Trying to keep my dinner down

Scanning the headlines on the Japan Times ジャパンタイムズ website this morning, my eyes were drawn to one of the commentary headings in the "Opinion-Editorial" section - North Korea's Khrushchev (link). Curious as to how such a comparison could be made, I clicked on the link to the article and found that it was written by none other than Gregory Clark, former Australian diplomat and longtime contributor to the newspaper. If you're not familiar with the man or his writings, do a Google search of "Gregory Clark Japan Times". If you have any sense of moral decency, you may find the results to be more than a little disturbing. Clark is an unapologetic apologist (pun intended) for authoritarianism and social discrimination. This is a man who has penned numerous articles attempting to defend or excuse the actions of the Chinese leadership, while never forgetting to pat himself on the back for having played a role in opening up of Australian-Chinese relations in the late 1960's/early 1970's. He has long earned the scorn of many in Japan's resident foreigner community over his attempts at justifying or whitewashing the often blatant forms of discrimination faced by many non-Japanese in the country. Don't confuse Clark for being on the same side with the Japanese right wing, however - when it comes to Japan's relationships with its neighbors, especially China, Gregory always manages to find a way to lay all the blame for the various regional disputes entirely on his host country (Clark has lived in Japan for a number of years, working as a journalist and university president). He no doubt fancies himself as a sort of provocateur, but his ideas generally come across as offensive to anyone who believes there should be a place for morality in international relations, while his articles are filled with half-truths and, in some case, outright fabrications.

This morning's exercise in revisionism concerns Kim Jong-il and North Korea. The opening paragraphs set the tone for the obnoxiousness that follows:

"The commentaries after Kim's death tell us repeatedly that the deceased North Korean leader was reclusive, erratic, enigmatic and dangerous. Yet almost all the few outsiders who actually met the man came away impressed by his intelligence, moderation, rationality and openness."

You don't rule a nation with an iron fist for seventeen years without possessing a high degree of intelligence. Kim had to have been an extremely shrewd individual to have been able to have remained in power despite presiding over the economic decline of his country and, especially, the devastating food shortages that led to a famine that may have killed up to 3.5 million people by some estimates. Clark would no doubt dispute such figures as being an example of unreasonable and unwarranted Western hostility to Kim's regime, but nowhere in his article will you find any mention of all of the hardships endured by the North Korean citizenry under the benevolent guidance of their "Dear Leader". Clark also makes no reference to the personality cult built up around Kim Jong-il, which is understandable as doing so would seem to undercut any evidence of the man's so-called "rationality". Clark doesn't dwell, either, on the ironic juxtaposition of Kim's "openness" while at the helm of the world's most secretive country.

Clark next goes on to place the blame for the failure of the 1994 Agreed Framework between the United States and North Korea (Wikipedia article link) squarely on

"...U.S. congressional conservatives and Pentagon hawks (who) moved to deny those agreements. They said the North Korean regime could not be trusted and was, in any case, about to collapse. But Pyongyang did not collapse, and Kim has since used various carrot-and-stick tactics — everything from cultural invitations to rocket and nuclear testing — while trying to bring the U.S. back to its 1994 promises..."

It is true the Agreement failed in large part due to Congressional opposition and insufficient funding, but Clark fails to mention to us here that it was the North Koreans' admission in 1998 that they had maintained a secret uranium enrichment program that led to the Agreement's demise. And only in Clark's world can "cultural invitations" be considered on an equal level with "rocket and nuclear testing" when it comes to international negotiations.

Japan, of course, fares no better than the U.S. when it comes to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK):

"Sublimating its justified anger over North Korea's abduction of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and '80s, Tōkyō 東京 was able in 2002 to gain a remarkable apology from Kim and the conditional return of five abductees, in exchange for Tōkyō promises to normalize relations and pay long overdue reparations. But fearing this would lead to detente with the hated communist regime, the Japanese right-wing, led by (Shinzō) Abe 安倍晋三, swept into action. It demanded, and got, a Tōkyō withdrawal of its promise to accept Pyongyang's conditions for the return of the five former abductees. It then began to use dodgy DNA data to prove that Pyongyang was lying when it denied holding on to other alleged abductees. This then allowed it to argue that Pyongyang's alleged lies justified reneging on the 2002 normalization promises.

Images of other abductees languishing in a North Korean hell — the beautiful but almost certainly deceased, Megumi Yokota 横田めぐみ, especially — were used to gain wide public support for severe sanctions which, we were told, would force Pyongyang to back down. In fact all it has done, predictably, is force Pyongyang to clam up. Relations with North Korea are now totally frozen, which means even less chance of any further abductee return — if such a chance ever existed."

For those of you unfamiliar with what Clark is referring to, you can read the Wikipedia entry on the North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens. In the late 1970's/early 1980's, up to as many as 70-80 Japanese (though only 17 are officially recognized by the Japanese government) were kidnapped by North Korean agents, and taken from Japan to North Korea, where they were used to train the regime's agents in Japanese language and culture (the woman who blew up Korean Air Flight 858 while posing as a Japanese tourist was taught by one of the abductees). After years of denial, in a 2002 summit meeting with then-Japanese Prime Minister Junichirō Koizumi 小泉純一郎, Kim Jong-il surprisingly admitted to 13 such abductions having occurred, and revealed that five of the unfortunate victims were still alive. The five were eventually allowed to "visit" Japan, but only on the condition that they return to the "workers' paradise". Once back home, however, they all decided, not unsurprisingly, to stay in the land of their birth, and Pyongyang responded by criticizing the Japanese government over its "broken promises".

