The coalescence of the Oikoumenê

By the year A.D. 1952 the initiative and skill of Western Man had been engaged for some four and a half centuries in knitting together the whole habitable and traversable surface of the planet by a system of communications that was unprecedented in the two features of being literally world-wide and being operated by a technique which was constantly surpassing itself at a perpetually accelerating pace. The wooden caravels and galleons, rigged for sailing in the eye of the wind, which had sufficed to enable the pioneer mariners of Modern Western Europe to make themselves masters of all the oceans, had given way [in the 1840s] to mechanically propelled iron-built ships of relatively gigantic size [some smaller steamships had wooden hulls]; “dirt-tracks” travelled by six-horse coaches had been replaced by macadamized and concrete-floored roads travelled by automobiles; railways had been invented to compete with roads, and aircraft to compete with all land-borne or water-borne conveyances. Concurrently, means of [instantaneous] communication which did not require the physical transportation of human bodies had been conjured up, and put into operation on a world-wide scale, in the shape of telegraphs, telephones, and wireless transmission – visual as well as auditory – by radio. The movement of sea-borne and airborne traffic had been made detectable at long range by radar. There had been no period in the history of any other civilization in which so large an area had been made so highly conductive for every form of human intercourse.

From this perspective, the creation of an electronic World Wide Web (for non-privileged users) in 1994 was the latest stage of a process that had begun with the discovery of Madeira by the Portuguese in 1419.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

The January 28 Incident

This was a pre-echo of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Imperial Japanese Navy bombed Shanghai on January 28 1932, ostensibly to crush Chinese student protests against the occupation of Manchuria in the previous year. The Chinese fought back. The two sides fought to a standstill. The League of Nations brokered a ceasefire in May.

After twenty years devoted to preliminary domestic exercises in civil wars, the Chinese peasant-soldier had won his spurs in his stubborn defence of an area in Greater Shanghai against a Japanese assault from the 28th January to the 3rd March 1932. [Footnote: See Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M.: Survey of International Affairs, 1932 (London 1933, Milford), pp. 480-95.] In psychology as well as in strategy this campaign had been reminiscent of the Russo-Turkish wars of A.D. 1828-9 and A.D. 1877-8, and it had been prophetic of China’s ultimate victory over Japan in a defensive war on a sub-continental scale that was to drag on from A.D. 1937 to A.D. 1945. At Shanghai in A.D. 1932, as in the Balkans in the nineteenth century, the moral victory had been won by the belligerent [Japan] who had managed by sheer endurance to postpone the hour of a defeat which he knew to be ultimately inevitable owing to the odds being overwhelmingly in his antagonist’s favour, while this ultimate victor [China] had been humiliated by having to take so long, and pay so high, to overcome the resistance of an antagonist who was notoriously not his match.

Not his match in the long run or in numbers, but in 1932 surely more than his match in everything else. The Chinese barely had an air force. An American army reservist and pilot, US Reserve Lt Robert McCawley Short, was in Shanghai to demonstrate a Boeing fighter biplane to the Chinese and decided to show it in action. He shot down an IJN aircraft on February 19. On February 22 he downed another and was shot down himself and killed. He was posthumously raised to the rank of colonel in the Republic of China Air Force.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954

The faithful remnant

The wholeheartedness of the conversion of at least a nucleus of the converts to Roman Catholic Christianity in Japan was attested by the survival of a “faithful remnant” underground for 231 years (A.D. 1637-1868) during which the penalty for detection was death.

An Historian’s Approach to Religion, OUP, 1956

Britten and Pears in Purcell in Tokyo

February 9 1956.

The first song is an aria, usually for soprano, from the semi-opera The Indian Queen, libretto by by John Dryden and Sir Robert Howard.

“I attempt from love’s sickness to fly in vain,
Since I am myself my own fever and pain.
No more now, fond heart, with pride no more swell;
Thou canst not raise forces enough to rebel.
I attempt from love’s sickness to fly in vain,
Since I am myself my own fever and pain.
For love has more power and less mercy than fate,
To make us seek ruin and love those that hate.
I attempt from love’s sickness to fly in vain,
Since I am myself my own fever and pain.”

The second is a setting of Peter Anthony Motteux.

“Man is for the woman made,
And the woman for the man;
As the spur is for the jade,
As the scabbard for the blade,
As for digging is the spade,
As for liquor is the can,
So man is for the woman made,
And the woman for the man.

As the scepter’s to be sway’d,
As for night’s the serenade,
As for pudding is the pan,
And to cool us is the fan,
So man is for the woman made,
And the woman for the man.

Be she widow, be she maid,
Be she well or ill array’d,
Be she wanton, be she stayed,
Princess or harridan,
So man is for the woman made,
And the woman for the man.”

Those are the sung words. The original texts are slightly different. The keyboard arrangements are Britten’s.

Takemitsu for children

Breeze and Clouds, the Piano Pieces for Children composed in 1978. Played by Megumi Fujita.

Boy with Cat, or Japanese song of summer

Donald Richie (recent posts) made his own experimental films.

What is the sound, apart from the obsessive piano, in this mildly erotic nouvelle-vague-ish short from 1966? Obviously a kind of musique concrète. It’s a sublime soundtrack, even if you hear it away from the images.

I lived in Tokyo from July 1990 to the end of ’91 (to help open a publishing office). I’d done a reccy a few weeks before to look for a flat. I was lucky and found a freestanding unfurnished house in the centre of town, in Nishi-Azabu, on a leafy slope between Roppongi and Hiroo. Or in the angle (tangle) between the Shuto Expressway and the road leading to Hiroo.

