Monday, February 28, 2005

CHRONICLES OF KYOTO
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
February 28, 2005

The Japanese call it the capusoru hoteru; capsule hotel in English. A modern day lodge offering hives upon hives of rooms in stacks of twos, each framed by a sickly, square yellow glow and uniformly measuring three feet and a half in height, three feet wide and the length of an average Asian man.

The capsule hotel is a new icon of Japanese urban living, one created mainly for transient men who missed the last train bound for wherever and Neverwhere.[1] Crawling inside for the first time can make one wonder whether the sensation of lying down in such a room is similar to the sweet serenity proffered by the morgue suite.

"Alone in the dark with nothing but your thoughts," said Ellis Boyd Redding in The Shawshank Redemption, "time can draw out like a blade."[2] You lie there and stare at the strange low ceiling. Over a week of memories pass you by.

Night of February 12. I ask Yu Jie if she can hold my bottle of beer for a few minutes while I go inside the temple on Teramachi street. I tell Jie I do not want to take the bottle inside. She nods and takes my beer. I walk in. Inside I gently pull a small log suspended horizontally from the ceiling and let go. The log hits the temple's great bell lightly releasing a deep and fragile sound. Two more pulls on the log. I whisper a plea each time for the swift recovery of an ailing friend. I lower my head a degree and close my eyes; I smile and sigh. I do not know why.

The day of St. Valentine, February 14. I approach the Koto-in Temple alone. Thick moss covers both sides of a long stone pathway like matte-green pillars. There is no noise save for the rustling from groves of bamboo and the rhythmic clicking of footsteps on the stone trail. I wonder how air can be so still and yet still make the leaves of the bamboo rustle.

Koto-in was established in 1601 at the behest of the famed military leader Hosokawa Tadaoki, a great warrior of his time and one of the few to survive the bloody wars which culminated in the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate.[3] At the precincts of Koto-in is the grave of Hosokawa and his wife, Gratia, a devout believer in the then outlawed Catholic faith. A solitary stone lantern and serenity adorn the resting place.

Inside the ancient temple and without my shoes, the wooden floor feels like ice but somehow it is ok. Space is partitioned by sliding doors and vistas of a small garden of bamboo, maple, moss, shapely bushes and obedient clusters of small trees, blades of grass and pebbles. The elegant simplicity is breathtaking.

The afternoon is gray. It feels like any other hour of the Japanese winter - biting cold - but the sun has found an improbable small crack in the clouds. A slender ray penetrates the sky and heats a square meter on the totomi mats; the rest of the floor is bathed in shadow. I sit down and colonize the warm space, lean on a wooden pillar and pull out of my bag the books I brought with me to Japan.

No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place, a Zen saying goes. In two hours I soak up chapters one after the other from Eduardo Galeano's Faces and Masks - an epic history of the Western hemisphere and the New World in the making from a Latin American eye-view; Tariq Ali's The Book of Saladin - a brilliant historical novel about the Kurdish warrior Yusuf Salah al-Din ibn Ayyub and the long fateful encounter between Christendom and the world of Islam; and The Naked Sun, a robot novel of science fiction maestro Isaac Asimov. And I think: a Filipino in a temple in Kyoto - the old capital of Japan - absorbing unlikely sunlight, feasting on books about the ancient past, recent history and memories of the future, bounding from land to land. None of this was planned.

February 16; the Kyoto Protocol - the global agreement that aims to prevent the onset of dangerous climate change - comes into force. The climate treaty is a legally-binding accord that obligates the industrialized world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide, by an average of five percent globally relative to 1990 emission levels. Scientists insist emissions reductions of at least 30 percent must take place by 2020, and over 75 percent by 2050.

Prior to the Protocol, a UN framework convention on climate change called on divine intervention to save the planet - by calling for voluntary cuts in emissions. Since providence did little to reduce emissions; the world decided legally-enforceable cuts were required. Indian saying: "Call on God, but row away from the rocks."

The Protocol was born in the city of Kyoto in 1997, hence the treaty's name. It is the only global instrument that gives the children of today a fighting chance to inherit a livable planet. In the exact same hall where the Protocol was born, a great conference is being held by the United Nations to mark the treaty's historic entry into force. The cavernous chamber is full.

Officials and diplomats from all over the world are present. The program begins in the evening to ensure that the rest of the world can participate in the event. Messages celebrating the triumph of multilateralism are transmitted live to the assembly. Applause resonates throughout the convention hall. Two countries are absent from the festivities and refuse to celebrate the day: the United States and Australia.