Though he uses the term "justified anger" in this article, Clark has in the past tried to excuse the kidnappings by claiming that they were in revenge for the use of forced Korean labor by Japan during its colonization of the Korean peninsula. And while trying to appear sympathetic, it is utterly repulsive that he finds nothing wrong with first forcibly abducting the five Japanese nationals, and then demanding that they be returned to North Korea as the price for letting them see their loved ones in Japan again after the long enforced separation. In Clark's world, it is the Japanese political right which is almost solely to blame.

After casting doubt on the North's attacks on the South last year, Clark moves on to why the DPRK has pursued the development of nuclear weapons:

"With his hopes of closer relations with Tōkyō and Washington dashed, Kim seems to have had no choice but to resume rocket and nuclear testing, and to turn increasingly to China, which North Korea had previously distrusted. His son and successor Kim Jong Un will almost certainly have to follow the same path while giving even more power to North Korea's hawkish military."

Again, Japan and the United States are to blame, for the North Korean regime had no other choice but to pursue the nuclear option. And it is interesting that Clark fails to make mention of the fact that it was the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it the generous aid the USSR had provided to Pyongyang, that forced North Korea to become more dependent on China.

The Khrushchev comparison mentioned in the article's headline comes in the next-to-last paragraph:

"History will show the late Kim to have been North Korea's Khrushchev. The former Soviet leader also sought detente with the West only to have his hopes dashed by U-2 flights and other U.S. hawk activities, which in turn strengthened the hand of the Soviet hawks. Khrushchev was ousted and that cruel, wasteful and meaningless exercise called the Cold War had to continue for another two decades. Presumably the same will happen over North Korea, with the regime there able to use foreign threats as an excuse for continued domestic repression."

History, apparently, shows a different face to Gregory Clark. Nikita Khrushchev came to power in 1953 following the death of longtime despot Josef Stalin. Though he was one of the dictator's closest advisers, and a supporter of the bloody purges of the 1930's that turned the Soviet Union into a nightmarish police state, Khrushchev made his mark on history by repudiating the worst excesses of Stalin's reign of terror. Though certainly no democrat, he was responsible for lessening the repression within the USSR through what is now known as the Khrushchev Thaw. Nevertheless, the "Gulag Archipelago" remained in existence,  and despite his pursuit of detente with the West, it was Khrushchev who ratcheted up Cold War tensions by approving the construction of the Berlin Wall and the stationing of nuclear arms in Cuba, the latter leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Nor should it be forgotten that in the same year he made his secret speech denouncing Stalin (1956), Khrushchev sent in the Red Army to brutally crush the Hungarian Revolution.

Kim Jong-il also succeeded a brutal dictator, succeeding his father, Kim Il-sung, upon the latter's death in 1994. Unlike Khrushchev, however, there was no attempt to launch a North Korean version of "De-Stalinization". Rather, Kim Jong-il played the Confucian role of dutiful son, elevating his deceased father to the status of "Eternal President of the Republic". Under the rule of the junior Kim, North Korea remained one of the world's most repressive societies, with an extensive gulag system of its own which imprisons thousands of its subjects in internment and reeducation camps (Human Rights in North Korea). The population, of course, has suffered in other ways as well, namely as a result of the food and famine crises (hunger is still a serious concern in the DPRK) and the crippling power shortages. Despite the breakdown in the functions of the centrally-planned economic system, Kim Jong-il made few attempts at reform, clinging to the elder Kim's policy of self-reliance, known as juche (link). And as for detente, it can be argued that the younger Kim played a far more dangerous game of concessions, threats and brinkmanship than his father ever did, at least in the last few years of Kim Il-sung's life. Khrushchev was overthrown by more conservative elements in the Soviet leadership, who feared his reforms had gone too far. What followed Khrushchev's ouster was the stagnation of the Brezhnev years, and the eventual downfall of the USSR. In North Korea's case, however, the stagnation set in long before the senior Kim left the scene, and greatly worsened during the rule of Kim Jong-il. History is going to remember Kim Jong-il, but not as the bright, rational Khrushchev-like figure Gregory Clark imagines him to have been.

Not that this will matter to Clark, though, who concludes his commentary in such a way as to leave a bad taste in the mouth (and by blowing his own horn in the process):

"The one hope is that the shift to China will have a moderating influence. China, too, once had to suffer the same hawk on hawk confrontation as the former Soviet Union, until rescued by China's Gorbachev — the moderate and intelligent premier Zhou Enlai relying on the 1971 so-called ping-pong diplomacy ( in which I was able to participate). For what it's worth, the "En" in Zhou's name is the same ideograph as the "Un" in the name of Jong Il's son. It means benevolent and kind."

It took 27 years of stagnation and decline following the forced retirement of Khrushchev before the peoples of the Soviet Union finally able to break free from a failed economic, political and social experiment that resulted in the needless deaths of millions of people (and with the exception of the Baltic states, the struggle is arguably still continuing in the former republics of the USSR). Can the people of the socialist paradise that is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea afford to wait that long?