The day before I was due to fly from London and move in, it occurred to me that it had no bed. My furniture was in the Panama Canal. I didn’t want to start this adventure in a hotel and I’d be landing too late to buy a futon. So I bought a folding bed and checked it in, feeling like the man in the parable.

The strangest thing is that, long before I had seen the house on the reccy, I’d been certain that I would live in one, and on a slope, and on the right as you walked up. So it was. It was on a lane that you entered as you left the road to Hiroo.

I like a sentence in Jonathan Rauch’s The Outnation, Harvard Business School Press, 1992: “Often you come upon neighborhoods in which the streets are so narrow that cars must negotiate them with care; the result is a glorious quiet, a Venetian calm.”

That is so true of Tokyo. Mine was not exactly like that. The lanes were a bit wider. There were trees. It was actually a patch of embassy-land (Greece, Romania), but not in the sterile gated way of a backward city. There were some quasi-’30s buildings. At its heart, towards Terebi-Asahi-dori, was a very large overgrown walled garden with a gloomily distinguished house at the centre of it.

My first sensory impression on arriving in my house on that hot July evening (no summers are as suffocating as Tokyo’s) was of the smell of tatami matting.

It was “western” on the ground floor and had paper doors and tatami on the first. It faced Hiroo and gave onto a garden via sliding doors in the main rooms on both levels. On the first floor, for its length, was a railed balcony. The rooms were separated from it by a wood-floored gallery. During typhoons, I’d pull all the doors open, turning it into a doll’s house.

Hydrangeas nodded into the dining room. The garden contained a stone frog and some real ones. (People think Tokyo is a sterile place.) The garden in the film looks exactly like it. The house and its relation to the garden are like mine, except for the ground-floor tatami. Could it have been it? I had been told that mine had belonged to an artist.

Below, at a short distance, was a school. The sound of a playground is the same everywhere. My house breathed. When you opened the front door in autumn, leaves would blow in.

I woke up on my first morning and heard the noise in Richie’s film. It was as loud as there. It couldn’t have been the singing of electricity in the ubiquitous Tokyo overground cables. Metal was being cut. I had moved opposite some light industry without noticing. I asked the real estate company. They sucked their teeth.

Then I stopped noticing it. And the smell of tatami receded slightly, but it must be overwhelmingly evocative in the minds of Japanese when they leave Japan.

It had been the sound of cicadas or semi singing in unison:

In 1993 I visited Tokyo and decided to take a look at the house, with a feeling of foreboding, knowing Tokyo’s impermanence, which is another name for its indestructibility. I turned off the main road, walked a few steps and saw a hole in the ground.

The Japanese song of summer:

Enter the Garden: Toru Takemitsu

One reason Richie (below) would have known Toru Takemitsu is that Takemitsu, as well as being the first Japanese composer influenced by the western classical tradition to gain a worldwide audience, was a serious film buff, watching about 300 a year in cinemas.

He composed scores for over 100, including Kurosawa’s Ran.

Here is a charming and important 45-minute documentary which momentarily restored my faith in BBC Radio 3 when it was broadcast a few years ago:

“Takemitsu’s music, philosophy and personality are explored alongside his attraction to the metaphor of the garden – ‘I design gardens with music’ [...].

“Including interviews with his daughter Maki, film directors Masahiro Shinoda and Peter Grilli, composer Dai Fujikura, conductor Oliver Knussen, pop musician David Sylvian, a gardener from the Hama Rikyu garden in Tokyo and a previously unheard interview with the composer himself, recorded in the early 1990s.”

Takemitsu was born in Tokyo in 1930. When he was a few weeks old, his father took the family to Manchuria, which the Japanese were about to invade. In 1937 he was sent back to Tokyo to live with relatives.

In 1944, while still a child, he was conscripted and posted to an army supply base. Here is that sweet enemy song composed by Jean Lenoir, Parlez-moi d’amour, sung by Lucienne Boyer, which one of the soldiers smuggled in and which so enchanted him.

He was self-taught. His 1957 Requiem for Strings got him noticed by Stravinsky. He was influenced by Debussy, Messiaen, Cage, pop, many elements in Japanese music. His whole career was in Japan.

1993 interview.

He wrote a Zen detective novel and published a cookbook.

I discovered his music when I was living in Tokyo (so was he), through the Varèse Sarabande CD of In an Autumn Garden for gagaku ensemble. (It would be hard to imagine anything further from Percy Grainger.) I followed that with November Steps, A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden and others.

The documentary begins and ends with one of his hits, the waltz from Hiroshi Teshigahara’s film Tanin no kao, The Face of Another. Here it is sung in German in the film. Here is the version for orchestra (the middle section is feeble).

Below, music for Rikyu, Teshigahara’s film about the sixteenth-century master of the Japanese tea ceremony, Sen no Rikyū. It is quoted in the documentary. Does it quote something European?

Richie on film

On Yasujirō Ozu (Richie only in part):

On Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (with others):

On Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar:

Donald Richie

Three gay Americans – Edward Seidensticker, Donald Keene and Donald Richie – were brought to Japan directly or indirectly by the Second World War and became its cultural interpeters to the English-speaking world for the next two generations.

Donald Richie has just died, aged 88. Edward Seidensticker died in 2007. Donald Keene is alive at 90.

They followed in an American tradition which included Lafcadio Hearn and Ruth Benedict.

I’m surprised at the lack of coverage of Richie’s death in the UK and American press. Here is the Guardian on him. Here is the New York Times. He was sometimes a fine writer of English. He was an interpreter of Japanese cinema, but he wrote about many things. Wikipedia has a list of his books. It’s best to begin with The Inland Sea. The œuvre is distilled in Arturo Silva, editor, The Donald Richie Reader, 50 Years of Writing on Japan, Berkeley, California, Stone Bridge Press, 2001.

