breaking momentarily through clouds, that exposes his true feelings.) There's something to be said for the way more hot-blooded cultures wail and toss flowers on coffins, and I'm a great believer in florid displays of emotion. But I broke down when Margaret Thatcher, herself widowed not long ago, stared at the casket as if she'd just lost the last person who Remembered and quietly laid her hand on it. And I didn't think I would ever stop crying when Mrs. Reagan, in her black clothes and the chunky gold jewelry we all remember on prominent women through the '80's, just laid her cheek on the casket and shook. I know she appreciates the people's love for her husband, but it must have cost her dearly to have to postpone her private grieving for this whole week, even down to the last moment before he was buried.

I wonder what the rest of the world will see in these broadcasts. Even BBC World, which we had at the hotel, seemed to be limiting itself to saying that Reagan's policies had been controversial--Aside: Has anyone ever been able to deal with viciously-debated issues in a way that was not "divisive"?--and that he and Thatcher had mostly agreed (its viewers will presumably know what's implied by that). Since we've been back in Japan, coverage of his transport to California and burial has nostalgically emphasized the presence of so many retired foreign leaders at the DC service (Yasuhiro Nakasone was there) and has recounted his role in the end of the Soviet Bloc. That's understandable. Also not surprisingly, the idea that he restored hope in America is getting less play here, where such things are of less immediate interest. But it might be a better idea for people to pay attention, considering that Americans are questioning the state of the War on Terrorism and could be effected in unpredictable ways by this week-long reminder of the last time they needed buoying.

Wow. Last night, they just said Ronald Reagan was failing rapidly and had weeks to months. I was surprised that his death wasn't one of the main headlines on the Nikkei at first, in the moment before I remembered that a US President who went out of office a decade and a half ago will not make the most important story abroad. Now, it's been moved up the page. Maybe someone tipped them off that the last standing superpower won't be able to think about anything else today?

The article does mention something that's not coming up in the American press much amid the stories about his interactions with Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev: In the '80's, the Japanese economic bubble was still expanding, and trade negotiations were very, very dicey. Reagan's rapport with Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone was known in the press here as the "Ron-Yasu Relationship." I'm sure the phrase was used in a somewhat bemused tone back then; it's as informal-sounding in Japanese as in English. Today, it sounds rather tender.

And while I know it's not intentional, leave it to CNN to be interrupting its retrospective on Reagan with commercials for a biopic of Che Guevara. Cht!

In t - 5 hours, the boyfriend will be back within molesting distance. Tomorrow we leave for Bali (the mountains, not the beach). I don't think I've ever needed a vacation so much in my life. If anything interesting happens in Japan today, I might post something quick about it; otherwise, see you in a week!

So I've kind of had a post brewing for the last week or so. I keep seeing people writing about similar things and then wondering whether the topic has already been attended to: Connie du Toit wrote about giving children guidance rather than being a dictator, which is part of it. Today, Boi from Troy has been involved in a back-and-forth about what qualifies as oversensitivity--it called to mind a priceless post of Agenda Bender's a while back. Rosemary Esmay's patience finally ran out on a particularly long-winded troll, with predictable results. I myself recently linked to news about a school killing here in Japan this week. And Baldilocks responded to a thread at Dean's World about single parenthood among black women.

Maybe the connection isn't obvious here--in fact, it's not obvious to me, but I sense one, and it's like an itch at the back of my mind, so I'm running with it. What I think most Americans want is a society in which several things are in the best possible balance:

(1) People whose idea of pursuing happiness is non-conformist are free to act on it to the extent that they aren't demonstrably infringing on the rights of others.

(2) The accumulated wisdom of the ages that some non-conformist behaviors have less benign possible consequences than others needs to be signaled to the young and inexperienced so that they don't make irreversible choices before they know what they're getting into.

(3) The society full of strong-minded, free people that results from (1) and (2) has a shared set of signals that allows everyone to, as accurately as possible, distinguish respectful people with opposing arguments from those of plain old ill-will.