The way it should be (according to Gregory Clark)

Things had been quiet on the Gregory Clark front in recent months. Too quiet it seems, as the headline for his latest commentary in the Japan Times ジャパンタイムズ, "Antiforeigner discrimination is a right for Japanese people", unfortunately lays it out all too clearly. You should read the entire article to see for yourself how the minds of some individuals work, but here are a few choice excerpts:

"'Japan girai' 日本嫌い — dislike of Japan — is an allergy that seems to afflict many Westerners here."

Right off the bat, Greg dismisses anyone who has any kind of complaint with some of the ways things are done in Japan. Sure, there are a lot of whiners among the resident foreigner population who would probably be happier living somewhere else (as you would find in any country), but there are also a great number of people who love Japan, and offer constructive criticism as a way to improve things for the general good. Greg doesn't see it this way, however. Instead, he yearns for those years not so long past when anyone who dared question certain aspects of Japanese society were quickly accused of "Japan bashing" ジャパンバッシング  in a clumsy attempt to avoid dealing with both the questions being raised and the person(s) raising them. Japan - love or leave it, right Greg?

"Normally these people do little harm. In their gaijin ghettoes they complain about everything from landlords reluctant to rent to foreigners (ignoring justified landlord fear of the damage foreigners can cause) to use of the word 'gaijin' 外人 (forgetting the way some English speakers use the shorter and sometimes discriminatory word 'foreigner' rather than 'foreign national.')"

First of all, the words "gaijin ghettos" conjure up images of Hiroo 広尾 and Nishi-Azabu 西麻布, and I find it hard to believe the corporate ex-pats living there had trouble securing accommodation. I, on the other hand, found apartment hunting to be a frustrating experience, and I was usually the only Westerner living in the neighborhoods where I eventually settled.

Secondly, what damage can foreigners cause that Japanese can't? Do we urinate on the tatami mats like pets not yet housebroken? I've known of foreigners with Japanese spouses, who presumably could properly train their barbarian mates, still being rejected in the search for somewhere to live simply because they were not Japanese. In Greg's view, if one foreigner causes problems in their rented abode, all non-Japanese should be damned. But plenty of Japanese people create a lot of problems for landlords as well, yet they are not turned away. To put things in an Australian context (Greg is from the Land Down Under), if one Aborigine trashed his/her apartment, would that mean the white landlord would be justified in only renting out their property to other white people (all the while overlooking the problems they have to deal with from their fellow Caucasians)?

Finally, for someone who criticizes others for hypocritically using the word "foreigner", it's all over his own damn commentary!

"Recently they have revived the story of how they bravely abolished antiforeigner discrimination from bathhouses in the port town of Otaru 小樽 in Hokkaido 北海道. Since I was closely involved, allow me to throw some extra light on that affair. An onsen manager who allegedly had earlier been driven to near bankruptcy by badly behaved Russian sailors had decided this time to bar all foreigners from his new enterprise. The activist then filed a suit for mental distress and won ¥3 million in damages. In the Zeit Gist and letter pages of (the Japan Times), some have criticized these excessively zealous moves by the activists. These critics in turn have been labeled as favoring Nazi-style discrimination and mob rule."

What Greg fails to tell us here, though he is clearly aware of the fact through his heated correspondence with the litigants in the past, is that at least one of those "foreigners" was a naturalized Japanese citizen! What Greg is suggesting, though he doesn't want to clearly come out and say it, is that even with a Japanese passport and family register 戸籍, if you don't look the part, it's OK to deny you the same rights as your fellow citizens.

"Otaru had been playing host to well over 20,000 Russian sailors a year, most arriving in small rust-bucket ships to deliver timber and pick up secondhand cars. I visited the wharves there, and as proof I harbor no anti-Russian feeling let me add that I speak Russian and enjoyed talking to these earthy, rough-hewn people in their own language. Even so, the idea of them demanding freedom to walk into any onsen bathhouse of their choice, especially to a high-class onsen like Yunohana 湯の原温泉, is absurd."

Greg really lays on the patronizing condescension here. And I thought one reason people emigrated to Australia in the first place was to get away from the English class system! This paragraph speaks for itself.

"The antidiscrimination activists say bathhouse managers can solve all problems by barring drunken sailors. But how do you apply a drunk test? And how do you throw out a drunk who has his foot in the door? Besides, drunken behavior is not the only bathhouse problem with these Otaru sailors. I can understand well why regular Japanese customers seeking the quiet Japanese-style camaraderie of the traditional Japanese bathhouse would want to flee an invasion of noisy, bathhouse-ignorant foreigners. And since it is not possible to bar only Russians, barring all foreigners is the only answer."

I guess there's just no way a gaijin could understand "the quiet Japanese-style camaraderie of the traditional Japanese bathhouse". Gregory Clark included, of course.

A few years ago, there were a couple of incidents of Japanese tourists carving their initials on the walls of old European cathedrals. Since it was not possible to bar only Japanese, would it have been OK for the authorities to have barred all Asians? Would that have been the only answer, Greg?

"The antidiscrimination people point to Japan's acceptance of a U.N. edict banning discrimination on the basis of race. But that edict is broken every time any U.S. organization obeys the affirmative action law demanding preference for blacks and other minorities. Without it, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama would probably not be where he is today."