Richie arrived in 1947 with the occupation forces. Guardian:

“Though recognised as the most important figure in introducing Japanese cinema to the west, Richie saw himself as a writer foremost and a film critic secondarily. His fictional work includes Memoirs of the Warrior Kumagai: A Historical Novel (1999) [set in the twelfth century], A View from the Chuo Line and Other Stories (2004) and Tokyo Nights (2005). His interests stretched to [...] the country’s literature (Japanese Literature Reviewed, 2003), modern fashion (The Image Factory, 2003) and travel. Twenty years after its publication, his personal travelogue The Inland Sea (1971) was turned into an award-winning documentary by Lucille Carra and Brian Cotnoir. Richie narrated the film himself.

[...]

“In the late 1940s, Richie’s articles on such topics as kabuki drama, ikebana (the art of flower arrangement) and Japanese festivals were published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes [my link] US military magazine, and marked the beginning of a lifelong exploration of the country’s culture and lifestyle. However, he always remained strongly aware of his intermediary status [as outsider].

“Upon returning to Japan in 1954, after taking a degree in English from Columbia University, he supported himself by teaching at Waseda University, in Tokyo, and writing film and literary criticism for the Japan Times, which he continued to do until suffering [...] a stroke in 2009. Over the decades he mingled with the novelists Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata, the actor Toshiro Mifune, the composer Toru Takemitsu, the Zen Buddhist scholar Daisetz Suzuki and another great western chronicler and translator of Japanese culture, Edward Seidensticker. Richie also played host to foreign guests including Truman Capote, Igor Stravinsky, W Somerset Maugham, Susan Sontag and Francis Ford Coppola. Yet, apart from his marriage to the American writer Mary Evans between 1961 and 1965, [...] Richie spent his time in Tokyo living alone.”

___

From A Taste of Japan, Kodansha International, 1985, quoted in The Donald Richie Reader:

“Whoever said Japanese cuisine was all presentation and no food was, of course, quite wrong, but one can at the same time understand how such a statement came to be made, particularly if one comes from a country where it is simply enough that food looks decent and tastes alright.

“Actually, the presentational ethos so much part of the Japanese cuisine continues right into the mouth. Is there any other cuisine, I wonder, which makes so much of texture, as divorced from taste? The West, of course, likes texture, but only when it is appropriate and never when it is tasteless. Consequently, the feel of the steak in the mouth, the touch of the clam on the tongue are part of the Western eating experience, but they are not enjoyed for their own sakes. Rather these sensations are enjoyed as harbingers of taste.

“Japan is, again, quite different. There are, in fact, not a few foods that are used for texture alone. Kannyaku (devil’s tongue jelly) has no taste to speak of though it has an unforgettable texture. Tororo (grated mountain yam) again has much more feel than flavor. Udo looks like and feels much like celery but it tastes of almost nothing at all. Fu, a form of wheat gluten, has no taste, except the flavor of whatever surrounds it. Yet all are prized Japanese foods.

“The reason is that the Japanese appreciate texture almost as much as they appreciate taste. The feel of the food, like its appearance, is of prime importance. The West, on the other hand, does not like extreme textures. Those few Westerners who do not like sushi or sashimi never say that it does not taste good. Rather, it is the texture they cannot stand – the very feel of the food.

“Not only do the Japanese like textures, they have turned their consideration into one more aesthetic system governing the cuisine. Textures, runs the unwritten rule, ought to be opposite, complementary. The hard and the soft, the crisp and the mealy, the resilient and the pliable. These all make good and interesting combinations and these, too, have their place within this presentational cuisine.

“There are other aesthetic considerations as well but this is a good place to stop and take stock of what we have so far observed. For review let us take a very simple dish, a kind of elemental snack, something to eat while drinking, a Japanese canapé. Let us see how it contrives to satisfy the aesthetic demands of Japanese cuisine.

“The dish is morokyu, baby cucumber with miso (bean paste, usually consumed with sake, more often nowadays with beer. Let us look at its qualities. First, the colors are right; fresh green and darkish red is considered a proper combination. Second, the portions are small enough so that their patterns can be appreciated – the dish consists of just one small cucumber cut up into sticks and a small mound of miso. Third, the arrangement and plate complement each other. The round mound of miso (yamamori) is considered operative, so the dish is served on a long, flat, narrow plate, thus emphasizing the very roundness of the bean paste. The length of the cucumber – and it is always cut along its length, never its width – stretches away from the miso and emphasizes the emptiness and again, by contrast, the fullness of the food. Fourth, the dish should be redolent of summer, since morokyu is mainly eaten in warm weather. So the dish should be untextured, unornamented, of a light color – white, pale blue, or a faint celadon green – thus emphasizing the seasonal nature of morokyu itself. Fifth, the textures are found to blend. The cool crispness of the cucumber complements perfectly the mealy, soft, and pungent miso.

“Let’s see, is there anything else? Oh, yes, almost forgot – the taste. Well, morokyu tastes very good indeed, the firm salty miso fitting and complementing the bland and watery flavor of the cucumber. But it is perhaps telling that, with so much going on in this most presentational of cuisines, it is the taste that one considers last. Perhaps it is also fitting. The taste of this cuisine lingers.

“Naturally, one cannot compare the taste of a few slices of fresh fish and almost raw vegetables with, let us say, one of the great machines of the French cuisines, all sauces and flavors. And yet, because it is made of so little, because there is so little on the plate, because what there is is so distinctly itself, Japanese cuisine makes an impression that is just as distinct as that of the French.