The US is the biggest greenhouse gas polluter in the world, period; Australia is the biggest emitter per capita. Climate change is considered the greatest threat facing the planet today, and yet the US continues to inflict fossil wars on the Middle East for the region's oil, the bloodiest of all fossil fuels. Australia continues to be the number one exporter in the world of coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, and has also sent fresh troops to Iraq, the frontline of America's petro-conflagration. During international negotiations to hammer out details of the Kyoto accord, and even now with the Protocol in force, the US and Australia continue to play hooligan roles.

The Kyoto Protocol is not based on science, said George W. Bush. We will meet the challenge of climate change with clean coal, said John Howard. "The only difference between genius and stupidity," said Albert Einstein, "is that genius has its limits."

At the capsule hotel hive, almost two weeks of tiring work have finally caught up. I ward away sleep with a final effort and open my notebook. Hastily scribbled notes from the Kyoto conference leap out. Words of hope.

"We have no reason to wait," said Hiroshi Ohki, former environment minister of Japan and the president of the 3rd UN Conference of the Parties which gave birth to the climate treaty. "The entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol is an ideal start to protect the health of the planet. This is a day to renew our resolve."

"We must believe in ourselves individually and collectively. Together we form a multitude," said the imposing Wangari Maathai, the Deputy Environment Minister of Kenya and recent recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Maathai exhorted the representatives gathered in the main hall of Kyoto's International Conference Center "to apply the precautionary principle and curb the rising tide. We are members of a generation that can still make a difference."[4]

I stare at the strange low ceiling of the capsule room. Over a week of memories and more pass me by. The world stops turning and descends on my eyelids. I slip down into a shapeless, nameless void.


NOTES:

[1] Neverwhere - borrowed where else but from the title of Neil Gaiman's superb fantasy novel about a hidden subterranean world, among other things.
[2] The Shawshank Redemption, directed by Frank Darabont and starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, who played the character Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding.
[3] The Koto-in Zen Temple is a subsidiary temple of the Daikotu-ji temple in Murasakino, Kita-ku, Kyoto City. The author thanks Mika Ohbayashi of the Institute of Sustainable Energy Policy for introducing him to the mesmerizing temple.
[4] The author spoke at a number of symposiums in Japan leading up to the commemorative Kyoto Protocol conference, which the author covered as a Greenpeace campaigner. The article does not reflect Greenpeace policy.

Monday, February 07, 2005

THE GARRISONS OF MEMORY
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO
Op-Ed, Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com
February 7, 2005

"The world is hearing the voice of freedom from the center of the Middle East," said US President George W. Bush soon after the Iraqi elections of January - a quote published widely without reflection by mainstream American media."[1]

Zoooom! roared the US time machine, a Nietzschian genie indulging "the eternal recurrence of the same."

"US encouraged by Vietnam vote: Officials cite 83% turnout despite Vietcong terror", headlined the New York Times on September 4, 1967. "[D]espite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting," the paper reported, Americans were "surprised and heartened" by the huge turnout of voters. A successful election, wrote the Times, "has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam".[2] So uncanny.

Did not America use the word "fraud" not too long ago when it was busy denouncing elections staged by the Soviets after invading Afghanistan, Hungary and Czechoslovakia? And didn't America refer to the people elected by what it called phony exercises as "stooges" and "pawns?"[3]

Is it so hard to remember? Memory can be a well-guarded stronghold.

In the South Korean port city of Incheon, police guard a bronze statue of an American general called Douglas MacArthur. This is the general who, while commanding US forces during the Korean War, had wanted to drop 24 atomic bombs along the river dividing Korea and China.

Police have protected MacArthur's statue twenty four hours each day since it was targeted three years ago by protest groups angry with American policies. "It's funny," said 22-year-old Shin Song-jin, an officer on duty, "we guard the statue just like we guard the U.S. military bases [in South Korea]."[4] Ask yourself why, Officer Shin.

Time heals all wounds, but not all the time.

North Korea - the third member of America's Axis of Evil - is a land that has been on war-footing for decades. The very constitution of the Hermit Kingdom - ruled with an iron fist by a Stalinist monarchy - calls for "arming all the populace [and] turning the entire country into a fortress."

North Korea is a garrison state, says Bruce Cumings, author of the book North Korea, which provides a most cerebral, scholarly and reasoned study of "the country every American loves to hate."[5] It has close to 15,000 underground installations related to national security. "It has burrowed deep into the earth and the mountains to build hardened concrete shelters to survive nuclear attack, and the government spends 30 cents of every dollar in its budget to defend the country."