I'm not sure the USA even signed on to the edict described above, but that is irrelevant, as is Greg's comparison. It doesn't matter what other countries do - Japan accepted the anti-discrimination edict, and is supposed to follow through on its promise.

Greg also completely misses the boat on the history of anti-discrimination efforts in the USA. What laid the groundwork of Obama's victory were the efforts of countless activists from the 1950's and '60's, and the enactment of the Civil Rights Acts barring racial discrimination in public places, schools and employment, voting, housing and so on (and the abilities and intelligence of Obama himself). And if the result of all this activism was the election of Barack Obama, is that something to be feared? What talented individuals in Japanese society would be able to move up the ladder if there were similar laws in Japan? What does Greg think of someone like Marutei Tsurunen ツルネン・マルテイ? Would it be alright to bar him from a bathhouse?

"Sometimes their activism goes beyond even the absurd. Japan has long had a real problem of clever Chinese and Korean criminals taking advantage of Japan's lack of theft awareness to pick the locks and pockets of unsuspecting citizens. But when the authorities try to raise this problem, they too are accused of antiforeigner discrimination. Even companies advertising pick-proof locks are labeled as discriminators if they mention the Chinese lock-picking problem. Obviously Japan needs precautions against these theft experts. Many, myself included, dislike the fingerprinting of foreigners at airports. But this too is needed to stop criminally minded foreigners from re-entering Japan after they have been caught and expelled. If anything the authorities are too lenient with these people. (Let me add that I also have no anti-China feeling; I speak Chinese too.)"

Let's give Greg some credit here. At least he doesn't feel that white folks (and black people too, I presume) should be the only ones made to feel like second-class people - it's other Asians as well that have had the unfortunate luck of not being born Japanese. Yes, Greg, there are criminals active in Japan who come from China and Korea. But there are also a great many Chinese and Korean visitors (and residents) who would never involve themselves in such activities. And do you mean to tell us Japanese don't do these things either?

And yet another contradiction escapes Greg's notice. If he doesn't have any anti-Russian or anti-Chinese feelings because he can speak the languages, then does that mean all foreigners who can speak Japanese don't harbor any anti-Japanese feelings? If so, then those people can't be accused of being of having the "Japan-girai" allergy, right?

"It is time we admitted that at times the Japanese have the right to discriminate against some foreigners. If they do not, and Japan ends up like our padlocked, mutually suspicious Western societies, we will all be the losers."

As Greg sees it, Western societies made the mistake of trying to create societies where all their residents would be treated equally (it has yet to work that way, of course, but at least they're making the effort). We would all be better off if everyone knew their proper place in the greater social order.

Wouldn't we, Greg?

In the aftermath of the storm

I went to the Tak'eng (Dakeng) 大坑 area this afternoon to do some walking and, unsurprisingly, found the area had been battered by last weekend's storm. There were several landslides along the No. 7 trail, like this one...:

...but they were all passable. The real damage was on the No. 8 trail. About halfway down from the top, a section of the wooden steps had been washed away by what appeared to be a large mudslide:

I was still able to cross at this point, but soon afterwards, the trail came to a sudden end, blocked by dirt and fallen trees. Retracing my steps, I took an alternate route and made it down to the end of the trail, only to soon find that the road beyond was completely impassable due to a series of large storm-caused earth movements. The view on the left is what forced me to turn around, and make my way back to the No. 7 trail. The photo on the right was taken from the approach to the No. 8 trail (from the other side of the landslide), when I stopped to have a look on my way home:

Considering the fact the No. 1 trail is still officially closed almost a year because of storm damage (hikers still use it, however), it looks like it's going to be a long time before the No. 8 gets cleaned up.

Despite not being able to walk my intended route, I was able to see a lot of wildlife on the paths today. No doubt this was due to the relatively little human foot traffic, being a weekday afternoon on top of the damaged trails. The snake on the left was one of two I came across today. This one was long, and in the bushes off to the side of the trail - I wasn't able to get a very clear picture of it as it slithered away:

Speaking of calamities, it seems that some in the ruling Kuomintang (Guomindang) 中国国民党 are beginning to wake up to the fact that the administration of Mr. Ma 馬英九 has so far been a disaster for Taiwan ("Taiwan official bemoans bad Japan relations"):

"A failure to maintain political ties and a lack of senior Japan-savvy Taiwanese envoys has caused 'fault cracks' and misunderstandings to emerge in bilateral relations, ruling Nationalist Party Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung 呉泊雄 said Tuesday. 'In these past few years, fault cracks in the Taiwan-Japan relationship have appeared, and because of neglect in maintaining contact . . . many misunderstandings have been generated,' Wu said...Referring to senior Nationalist Party diplomats with links to Japan, he said, 'Right now we lack this kind of talent.' Wu made the comments to a visiting delegation of Taiwanese living in Japan who...said Japanese officials had expressed concern to them over Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou's attitude toward Tōkyō 東京. Wu received them at his party's headquarters in Taipei 台北. His remarks are the strongest indication since Ma took office May 20 that Taipei's ties with Tōkyō are wobbling, despite what some pundits said were 'sugar-coated' assurances Monday by Ma that relations were on track."