“This is because the taste is so fresh, because the taste is that of the food itself and not the taste of what has been done to it. The sudden freshness of Japanese cuisine captures attention as does a whisper in the midst of shouts. One detects, in presentation and in flavor, authenticity. Things are introduced and eaten in varying degrees of rawness, nothing is overcooked; one feels near the food in its natural state. Indeed, one is often very near it because so much Japanese food (cut bite-sized in the kitchen and arranged on plates before being brought out) is cooked or otherwise prepared at the table, right in front of you.

“Japanese cuisine is, finally, unique in its attitude toward food. This ritual, presentational cuisine, which so insists upon freshness and naturalness, rests upon a set of assumptions concerning food and its place in life. Eventually, the cuisine itself depends upon the Japanese attitude toward the environment, toward nature itself.

“These assumptions are many. First, one will have noticed that the insistence upon naturalness implies a somewhat greater respect for the food than is common in other cuisines. At the same time, however, it is also apparent that respect consists of doing something to present naturalness. In other words, in food as in landscape gardens and flower arrangements, the emphasis is on a presentation of the natural rather than the natural itself. It is not what nature has wrought that excites admiration but what man has wrought with what nature has wrought.”

Imperialists, westernisers, intelligentsias

Before the Industrial Revolution, Man had devastated patches of the biosphere. For instance, he had caused mountain-sides to be denuded of soil by felling the trees that previously had saved the soil from being washed away. Man had cut down forests faster than they could be replaced, and he had mined metals that were not replaceable at all. But, before he had harnessed the physical energy of inanimate nature in machines on the grand scale, Man had not had it in his power to damage and despoil the biosphere irremediably. Till then, the air and the ocean had been virtually infinite, and the supply of timber and metals had far exceeded Man’s capacity to use them up. When he had exhausted one mine and had felled one forest, there had always been other virgin mines and virgin forests still waiting to be exploited. By making the Industrial Revolution, Man exposed the biosphere, including Man himself, to a threat that had no precedent.

The Western peoples had begun to dominate the rest of mankind before the Industrial Revolution. In the sixteenth century the Spaniards had subjugated the Meso-American and Andean peoples and had annihilated their civilizations. In the course of the years 1757-64 the British East India Company had become the virtual sovereign of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. In 1799-1818 the British subjugated all the rest of the Indian subcontinent to the south-east of the River Sutlej. They had a free hand because they held the command of the sea and because in 1809 they made a treaty with Ranjit Singh, a Sikh empire-builder, in which the two parties accepted the line of the Sutlej as the boundary between their respective fields of conquest. In 1845-9 the British went on to conquer and annex the Sikh empire in the Punjab. Meanwhile, in 1768-74, Russia had defeated the Ottoman Empire decisively; in 1798 the French had temporarily occupied Egypt, and in 1830 they had started to conquer Algeria; in 1840 three Western powers and Russia had evicted the insubordinate Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, from Syria and Palestine. In 1839-42 the British had defeated China dramatically. In 1853 an American naval squadron compelled the Tokugawa Government of Japan to receive a visit from it. The Japanese recognized that they were powerless to prevent this unwelcome visit by force of arms.

These military successes of Western powers and of one Westernized Eastern Orthodox power, Russia, were won at the cost of occasional reverses. In the seventeenth century, the Portuguese were evicted forcibly from both Japan and Abyssinia. A British army that invaded Afghanistan in 1839-42 was annihilated. Yet by 1871 the Western powers and Russia were dominant throughout the World.

Even before the Industrial Revolution in Britain the Tsar of Russia, Peter the Great, had recognized that the only means by which a non-Western state could save itself from falling under Western domination was the creation of a new-model army on the pattern of the Western armies that were being created in Peter’s time, and Peter also saw that this Western-style army must be supported by a Western-style technology, economy, and administration. The signal military triumphs of the Western powers and of a Westernized Russia over non-Westernized states between 1757 and 1853 moved the rulers of some of the threatened states to do what Peter the Great had done.

Eminent examples of Westernizing statesmen in the first century after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain are Ranjit Singh (ruled 1799-1839), the founder of the Sikh successor-state, in the Punjab, of the Abdali Afghan Empire; Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman Padishah’s viceroy in Egypt from 1805 to 1848; the Ottoman Padishah Mahmud II (ruled 1808-39); King Mongkut of Thailand (ruled 1851-68); and the band of Japanese statesmen that, in the Emperor’s name, liquidated the Tokugawa regime and took the government of Japan into its own hands in 1868. These Westernizing statesmen have had a greater effect on the history of the Oikoumenê than any of their Western contemporaries. They have kept the West’s dominance within limits, and they have done this by propagating, in non-Western countries, the modern West’s way of life.

While the achievements of all the Westernizers mentioned above are remarkable, the Japanese makers of the Meiji Revolution were outstandingly successful. They themselves were members of the hitherto privileged, though impoverished, traditional military class, the samurai; the Tokugawa Shogunate succumbed after offering only a minimal resistance; a majority of the samurai acquiesced peacefully in the forfeiture of their privileges; a minority of them that rebelled in 1877 was easily defeated by a new Western-style Japanese conscript army composed of peasants who, before 1868, had been prohibited from bearing arms.

