Japanese imperialist atrocities, Chinese Communist lies

This morning, AP reports that a district court in Japan has rejected compensation claims by 45 Chinese men who were used as wartime slaves.

They were demanding US$9 million (US$8.5 million according to the BBC) from the government and two companies - Mitsubishi and Matsui Mining Co. - involved in taking them from their homes in China and into forced labour in Fukuoka between 1943 and the end of WWII.

One of the plaintiffs' lawyers says the case was ruled against despite recognising the wrongdoing due to a 20-year deadline for filing suits and because the current government shouldn't be held responsible for wartime leaders' actions.

A March 20 article by a Fukuoka Jo Gakuin University faculty member says Mitsubishi's defence had denied facts of forced labour accepted by courts hearing earlier cases, going so far as to question whether Japan had "invaded" China at all.

There have been many claims for compensation relating to Japan's war crimes against Chinese people (including forced labour, sex slavery, use of biological and chemical weapons and the Nanjing Massacre) progressing through its courts in recent years.

The great majority have been rejected for similar reasons, most notably that the government of China renounced all potential claims in exchange for aid in 1972's joint statement reestablishing relations between the two countries, though campaigners say this does not cover claims made by private citizens.

Shocking though the wartime atrocities committed by Japan are, I found the way they are perceived in China to be extremely warped by the lens of Communist misinformation, particularly among younger people.

Taught history has to conform to the Communist Party's narrative, portraying it as the saviour of the Chinese people and legitimating its authority over them.

As far as I could tell this results in a focus on the overlapping civil war and Japanese invasion, in which the Party's role in securing their own victory is exagerrated, and a brushing over of the millions who were killed and many more who suffered from Communist policies during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.

Whilst many of my older Chinese colleagues could contextualise Japan's crimes within history, those in their 20s, though educated, were either largely unaware of or disinterested in significant events between 1945 and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms.

It is no coincidence that this is a generation so easily provoked into anti-Japanese demonstrations and violence over a textbook used in a small minority of Japanese schools with no reference to the books used universally in Chinese schools that whitewash Communist mass murder and lethal negligence under Mao Zedong.

Beijing Loafer talks about the reluctance of Chinese people to criticise a government that casts itself in a parental role, pandering to the misguided Confucian obsession with filial piety - contrasting sharply with the Communists' hackneyed demands for the Japanese government to "take history as a mirror and look forward to the future."

There does appear to be a huge amount of denial in Japan about its wartime actions, but repeatedly coming face to face with this hypocrisy in Beijing left me with little sympathy for those seeking compensation.

Instead, I (unfairly) began to see them simply as pawns used by the Party to help score points in wider strategies against its neighbour, keeping a check on its role in the UN and competing for natural resources.

Once again, the Chinese people are victims of their biggest real enemy: the Chinese government.

Graphic offence

After reading Ben Goldacre's Sweary Mary I was fascinated to see this diagram in the 2000 report it links to, Delete expletives? (pdf) by the ASA, BBC, BSC & ITC (both now Ofcom):

Personally, I think they're just fucking with our heads.

Even in Kyoto

Even in Kyoto—
hearing the cuckoo's cry—
I long for Kyoto

(by Matsuo Basho, 1644-94)

Animation is sweet

Too funny! From BBC News' South Park gets revenge on Chef:

South Park has exacted revenge on its former star Isaac Hayes by turning his character Chef into a paedophile and seemingly killing him off."

Perfect.

Trouble getting wood

The press release of a report published yesterday on illegal and unsustainable logging is headed US, EU Consumption Driving Chinese Imports of Illegal Wood from Around the World with the subtitle "Chinese Government Faces Opportunities to Boost Timber Production And Reduce Poverty and Conflict in Rural Areas."

BBC News' China furniture destroys forests seems to shift focus from demand in developed economies toward China's imports from dubious sources. Though it does refer to Western consumers playing a "major role," is this basically yet another story written on the 'hungry waking dragon spoiling it for everyone else' template?

Of course, it's hardly the job of journalists to unquestioningly accept the pitch of a press release and the full report itself, China and the Global Market for Forest Products (pdf), does appear to give more emphasis to the country's role in driving overexploitation of forests in nations such as Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

English news of the report was released by Forest Trends and the Center for International Forestry Research but it was produced jointly with the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, run under the aegis of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Given a tendency in China to intentionally politicise everything, it is tempting to speculate that such an agency may have pressured a spin of the press release away from the country's regulatory and enforcement deficiencies.

But the overall tone of the report (facing "opportunities" rather than problems) also chimes with Forest Trends' description of themselves as "market promoters," and it could be argued that a report produced with the involvement of a Western government agency might be just as likely to have news of its release skewed from anything too awkward.

And awkward the issue of wood supplies certainly is in China; even official news agencies have reported sporadically on likely local government corruption connected to logging by the notorious APP in the provinces of Yunnan and Hainan.

Embarrassments like these have helped prompt crackdowns on logging within China, resulting in increased supplies from elsewhere.

Perhaps, regardless of who produced the report, a genuine desire to positively influence Chinese policy rather than berating it lies behind its diplomatic phrasing.

Governments that cannot take criticism might respond laboriously slowly to carefully-worded recommendations, but not at all to bare exposure of their flaws. And boy, if there was ever a government with flaws...

I got a job!

Yipppeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Bird flu defence: lengthen your trachea

According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, research published yesterday suggests one reason the bird flu virus hasn't yet established itself sufficiently amongst people to mutate into a strain easily transmitted between us may be how far it needs to get into our respiratory tracts before finding cells it can enter.

Virologists found that only cells deep inside the human respiratory system have receptors the H5N1 virus is able to use. People might be less likely to become infected than birds because it's harder for the virus to reach this far.

The BBC quotes a Reading University professor as saying it could explain why children have been more vulnerable than adults; there's less distance the virus needs to cover before it gets to their lungs.

If true, isn't the banality of that last explanation grotesque?

WHO says laboratories have confirmed H5N1 infection in 103 cases of human death from flu worldwide.

Quark, Mac, bored

A screenshot of me practising using Quark on my boyfriend's Mac for an interview test tomorrow:

Evidence, if it was needed, that I'm really quite bored of practising using Quark on my boyfriend's Mac.

Crackers: forgotten but found

BBC News reports today, and Reuters yesterday, on the discovery under Brooklyn Bridge of a stash dating back forty years of "350,000 Civil Defense All Purpose Survival Crackers, medical kits and now-empty water drums."

Apart from prompting a string of "remember what the Cold War was like?" reveries, was anyone concerned that emergency supplies were so easily forgotten about?

And why on earth would its location still be considered secret (or have they simply already let this information slip from their minds again)?

Whenever my lover touches me

Like the algae on the well
from which the townsfolk drink,
my paleness goes away
whenever my lover touches me.
And whenever he leaves
it spreads over again.

(translation of an ancient Tamil poem from Kuruntokai, "Anthology of 400 Short Poems on Love")

Scrubbing and bouncing between sleeps

The current issue of Gou-Rou.com's Government Throws Commuters a Lifeline made me giggle, but also reminded me of how many people in China do actually live at their place of work.

I didn't notice it when I first moved to Beijing; everything was so unfamiliar and there were so many people around all the time that it took a while before I began to figure out who was doing what where and when.

At one point I went at least once a week to an amazing Korean bathhouse (I never worked out why people called it 'Korean' - everyone who worked there were locals, as was its name, but all the signs were in Korean as well as Chinese).

The place was a revelation, a relatively inexpensive luxury comprising invigorating body scrubs, saunas, simultaneous head and foot massages, pedicures etc.

Because it didn't have gold-plated fittings and other tasteless flourishes it didn't attract masses of flash, swaggering newly-rich businessmen, and since it was slightly out of the way of the embassy district it seemed to be off the radar of most expats too. As such it made a comfortable, relaxing place to mix with ordinary (though not poor) Beijingers and inflict my atrocious Putonghua on the affable staff.

After visiting a few times as a post-taijiquan class/pre-dinner indulgence, and recalling that it was open 24 hours, I was inspired whilst drinking with a Chinese friend to suggest we went there as an end to our night out.

So, at around 4 in the morning we rolled up at the bathhouse, where the smiling workers took our shoes, led us to our lockers and offered to help us disrobe (I'm not joking, this was business as usual - and I admit that sometimes I let them).

After a quick shower, sauna and dip in the hot pool we asked to get the treasured cuo zao and qiao bei (an all-over scrub with mineral salts and lotion followed by a loud, wet massage involving a certain degree of slapping).

It was only when two of the stocky, fortysomething masseurs emerged from a side room rubbing their eyes that it hit home that we had woken them up, and that they appeared to be always there because they actually were always there.

It didn't seem to induce any bitterness on their part - and amidst their banter one of them established he used to work in a bathhouse on the same Chongqing road my friend had once lived on - but I never went back at a similar hour.

Another time, a German colleague who lived in the same complex as me said he'd accidently got off the elevator at the wrong basement level in my building, only to stumble on the rooms where our security guards slept.

There was a legion of these late teens/early twenties young men who stood at the doors and gates of our buildings every minute of the day, lost in long, quilted coats in winter but still bursting with grins most times we greeted them.

It was a jar to my naivety to realise they bunked in windowless rooms of the same building in which I enjoyed a spacious apartment that, though nothing special by Western standards, was palatial in comparison.

It was also pointed out to me that their accommodation was probably a huge improvement on what they had enjoyed before working in my complex, and definitely better than that of a great many others in the city.

Yet there was something about it all being in the same building - a too-literal representation of the socioeconomic hierarchy involved - that made it harder to accept.

Whilst it obviously involved a sizeable dose of not-very-useful liberal guilt, a lingering distaste remains...

Of course, I haven't lost any sleep over the sleeping arrangements or otherwise of the homeless people I step over on nearby Tottenham Court Road (and have as yet to give any change to as I do).

Well, well, well...

... after years of casting aspersions and sinister sidelong glances at those who insist on hurling unsolicited details of their lives and opinions into cyberspace with the conviction that the rest of us WILL be interested, I finally find myself adequately without stimulation to start my own blog. Joy.

But you really can do one job application too many, and the washing up only provides a limited procrastination opportunity, particularly when you repeatedly plump for picking up something from the convenience store rather than cooking.

There is no excuse to be bored, of course, and this is especially the case when you've just moved into a flat in the centre of one of the world's most exciting cities. However, eschewing all distractions I hereby swear to endeavour to be endlessly absorbing, challenging and worthy of habitual reading.

Right, erm...