The same Taiwanese delegation apparently received more "sugar-coated assurances" later on Tuesday from Wang Jin-pyng 王金平, Speaker of the Legislative Yuan 立法院, according to an article in today's Taipei Times ("Wang affirms Japan’s importance to Taiwan"). As the story notes:

"...many in Japan are skeptical about Ma’s stance toward the country because he failed to mention Japan in his May 20 inaugural address and played an active role in Taiwan’s campaign in the 1970s to claim sovereignty over the disputed (Senkaku islands) 尖閣諸島."

Of course, Gregory Clark would probably find some reason to excuse Ma and the KMT, and put the blame for any problems squarely on the Japanese government. In his most recent column in the Japan Times ジャパンタイムズ ("Birth of a massacre myth"), however, Clark avoids Taiwan and focuses on finding excuses for the Chinese government over the Tiananmen Square Massacre 天安門大虐殺. While trying to make his case that there was no massacre in Tiananmen Square on the night of June 4, 1989, Clark grudgingly admits:

"True, much that happened elsewhere in Beijing that night was ugly. The regime had allowed prodemocracy student demonstrators to occupy its historic Tiananmen Square for almost three weeks, despite the harm and inconvenience caused. Twice, senior members of Deng Xiaoping's regime had tried unsuccessfully to negotiate compromises with the students. Unarmed troops sent in to clear the square had been turned back by angry crowds of Beijing civilians. When armed troops were finally sent in, they too met hostile crowds, but they kept advancing. Dozens of buses and troop-carrying vehicles were torched by the crowds, some with their crews trapped inside. In the panicky fighting afterward, hundreds, maybe even thousands, of civilians and students were killed. But that was a riot, not a deliberate massacre. And it did not happen in Tiananmen Square."

Oh, those poor soldiers, victims of the heartless students and civilians:

"Photos have helped sustain the Tiananmen massacre myth. One showing a solitary student halting a row of army tanks is supposed to demonstrate student bravery in the face of military evil. In fact, it shows that at least one military unit showed restraint in the face of student provocation...Photos of lines of burning troop carriers are also used, as if they prove military mayhem. In fact, they prove crowd mayhem."

Unless I'm reading this wrong, Clark is suggesting that the demonstrators in essence got what they deserved. And the well-meaning Chinese government is the victim of:

"U.S. and British black information authorities ever keen to plant anti-Beijing stories in unsuspecting media...Damage from the Tiananmen myth continues. It has been used repeatedly by Western hawks to sustain a ban on Western sales of arms to Beijing, including refusing even a request for riot-control equipment that Beijing says would have prevented the 1989 violence."

The logic that Clark employs here is reminiscent of an Escher impossible reality woodcut. If Western governments hadn't banned the sale of riot-control equipment, Tiananmen wouldn't have happened. But the sale of riot-control equipment to China is banned because of Tiananmen, which could have been avoided had the sale of riot-control equipment to China not been banned due to Tian...

Clark is a product of the 1960's, so perhaps he's still suffering from the drug-induced paranoia so prevalent among many baby boomers. After all, JFK was killed as part of a massive government conspiracy to prevent him from revealing the truth about Roswell. Uh, wasn't he?

And like Uncle Rico in "Napoleon Dynamite", Greg must relive his one great moment in life:

"Despite having organized single-handedly over Canberra's opposition an Australia table-tennis team to join the all-important 'Ping-Pong diplomacy,'..."

This reference almost always manages to make it into Clark's writings on China.

On a more positive note, it seems that ASUS is doing pretty well these days in Japan ("A cheap belt is tightened"):

"When ASUSTeK Computer of Taiwan introduced a bare-bones notebook PC for the rock-bottom price of ¥50,000 ($464 or NT14,110) in Japan in January, consumers snapped up the entire stock of 10,000 units in three days. Since then, the company has struggled to keep up with demand, moving a total of 70,000 units by the end of May. Meanwhile, domestic (Japanese) makers, whose portable PCs were all priced at ¥200,000 ($1860 or NT56,440) or higher, scrambled to follow the Taiwanese lead."

No black information here, just cheap computers.

A return to normalcy

When you put two chairs close together, then put yourself between them and begin lifting your body with your arms and swinging back and forth (as my daughter did yesterday afternoon), it's safe to assume everything is back to normal. And the feeling was strangely reinforced this morning when I opened the homepage of the Japan Times ジャパンタイムズ, and saw that Gregory Clark had another one of his bizarre, "It ain't the fault of the authoritarians" opinion piece ("Puzzle awaits G8 delegates"). The focus of this article is mostly on the upcoming G8 summit in Tōya-ko 洞爺湖 in Hokkaidō 北海道 (where I spent a night during the summer of 1992), but Clark does manage to slip in a comment about recent events between Japan and Taiwan:

"Japan's muddled, nationalistic hard line over territory leaves it at loggerheads with all its other neighbors — South Korea, China and Taiwan. That the dispute with Taiwan over the Senkaku islands 尖閣諸島 should have led to a semi-formal break in relations is a much more serious setback for Japan's diplomacy than anyone in Japan seems to want to realize."