Muhammad Ali and Mahmud II did not have so smooth a start. Like Peter the Great, they found that they could not begin to build up a Western-style army till they had liquidated a traditional soldiery. Peter had massacred the Muscovite Streltsy (“Archers”) in 1698-9; Muhammad Ali massacred the Egyptian Mamluks in 1811, and Mahmud II massacred the Ottoman janizaries in 1826. The new Western-style armies all gave a good account of themselves in action. Muhammad Ali began building his new army in 1819 and a navy in 1821; in 1825 his well-drilled Egyptian peasant conscript troops almost succeeded in re-subjugating for his suzerain Mahmud II the valiant but undisciplined Greek insurgents. The Greeks were saved only by the intervention of France, Britain, and Russia, who destroyed the Egyptian and Turkish fleets in 1827 and compelled Muhammad Ali’s son Ibrahim to evacuate Greece in 1828. In 1833 Ibrahim conquered Syria and was only prevented from marching on Istanbul by Russia’s intervention on Mahmud II’s behalf. Muhammad Ali’s army was more than a match for Mahmud’s because he had been able to make an earlier start in building it up. Mahmud could not start before 1826, the year in which he destroyed the janizaries; yet, in the Russo-Turkish war of 1828-9, his new-model peasant conscript army put up a much stiffer resistance than the old Ottoman army in the Russo-Turkish wars of 1768-74, 1787-92, and 1806-12.

Ranjit Singh, like his contemporary Muhammad Ali, engaged former Napoleonic officers as instructors. The British succeeded in defeating the Western-trained Sikh army in 1845-6 and again in 1848-9, but these two wars cost the British a greater effort and heavier casualties than their previous conquest of the whole of India outside the Punjab.

Rulers who set out to Westernize non-Western countries could not do this solely with the aid of a few Western advisers and instructors. They had to discover or create, among their own subjects, a class of Western-educated natives who could deal with Westerners on more or less equal terms and could serve as intermediaries between the West and the still un-Westernized mass of their own fellow-countrymen. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Ottoman Government had found this newly needed class, ready to hand, among Greek Ottoman subjects who were acquainted with the West through having been educated there or having had commercial relations with Westerners. Peter the Great in Russia, Muhammad Ali in Egypt, and the British in India had to create the intermediary class that they, too, needed. In Russia this class came to be called the intelligentsia, a hybrid word composed of a French root and a Russian termination. During the years 1763-1871, an intelligentsia was called into existence in every country that either fell under Western rule or saved itself from suffering this fate by Westernizing itself sufficiently to succeed in maintaining its political independence. Like the industrial entrepreneurs and the wage-earning industrial workers who made their appearance in Britain in the course of this century, the non-Western intelligentsia was a new class, and by the 1970s it had made at least as great a mark on mankind’s history.

The intelligentsia was enlisted or created by governments to serve these governments’ purposes, but the intelligentsia soon realized that it held a key position in its own society, and in every case it eventually took an independent line. In 1821 the ex-Ottoman Greek Prince Alexander Ypsilantis’s invasion of the Ottoman Empire taught the Ottoman Government that its Greek intelligentsia was a broken reed. In 1825 a conspiracy of Western-educated Russian military officers against Tsar Nicholas I was defeated and was suppressed, but it was a portent of things to come, and this not only in Russia but in a number of other Westernizing countries.

To live between two worlds, which is an intelligentsia’s function, is a spiritual ordeal, and in Russia in the nineteenth century this ordeal evoked a literature that was not surpassed anywhere in the World in that age. The novels of Turgenev (1818-83), Dostoyevsky (1821-81), and Tolstoy (1828-1910) became the common treasure of all mankind.

See the eighth volume of the Study and the Reith lectures.

Vasily Timm, The Decembrist revolt, painted 1853, St Petersburg, Hermitage

The scampering boy in the foreground appears in so many works of this period and somewhat earlier. In British prints he sometimes rolls a hoop and is followed by a scampering dog.

Mankind and Mother Earth, OUP, 1976, posthumous

Cultural diversity in universal states

Owing to the tendency of the parochial states of a broken-down civilization in its Time of Troubles to sharpen their weapons in fratricidal conflicts with one another and to take advantage of this dearly bought increase in their military proficiency to conquer neighbouring societies with their left hands while continuing to fight one another with their right hands, most universal states have embraced not only a fringe of conquered barbarians but substantial slices of the domain of one or more alien civilizations as well. Some universal states, again, have been founded by alien empire-builders, and some have been the product of societies within whose bosoms there has already been some degree of cultural variety even on a reckoning which does not differentiate between march-men and the denizens of the interior of the same social world. [...]

No other universal state known to History appears to have been as homogeneous in culture as Japan under the Tokugawa régime. In “the Middle Empire” of Egypt, in which a fringe of barbarians on the Nubian glacis of its Theban march was one element of variation from the cultural norm of the Egyptiac Society of the age, there was another and more positive feature of cultural diversity in the Empire’s culturally Sumeric provinces and client states in Palestine and Coele Syria. As for “the New Empire”, which was a deliberate revival of the original Egyptiac universal state, it accentuated the pattern of its prototype by completing the assimilation of the barbarians of Nubia and by embracing the domain of an abortive First Syriac Civilization in Syria and North-Western Mesopotamia; and this culturally tripartite structure – in which the cultural domain of the civilization through whose disintegration the universal state has been brought into existence is flanked by culturally alien territories annexed at the expense of both barbarians and neighbouring civilizations – appears to be the standard type.