In a population of 23 million, one million are in the military, six million are in the reserves and almost all adults have had significant military experience. When North Korean men reach the age of 18, they go through eight years of compulsory military service, "and they are not allowed to go on home leave or see their families until six years have passed."

War is a stern teacher, said Thucydides.

A paradoxical question: who remembers the "forgotten war," which ravaged Korea from 1950 to 1953? Some do and some don't. And some don't want to.

"We are facing an army of barbarians," wrote the military editor of the New York Times, Hanson Baldwin, on July 14, 1950. "[T]hey are barbarians as trained, as relentless, as reckless of life, and as skilled in the tactics of the kind of war they fight as the hordes of Genghis Khan . . . They have taken a leaf from the Nazi book of blitzkrieg and are employing all the weapons of fear and terror." Not far behind might be "Mongolians, Soviet Asiatics and a variety of races" - some of the "most primitive of peoples," wrote Baldwin, a senior editor of the press icon of the free world.

Operation Rat-Killer: the official name of a US military campaign from 1951 to 1952 designed to wipe out North Korean guerillas. What better way to exterminate vermin than to burn them out?

Napalm was invented at the conclusion of World War II. The horrific effects of napalm gained notoriety during the Vietnam War after terrible photographs were published showing children running naked down the road, their skin peeling off. And yet, recounts Bruce Cumings, America's leading historian and analyst of contemporary Korea, the US dropped far more napalm on North Korea and "with much more devastating effect" since North Korea "had many more populous cities and urban industrial installations than did North Vietnam."

What else should we remember to forget in this "forgotten war?"

The American military loves exploding, flammable things. And America wears its heart on its sleeve. "They Don't Like Hell Bombs," blazed the lead of J. Townsend's article in the American Armed Forces Chemical Journal in January 1951. Another US Air Force "trade" journal, All Hands, had this for its title in its April 1951 issue: "Napalm Jelly Bombs Prove a Blazing Success in Korea." "Wonder Weapon: Napalm," boasted the US Army Combat Forces Journal edition of November 1952.

How horrible is napalm? Here's an account of an American whose unit in Korea was hit by a napalm bomb mistakenly dropped by a US bomber: "Men all around me were burned. They lay rolling in the snow. Men I knew, marched and fought with begged me to shoot them . . . Where the napalm had burned to a crisp, it would be peeled back from the face, arms, legs . . . like fried potato chips."

Early account of America's blistering love affair with incendiary bombs: July 31, 1950, 500 tons of ordinance dropped by US bombers on the city of Hungnam. August 12, 1950: the US Air Force drops 625 tons of bombs - "a tonnage that would have required a fleet of 250 B-17s in the Second World War." By late August, B-29 formations were dropping 800 tons a day on North Korea - much of it pure napalm. All this within the first few months of a war that would last over three years - a war still referred to by the American military as "a limited war."

On February 8, 1951 George Barrett of the New York Times wrote of "a macabre tribute to the totality of modern war" in a village hit by US jets: "The inhabitants throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they held when the napalm struck - a man about to get on his bicycle, fifty boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife strangely unmarked, holding in her hand a page torn from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue crayoned at Mail Order No. 3,811,294 for a $2.98 'bewitching bed jacket - coral.'"

The oldest psychology on earth, wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, is that which must be "burned" in: "only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory."

NOTES:

[1] "Bush calls Iraqi election a success," Nedra Pickler, Associated Press, January 31, 2005.
[2] "The Vietnam turnout was good as well," Sami Ramadani, The Guardian-UK, February 1, 2005.
[3] "Real freedom still far off," Eric Margolis, Toronto Sun, January 30, 2005.
[4] "South Koreans doubt relevance of MacArthur," Jeremy Kirk, The Washington Times, January 18, 2005.
[5] Bruce Cumings, North Korea, The New Press, 2004. Apart from the quote from the Washington Times, all other references are based on the book of Cumings. In fact, due to usual reasons of space, I regretted constantly while writing the piece that I could only delve on a small fraction of Cumings' theses. To call Cumings' book "riveting," as The Financial Times did, or "instructive," as The New York Times described it, is to diminish the book's worth. It is tremendously well-written and moving, its scholarship is impeccable and the arguments presented formidable and provocative. Cumings provides forceful criticism of the sustained idiocies of the US government and mainstream media. More than this, however, Cumings puts forth compelling highly nuanced alternative approaches to "repairing the crisis of current US-North Korean relations" and achieving lasting peace in the region. Get a copy immediately if you come across one.