If one thing is clear above anything else, it's that Greg knows next to nothing about political developments in Taiwan (though I suspect he doesn't think so). Let's see...it was the Taiwanese premier that made the ridiculous remark about going to war, it was the Taiwanese foreign minister who recalled the unofficial ambassador to Japan back to Taiwan (with the latter being labeled a "traitor" by some KMT 中国国民党 legislators), and it was a group of right-wing Taiwanese politicians who sailed out to the Senkakus in an attempt to provoke trouble, and score a few points back home. While all this was going on, Mr. Ma 馬英九 was nowhere to be found, and even some in the sycophantic, pro-KMT media (like the China Post English newspaper) were calling for the government to get its act together before the situation got dangerously out of hand. The Japanese government, in contrast, remained calm, and offered apologies and compensation over the sunken fishing boat, while simultaneously reinforcing its claim over the Senkakus (and coming to an agreement with China over the gas disputes in the East China Sea 東シナ海, and having a Japanese destroyer pay a goodwill visit to a Chinese port). And Greg thinks this was a "serious setback" for JAPANESE diplomacy?! (Oh, and of course the South Koreans, Chinese and Taiwanese are never guilty of muddled, nationalistic hard lines over disputed territories!)

But what do you expect from a man who makes the claim that:

"...it was the same Washington that in 1951 almost certainly forced Japan to give up its legitimate rights to the disputed islands (meaning the Northern Territories 北方領土), as part of a secret U.N. deal with Moscow allowing the U.S. to use Guam as a military base — a fact that if admitted would greatly strengthen Tōkyō's position."

Perhaps I'm missing something, but what exactly is Gregory Clark talking about here? What "secret U.N. deal"? Why would the United States have needed the permission of the Soviet Union to use Guam as a military base, when the island had been an American territory since 1898 (and the last time I checked, still is)? Like I said earlier, things must be back to normal if Greg makes comments like these, without any evidence to back them up, nor any attempts to clarify the relevance of them to the topic(s) at hand. Details, Greg, it's all in the details.

Some things never change. Sigh...

Gregory Clark and Tibet

It didn't take Gregory Clark long to come up with a column in the Japan Times ジャパンタイムズ on the recent troubles in Tibet チベット ("Tibet and Olympic Games"). He only makes one reference to Taiwan, but it's a classic:

"As for Tibetan independence, people forget that the strongest opponent was the Western-backed Nationalist Chinese government that ended up in Taiwan. Beijing simply inherited that Western-approved situation."

So it's all Taiwan's fault! Well, Greg, I'm no fan of the KMT 中国国民党, but it wasn't their forces that invaded Tibet in 1950, and drove the Dalai Lama ダライ・ラマ into exile in 1959. But there's no end to the excuses that Clark dreams up to explain away one of the world's worst abusers of human rights. In fact, he's been writing in this vein for so long, it's hard to work up a sense of outrage anymore. But it does make me wonder how people who can otherwise distinguish between what is right and wrong (as far as I know, Gregory Clark has never committed any felonies) can betray those most basic principles of being human when the lives of literally millions are needlessly suffering. Or is that also a part of being human?

And so we come to Taiwan, and the March 22 presidential election. I'm having a difficult time comprehending why otherwise decent people would consider voting for a party like the KMT, with it's long history of unrepentant corruption (and cozy ties with gangsters) and repression (40 years of martial law 戒厳令, the 228 Incident 二・二八事件, the White Terror 白色テロ etc.) This isn't like deciding to vote against the Republicans 共和党, where even though one might disagree with many of their conservative principles, it is still the party of Lincoln, after all. No, the KMT is odious, plain and simple, yet it controls the legislature, and stands a good chance of capturing the presidency. There are plenty of types like Gregory Clark here in Taiwan, with their warped views of both history and current events often being reflected on the pages of the China Post, a newspaper which frequently tries to portray Chiang Kai-shek (Shō Kaiseki) 蒋介石 as the man who (almost single-handedly!) defeated the Japanese in World War II (never mind the fact that the Japanese army was still entrenched in China when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima 広島 and Nagasaki 長崎, and the Red Army 赤軍 attacked Manchuria 満州国); protected Taiwan from communism (no, it was the U.S. Seventh Fleet 第7艦隊 that did that); and started Taiwan on the path to democracy (a process which was actually begun by his son following Chiang's death). I guess it all comes down to what benefits the individual more than anything else, and if the KMT is judged to be party that can better bring home the bacon, then a little moral obfuscation will help to swallow the bitter pill that comes with all that pork.

Perhaps the day will come when the KMT will attempt to atone for its sins of the past, either by reforming itself into a new party, like the former communists in Hungary ハンガリー, or agreeing to the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to look into past misdeeds, as was done in South Africa 南アフリカ共和国. And someday, too, pigs may take to the skies, and there will be snowball fights in Hell.

In the news: Gregory Clark ニュース

The ultimate Gregory Clark column has appeared. Entitled "The fusillade against China", almost everything that is offensive about Clark's writings is collected on one page. In it, Clark bares to the world the lengths he is willing to go to excuse China and its authoritarian regime. Writing this disgusting deserves to relished.

"In some ways China is not my favorite country. I once went to some trouble to learn its language. I have often had to court rightwing hostility for trying to explain its foreign policies in less than demonic terms. Back in 1971 I even organized, single-handedly and over Canberra's opposition, an Australian team to join in Beijing's Ping-Pong diplomacy. (Canberra in those days saw Beijing as evil incarnate, and its efforts to open up to the world via Ping-Pong team matches as a plot to take us all over.)"

Poor Greg. He's gone to a lot of trouble over the years sticking up for the poor, misunderstood dictatorial government, and hasn't received much love in return from others, despite the fact that he, and he alone, was responsible for Australia's diplomatic breakthrough with China vis-a-vis ping pong diplomacy. Visionaries such as Greg are often never appreciated.