For example, in the Mauryan Empire, which was the original Indic universal state, an Indic cultural core was flanked by an alien province in the Panjab, which had been at least partially Syriacized during a previous period of Achaemenian rule after having been partially barbarized by an antecedent Völkerwanderung of Eurasian Nomads, while in other quarters the Mauryan Empire’s Indic core was flanked by ex-barbarian provinces in Southern India and possibly farther afield in both Ceylon and Khotan as well. The Guptan Empire, in which the Mauryan was eventually reintegrated, possessed an ex-barbarian fringe, with an alien Hellenic tincture, in the satrapy that had been founded by Saka war-bands in Gujerat and the North-Western Deccan, and a Hellenized fringe, with a Kushan barbarian dilution, in the territories under its suzerainty in the Panjab. In a Han Empire which was the Sinic universal state, the Sinic World proper was flanked by barbarian annexes in what was eventually to become Southern China, as well as on the Eurasian Steppe, and by an alien province in the Tarim Basin, where the Indic, Syriac, and Hellenic cultures had already met and mingled before this cultural corridor and crucible was annexed to the Han Empire for the first time in the second century B.C. and for the second time in the first century of the Christian Era. In the Roman Empire, which was the Hellenic universal state, a culturally Hellenic core in Western Anatolia, Continental European Greece, Sicily, and Italy, with outlying enclaves in Cilicia, in Syria, at Alexandria, and at Marseilles, was combined with the domain of the submerged Hittite Civilization in Eastern Anatolia, with the homelands of the Syriac and Egyptiac civilizations in Syria and in the Lower Nile Valley, with the colonial [Carthaginian] domain of the Syriac Civilization in North-West Africa, and with ex-barbarian hinterlands in North-West Africa and in Western and Central Europe as far as the left bank of the Rhine and the right bank of the Danube. [Footnote: Leaving out of account the late-acquired and early-lost Transdanubian bridgehead in Dacia.]

There are other cases in which this standard cultural pattern has been enriched by some additional element.

In the Muscovite Tsardom, a Russian Orthodox Christian core was flanked by a vast ex-barbarian annex extending northwards to the Arctic Ocean and eastwards eventually to the Pacific, and by an Iranic Muslim annex consisting of the sedentary Muslim peoples of the Volga Basin, the Urals, and Western Siberia. This pattern was afterwards complicated by Peter the Great’s deliberate substitution of a Westernized for a traditional Orthodox Christian cultural framework for the Russian Orthodox Christian universal state, and by the subsequent annexation of additional alien territories – at the expense of the Islamic World on the Eurasian Steppe and in the Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin, and at the expense of Western Christendom in the Baltic Provinces, Lithuania, Poland, and Finland.

In the Achaemenian Empire, which was the original Syriac universal state, there was an antecedent cultural diversity, within the Syriac core itself, between the Syrian creators of the Syriac Civilization and their Iranian converts, and a geographical gap between Syria and Iran that was still occupied by the dwindling domain of the gradually disappearing Babylonic culture. The Achaemenian Empire also embraced the domain of the submerged Hittite culture in Eastern Anatolia, the best part of the domain of the Egyptiac Civilization, fringes torn from the Hellenic and Indic worlds, and pockets of partially reclaimed barbarian highlanders and Eurasian Nomads. Moreover, after its life had been prematurely cut short by Alexander the Great, its work was carried on by his political successors, and especially by the Seleucidae, whom it would be more illuminating to describe as alien Hellenic successors of Cyrus and Darius. In the Arab Caliphate, in which the Achaemenian Empire was eventually reintegrated, the Syriac core – in which the earlier diversity between Syrian creators and Iranian converts had been replaced by a cleavage, along approximately the same geographical line, between ex-subjects of the Roman and ex-subjects of the Sasanian Empire – was united politically, by Arab barbarian empire-builders, with barbarian annexes – in North-West Africa, in the fastnesses of Daylam and Tabaristan between the Elburz Mountains and the Caspian Sea, and on the fringes of the Eurasian Steppe adjoining the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin – and with fragments of alien civilizations: a slice of the new-born Hindu World in Sind; the potential domain of an abortive Far Eastern Christian Civilization in the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin; an Orthodox Christian diaspora in Syria and Egypt; and a fossil of the by then elsewhere extinct Babylonic Society at Harran.

In the Mongol Empire, which was a universal state imposed by alien empire-builders on the main body of the Far Eastern Society in China, the annexes to a Chinese core were unusually extensive – including, as they did, the whole of the Eurasian Nomad World, the whole of Russian Orthodox Christendom, and the ex-Sasanian portion of a Syriac World which by that time was in extremis. The Mongols themselves were barbarians with a tincture of Far Eastern Christian culture. In the Manchu empire-builders, who subsequently repeated the Mongols’ performance on a less gigantic yet still imposing scale, there was the same tincture in a more diluted form; and the Chinese universal state in its Manchu avatar once again embraced, in addition to its Chinese core, a number of alien annexes: a “reservoir” of barbarians in the still unfelled backwoods and still virgin steppes of Manchuria, the whole of the Tantric Mahayanian Buddhist World in Tibet, Mongolia, and Zungaria, and the easternmost continental outposts of the Islamic World in the Tarim Basin, the north-western Chinese provinces of Kansu and Shansi, and the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan.

In the Ottoman Empire, which provided, or saddled, the main body of Orthodox Christendom with its universal state, the alien ʿOsmanli empire-builders united an Orthodox Christian core with a fringe of Western Christian territory in Hungary, with the whole of the Arabic Muslim World except Morocco, the Sudan, and South-Eastern Arabia, and with pockets of barbarians and semi-barbarians in Serbia, Bosnia, Albania, the Mani, the Caucasus, the Crimea, and on the Arabian Steppe. In the Mughal Empire, which was the Ottoman Empire’s counterpart in the Hindu World, the pattern was simpler, since, apart from the Iranic Muslim empire-builders and their co-religionists who had been deposited in the Hindu social environment by earlier waves of invasion from the Middle East and Central Asia [since the twelfth century], the Mughals’ only [sic] non-Hindu subjects were the Pathan barbarian highlanders on the north-western fringe of their dominions. When, however, the Mughal Rāj was replaced by a British Rāj, the pattern of the Hindu universal state became more complex; for the advent of a new band of alien empire-builders, which substituted a Western element for an Islamic at the political apex of the Hindu universal state, did not expel the Indian Muslims from the stage of Hindu history, but merely depressed their status to that of a numerically still formidable alien element in the Hindu internal proletariat, so that the Hindu universal state in its second phase combined elements drawn from two alien civilizations with a Pathan barbarian fringe and a Hindu core.