(4) The society full of strong-minded, free people that results from (1) and (2) has a shared set of signals that allows everyone to live in overall peace with other citizens without forcing him into postures of approval that he cannot make in good conscience.

Obviously, if these problems were truly solvable, they'd have already been taken care of by a greater mind than the one that belongs to this little white boy. It does seem that we could do somewhat better than we are, though. One thing that springs to mind is that in this transition period back to civility, jumping to conclusions is even less useful than it would otherwise be. Who knows anymore what someone means when he uses the word homophobia or disrespect. Contexts for social interactions having been mashed together over the last several decades, it often takes quite a few exchanges to be sure where someone is coming from. Along those lines, there's a lot of amnesia about the last several decades of American social history going around, and I wish people would knock it off. The cultural upheavals of the '60's did not begin because two students at Wesleyan suddenly woke up one 1963 morning in an innocent world and said, "Hey! Suppose we just, like, threw all the rules away!" The stigma on children born out of wedlock punished them for behavior they did not have a say in and worked against the American belief that you can achieve things beyond what the circumstances of your birth dictate. Adulterous men were often dealt with severely by others in the community, but it was also frequently the case that wives got the message that marital problems were always their fault and theirs to fix. Gays were given to believe that their attractions could not rise above the level of carnality. The '50's were an understandable and psychologically necessary breather after two world wars and the Depression, but they couldn't have lasted in existing form. Attitudes did need to be changed. The problem was the way they were transformed. It's one thing not to shut non-conformists out of society, and quite another to encourage everyone to believe that non-conformity is the solution to life's problems. Now everyone is free to take the Zsa Zsa approach to marriage, many young women do not believe you need to be particularly strong-minded to rear a child out of wedlock, large numbers of ethnic minorities see systemic racism as the major impediment to their progress, and gay men of my age hear older buddies talk about countless colorful friends that we'll never get to meet. (Aside: I know that many people don't see liberty for women or racial minorities as analogous to liberty for homosexuals. That's a topic worth debating, though it's more specific than what I'm talking about here. I might mention, though, one way that those groups are related in practice if not in theory: Whatever the loudest, dumbest feminist or minority activist is saying today, the loudest, dumbest queer activist will be saying tomorrow. So very disheartening. Anyway....) For quite a while, I've wanted to write something about what I think America should and should not learn from Japan. I still don't have a fully worked-out answer, but I really don't think it comes down to much more than two things. One is that people here assume that you are going to treat them respectfully and will work overtime to interpret your behavior that way unless you cross the line in a big, bad way. The second is that, for all the mutual dependence and 甘え encoded in Japanese social forms, people go out of their way not to burden others unnecessarily. Each of these takes work, but in my experience, neither is all that hard for people in normal circumstances. While we Americans are sorting out what we want to retain and what we want to leave behind from the last forty or so years, I hope we find a way to start thinking in that vein again. ... I realize that this post is disjointed, even for me, but it's not coming together any better right now. If the usual suspects have any input, I'd be glad to hear it.

The latest Japanese child-on-child killing took place in Nagasaki Prefecture today. One sixth-grade girl lured a classmate into one of the study rooms, then slashed her in the face and neck with an Exact-o knife; she died of massive bleeding. The victim's father is a bureau chief for one of the major newspapers here (the Mainichi Shimbun), so I'm guessing the school was pretty exclusive. The poor guy's wife died of cancer a few years ago, too. Wow. Apparently, the attacker was in tears and apologizing, and she was lucid enough to answer questions.

Most Japanese people turn out just fine, obviously; nevertheless, the risk in having such a conformist society is that when people crack from the pressure, they're likely to lose their shit completely. It's too soon to know, but I wonder whether that's what happened here; a petty grievance became magnified, and she flipped out. How very sad.

ご冥福をお祈りしています。