"Yet, on my first day in China accompanying the team I had organized with such effort, I was almost expelled for trying to rescue an Australian journalist in trouble with the Red Guards. A few weeks later I was to receive a formal reprimand from the Chinese Foreign Ministry for trying to help more mistake-prone Australian journalists in trouble."

It isn't easy being Greg, not when you have to suffer fools gladly.

"This, together with some articles I wrote showing less than complete enthusiasm for China's disastrous Cultural Revolution, put me in Beijing's bad books for quite some time. Others who slavishly praised China at the time were warmly welcomed."

If you've ever read a lot of things that Clark has written, one thing that will no doubt strike you is his feeling of resentment against others that in his view are less deserving than he.

"But while it is easy to be annoyed by China's hard-nosed realpolitik in choosing friends, it is hard also not to be annoyed by the continual anti-China carping in the West."

Ah yes, criticism of Beijing's atrocious human-rights record is just "carping", a word that suggests one is complaining out of habit and not with any valid reason. This sounds reminiscent of the term "Japan-bashing" that used to be bandied about by those who wanted to deflect criticism away from Tokyo's economic policies of the 70s and 80s. Except that the Japanese government wasn't imprisoning people who dared to stand up for their rights.

"Here is a nation that has begun to lift one quarter of the world's population out of poverty to close to middle-class prosperity in a generation. Yet we are supposed to be upset by suspect paint on some toys ordered to the specifications of a U.S. importer, plus a few other imperfections in the torrent of quality goods helping rescue our Western economies from inflation and improve our own middle-class existences."

If you've been following the news the last few months, you've probably come across a number of stories about unsafe Made-in-China products. Clark prefers to dismiss all of this quickly by suggesting that Western companies are actually to blame, and we should accept the deaths of our pets and the sudden illnesses affecting our children because the Chinese are doing us a favor, after all, by selling us this stuff. This is classic Greg!

"China is accused of air pollution and gobbling up world energy resources. But when it dams the Yangtse River to produce over 22,000 megawatts of clean energy in an engineering feat that no Western nation can even begin to match, the Western media complain about the unforeseen erosion of mountain slopes upstream forcing villagers to be evacuated.

So it would have been better not to build the dam, force China to continue to rely on pollution-intense, coal-based energy, and go back to the days when tens of thousands died from flooding in the Yangtse's heavily populated lower reaches?"

And so much for China's environmental mess. It seems that we in the West are just jealous of China's engineering achievements. Besides, if we force the Chinese to stop destroying their living space, we will be responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. How can Greenpeace sleep at night?!

"Somehow the recent opening of the remarkable 1,142-km, 5,000-meter-high railway line into Tibet is also sinful because it opens Tibet to Han Chinese influence. So it would be better to keep Tibetans in backward isolation forever?

The Han Chinese are supposed to be guilty of creeping genocide in Tibet. But since Beijing allows Tibetans, like other minorities, to have as many children as they want while Han Chinese are restricted to only one child, it seems we need a new definition of genocide."

Considering how many Han Chinese there are to begin with, Greg, I don't think they are in danger of being overtaken demographically anytime soon. It's funny, too, how Clark's defense of China's rule over Tibet - how it has lifted the country out of its backwardness - is the same kind of argument that was used by the Western powers to justify their past colonial rule over Asia and Africa. Greg, unfortunately, seems to be ironically-challenged. He also seems to have trouble grasping the nuances of the English language. It has been estimated by some that up to 1.2 million Tibetans have died through violence and misguided Chinese economic policies since Han Chinese rule was established in 1950. Sounds like genocide to me.

"China, it seems, is also guilty for failing to protest atrocities the West condemns in Sudan's Darfur and in Myanmar. Maybe it sees hypocrisy in the way the West not just fails to protest similar atrocities elsewhere, but actually helps to create them, as in Iraq, Somalia or Afghanistan. U.S. free-fire zones in Vietnam forcing villagers to live in underground tunnels for years make Darfur's Janjaweed killers look like a bunch of amateurs."

Yes, Greg, the U.S. did some pretty bad things in Vietnam. Except that that happened around 35-40 years ago, while Darfur and Myanmar are ongoing tragedies. Clark often seems stuck in a 1960s time warp, as the opening paragraph of his latest column shows.

"Maybe we would all be better off if we stopped telling other nations what to do and concentrated on our own affairs, as China does. But the main complaint is that China is not a democracy. Has anyone thought what would happen if China was a democracy?"

Clark conveniently forgets all the demands and threats China makes against other countries over things like visits by the Dalai Lama or former Taiwanese presidents. Now Greg is really getting going, for he's going to show us how China is better off in its current one-party authoritarian mode of government.

"The first victim would be the unpopular one-child policy, which threatens to cause serious problems for the nation in the future — rapid population aging, a male-female population imbalance, the weakening of family values. Yet, without that policy, the global pollution and resource shortage problems we all face would be far worse. In a sense the Chinese are making sacrifices for our sakes. But they get little thanks. Even the one-child policy is denounced as evil authoritarianism."