There had been other universal states in which, as in the Mughal Empire, the cultural pattern had been less complex than the standard type yet not so simple as that of the Tokugawa Shogunate.

The Empire of Sumer and Akkad, which was the Sumeric universal state, included no representatives of an alien civilization – unless Byblus and other Syrian coast-towns are to be counted as such in virtue of their tincture of Egyptiac culture. On the other hand, the Sumeric Civilization itself was represented in two varieties at least – a Sumero-Akkadian and an Elamite – and in no less than three if the domain of the Indus Culture should prove also to have been included in “the Empire of the Four Quarters of the World”. Moreover, the Babylonian Amorites, who eventually restored a polity that had been first constructed by the Sumerian Ur-Engur (alias Ur-Nammu) of Ur, were not merely marchmen but marchmen with a barbarian tinge. So, on a broader and a longer view, the cultural pattern of the Sumeric universal state proves to have been less homogeneous than might appear at first sight. “The thalassocracy of Minos”,  again, which was the Minoan universal state, probably included representatives of the continental Mycenaean variety of the Minoan culture as well as the creators of that culture in its Cretan homeland, even if it did not embrace any representatives of an alien civilization.

In the Central American World, two once distinct sister societies – the Yucatec Civilization and the Mexic – had not yet lost their distinctive characteristics, though they had already been brought together by force of Toltec arms, when the task, and prize, of establishing a Central American universal state was snatched, at the eleventh hour, out of the hands of barbarian Aztec empire-builders by Spanish representatives of an utterly alien Western Christendom. In the Andean World the Empire of the Incas, which was the Andean universal state, already included representatives of the Kara variety of the Andean culture [...] before the indigenous Incan empire-builders were suddenly and violently replaced by Spanish conquistadores from Western Christendom who turned the Andean World upside-down, with a vigour reminiscent of Alexander the Great’s, by proceeding to convert the indigenous population to Christianity and to variegate the social map by studding it with immigrant Spanish landlords and self-governing municipalities.

The Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy, which served as a carapace for Western Christendom against the assaults of the ʿOsmanlis, and which, seen from the south-east, wore the deceptive appearance of being a full-blown Western universal state, set itself, like the Tokugawa Shogunate, to achieve domestic cultural uniformity, but lacked both the ruthlessness and the insularity which, between them, enabled the Japanese isolationists for a time to put their policy into effect. In pursuing its aim of being totally Catholic, the Hapsburg Power did succeed, more or less, in extirpating Protestantism within its frontiers; but the very success of its stand, and eventual counter-attack, against the Ottoman embodiment of an Orthodox Christian universal state broke up the Danubian Monarchy’s hardly attained Catholic homogeneity by transferring to Hapsburg from Ottoman rule a stiff-necked minority of Hungarian Protestants and a host of Orthodox Christians of divers nationalities, most of whom proved unwilling to accept the ecclesiastical supremacy of Rome, even when the yoke was proffered in the easy form of Uniatism [union with Rome and retention of local rites], while, among those who did accept this relatively light burden, the rank and file remained nearer in heart and mind to their dissident Orthodox ex-co-religionists than they ever came to be to their fellow Catholics who were of the Latin Rite.

The [post-Assyrian] Neo-Babylonian Empire [or Chaldean Empire], which was the Babylonic universal state, similarly forfeited its cultural purity – and thereby worked unwittingly for the eventual extinction of the Babylonic Civilization itself – when Nebuchadnezzar conquered and annexed the homeland of the Syriac Civilization west of the Euphrates; and the impress of the indigenous Babylonic culture became progressively fainter as the domain which Nebuchadnezzar had bequeathed to a short line of native successors was incorporated first into the barbaro-Syriac Empire of the Achaemenids and then into the Hellenic Empire of the Seleucids.

Our survey has shown that, in the cultural composition of universal states, a high degree of diversity is the rule; and, in the light of this fact, it is evident that one effect of the “conductivity” of universal states is to carry farther, by less violent and less brutal means, that process of cultural pammixia that is started, in the antecedent Times of Troubles, by the atrocities that these bring in their train. The refugees, exiles, deportees, transported slaves, and other déracinés of the more cruel preceding age are followed up, under the milder régime of a universal state, by merchants, by professional soldiers, and by philosophic and religious missionaries and pilgrims who make their transit with less tribulation in a more genial social climate.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

The Mahayana and the masses

In [the] first chapter of its history in Japan [sixth century onwards] the Mahāyāna, while nominally professed by all subjects of the Emperor, was not in fact comprehended and assimilated by Japanese souls outside the narrow limits of a sophisticated court circle. The propagation of the Mahāyāna among the masses, in popular forms which the common man could understand, did not begin until after the onset of a “Time of Troubles” [and of a feudal age] in the latter part of the twelfth century of the Christian Era [...].

A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939 (footnote)

Five roads from Edo

The Five Routes (五街道, Gokaidō) were five roads (kaidō) that started at Nihonbashi (the Japan Bridge over the Nihonbashi River, a tributary of the Sumida River; a river named after a bridge) in Edo, ie Tokyo, during the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868).

The most important was the Tōkaidō, which linked Edo with Kyoto, the seat of the irrelevant Emperor.

Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa Shogun, started the construction of the roads. Post stations (宿場, shukuba) were set up so that travellers could rest and buy supplies. Enlarge map (will open in a separate window).

The Ōshū Kaidō had 27 stations, running north to Mutsu Province (now in Fukushima Prefecture, the area affected by the recent earthquake). Ōshū is another name for Mutsu.