See, if the Chinese were given political freedoms, they would start having lots of sex, and global warming would get worse. So we should be thankful that the Chinese people who demand the freedoms of speech, press, religion and assembly, and who call for multi-party democracy, are rounded up, imprisoned and tortured. I'm surprised Greg hasn't praised the regime for the part it's doing to increase the number of available body organs (harvested from prisoners in Chinese jails, according to many reports).

"Today few criticize Singapore, or Japan for that matter, both of whom chose one-party autocracy during their early growth periods. China's blend of local democracy with reasonably responsible collective leadership from the top could well be a model for many other struggling societies.

Singapore's continuing one-party rule suggests that even advanced Chinese culture societies could prefer Confucian-style benign autocracy to Western-style democracy. Democracy is supposed to be about freedom of choice. But our moralists complain when a nation makes a choice they do not like."

Notice how he mentions Singapore, but completely ignores Taiwan, an "advanced Chinese culture society" that remains the only one of its kind to have chosen (and replaced) its leaders through relatively free and open elections. Don't worry, though, Greg will get to Taiwan soon enough.

"Even more annoying is the way the distorted products of myth-making are constantly dragged out to slam Beijing, as with the Tiananmen "massacre" of 1989? Just read the freely available reports from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing at the time to get the true story."

So you see Tiananmen Square was just a myth. When even the Chinese government admits that 200-300 people were killed by the PLA, you have to wonder what is Clark's definition of the word "massacre".

"China attacked India in 1962? Read what the historians have long said: namely, that it was India that attacked China and China retaliated.

China wants to take over Taiwan? Almost the entire world now formally recognizes Taiwan to be part of China."

Criticism of India goes hand-in-hand with love for China; it's a zero-sum game for Clark. Meanwhile, Greg totally ignores the reality that Taiwan has been a de facto independent country since 1949, and a democratic one at that since the early 1990's. Does the world formally recognize that Taiwan is part of China, Greg? Or is it the case that most of the planet's governments recognize that the R.O.C. has no claim over China?

"China crushed Tibetan independence in 1959? But no one, the previous anticommunist Chinese regime especially, has ever recognized Tibet as independent. And we now know that the CIA and India were deeply involved in fomenting the 1959 uprising that China felt it had to crush."

So the Indians and the CIA were the ones really responsible for the Tibetan uprising of 1959. After all, without the nefarious meddling of outsiders, the Tibetans would have realized that the Chinese were doing their benevolent best to lift Tibet out of the Dark Ages. In Clark's strange alternate reality, there is no such thing as Tibetan desires for self-determination. Instead, Clark sounds like one of those old Southern segregationists who blamed "outside agitators" for getting their "Negroes" all riled up about civil rights (Clark is often critical of Western residents of Japan who have the audacity to take legal action against discriminatory practices there).

"True, Chinese leaders have been far from angelic. They have yet to explain their largely unprovoked 1979 attack on Vietnam. Their mishandling of domestic policies led directly to the Tiananmen incident of 1989, and the many other localized riots that continue to occur. But post-Maoist Beijing has been trying hard to reform itself. It deserves more encouragement, less brickbats."

I was always under the impression that China attacked Vietnam to "punish" it for overthrowing Cambodia's murderous Khmer Rouge government. And I like how Greg uses the word "localized" to describe the riots, as if the very idea of any kind of general disgruntlement with the CCP government among the Chinese population is somehow hard to comprehend.

"Recent criticisms of China seem aimed to neutralize the kudos Beijing hopes its 2008 Olympics will bring. For some reason the British have long been the most diligent. As proof of Beijing's continuing authoritarianism the BBC recently went to some lengths to show a young reporter speaking execrable Chinese being refused entry to the closely guarded Chinese leadership housing and office compound in Beijing. Perhaps the guards remembered what happened the last time the British arrived there — the looting of invaluable treasures while crushing the 1900 Boxer Rebellion."

Once again, we in the West are just green with envy over what China has accomplished. And once again, he goes back in history, way back in this case (the Boxer Rebellion Greg?) to justify the heavy-handed way Beijing often handles things.

"London orchestrated much of the anti-China black information campaigns during Vietnam War days. It has used the Tiananmen myth to persuade the European Union to continue its ban on weapons sales to China. Its former governor in Hong Kong, Christopher Patten, was openly contemptuous of the Chinese regime.

Coming from the nation that launched the two Opium Wars of the mid-19th century — wars that were to lead directly to many of China's later troubles, including the loss of Hong Kong — the criticisms seem a bit indulgent."

Now he's on a roll. The "Tiananmen myth"? Christopher Patten - the man Beijing so charmingly called the "historic criminal/eternal sinner/sinner condemned for a thousand generations" for his atrocious crime of trying to expand Hong Kong's electorate? And the Opium Wars? Come on, Greg, the Boxer Rebellion was a stretch, but events of the mid-19th century?

All good things must come to an end, and Clark's column is no exception. As an old colleague of mine from my Tokyo days would have said, Greg is "an incredible piece of work". I wish I knew what makes people like Gregory Clark write the things that they do (perhaps Mr. Pinyin, my Ma Ying-jeou-loving secret admirer from a few threads back could shed some light on this).

Being vice-president of a university in northern Japan, maybe Greg is worried about the security of his cozy job in the face of the declining student enrollments in that country. By standing up for a ruling caste made up of thugs and criminals, he could be angling for a similar post in his beloved PRC. I wonder how he's going to top this article in his next column in the Japan Times?