The Nikkō Kaidō, Nikko Road, had 21 stations, connecting with Nikkō Tōshō-gū (now in Tochigi Prefecture).

The Kōshū Kaidō had 44 stations, connecting with Kai Province (now Yamanashi Prefecture) and ending at the Shimosuwa-shuku, the 29th stop on the Nakasendō. Kōshū is another name for Kai.

The Nakasendō (or Kisokaidō), Central Mountain Road (or Kiso Road), the longest, had 69 stations and ran through the centre of Honshu to Kyoto.

The Tōkaidō, East Sea Road, the most famous, had 53 stations and ran along the Pacific coast to Kyoto. Hiroshige made a series of prints of The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. (He made another of Famous Restaurants of the Eastern Capital.)

That makes 214 organised stops on a feudal Gokaido. The Japanese had no mental barriers to overcome when it came to organising railways and subway systems.

At the beginning of her authentically recorded history, Japan was a unitary empire, and in 1868 she became a unitary empire again. During the seven centuries ending in 1868 [from the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate, which lasted from 1185 to 1333, until the Meiji “restoration”] the political map of Japan was a mosaic of local states which had been held together during the latest two and a half of those centuries [Tokugawa shogunate, 1603-1868] under the hegemony of the most powerful of them, but, except for Sakai, these Japanese states had not been city-states. They had been feudal states, each of them ruled from a castle by a baron [daimyo] commanding a war-band of retainers [samurai].

 Tōkaidō:

In Japan the Great North-East Road, running up the south-eastern side of the Main Island [Honshu] from the civil capital at Kyoto in the interior to the successive military capitals at Kamakura and Yedo [Kyoto had also been the military capital under the Ashikaga shoguns, from 1337 to 1573], served first to secure the conquests made by the Far Eastern Civilization in Japan at the expense of the Ainu barbarians and afterwards to bring and keep Yamato [the area around Nara in which the Japanese state first emerged] under the domination of the Kwanto [Kantō] – as the new northern marches came to be called, after the name of the road by which they had been opened up. Under the Tokugawa régime, which provided the Far Eastern Society in Japan with its universal state, this trunk road and its branches ministered to the policy of the Shogun’s government at Yedo as an instrument not only for keeping an eye on the impotent Imperial Court at Kyoto, but also for the more formidable task of keeping to heel the feudal lords all over the Empire – especially those “Outside Lords” (Tozama) whose houses had once been rivals of the Tokugawa in the grim struggle for power at the climax of a Japanese Time of Troubles.

These daimyō were required by the Shogun to reside in Yedo, with their principal retainers, for so many months in the year, and to leave their wives and families there as hostages when they themselves were in residence in their fiefs, with the triple object of keeping them under supervision, loosening their personal hold on the fiefs from which they drew their political and military strength, and weakening them financially by putting them under social pressure to live, while in the capital, in a style beyond their means. [Footnote: See Sansom, G. B.: Japan, a Short Cultural History (London 1932, Cresset Press), p. 436; Sadler, A. L.: A Short History of Japan (Sydney 1946, Angus & Robertson), p. 217.] The migration, twice a year, of these feudal lords, with their retinues, between their fiefs in the provinces and their residences in the capital was one of the distinctive features of Japanese life in the Tokugawa Age; and the grand trunk road and its ramifications were the media of communication for their perpetual coming and going. While the Government were interested in seeing the means of communication kept up sufficiently well to serve this police purpose, they were equally interested in seeing to it that they should not be kept up well enough to tempt disaffected feudal forces into planning a convergent march on the capital; and they “deliberately refrained from building bridges and otherwise facilitating communications on the main lines of approach to Yedo”. [Footnote: Sansom, op. cit., p. 437. Perhaps their scholars had reminded them of the unintended and untoward service that the roads built by Ts’in She Hwang-ti had once rendered to the rebels who had overthrown his regime a few years after his death [...].]

He says that the Tōkaidō ran from Kyoto to Edo. It would be better to put it the other way round.

He is implying that a road existed between the Kanto and Yamato regions before the seventeenth century. As it must have done.

Tōkaidō, 1865, by Felice Beato

Daimyo residences, Edo, 1865 or ’66, demolished after the Shogunate ended; coloured print after Felice Beato

Hiroshige’s 55th print: the end of the Tōkaidō and arrival at Kyoto (the first shows the beginning of the journey at Nihonbashi)

Cities on the Move, OUP, 1970 (first quotation)

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

Hits of 1962

The first Beatles single and the first James Bond film – Love Me Do and Dr No – were released 50 years ago today in the UK.

More 1962:

The Brazilian Girl from Ipanema, Garota de Ipanema. Far too well known to post.

The cosmic Telstar (released August 17 in UK):

The Japanese Sukiyaki (not quite 1962: released Japan 1961, arrived UK and US 1963):

In Japan it was Ue o Muite Arukō, 上を向いて歩こう, I Will Walk Looking Up. Sukiyaki was a meaningless title used in the West. Sakamoto died on Japan Airlines Flight 123 on August 12 1985.

The Russian Midnight in Moscow (released USSR 1955-56, hit in the West 1961-62); the famous version in the West was an arrangement by Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen:

In Russia it was Podmoskovnye Vechera, Подмосковные вечера, Evenings in Moscow Oblast.

Here’s Van Cliburn doing it in Moscow:

Cliburn was the young Texan who won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958. It was one of the great cultural episodes of the Cold War, like Gould’s visit (1957), Nureyev’s defection (1961) and Stravinsky’s return visit (1962 again). Cliburn’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s first concerto and Rachmaninoff’s third gave him an eight-minute standing ovation. The judges asked permission of Khrushchev to give first prize to an American. “Is he the best?” Khrushchev asked. “Then give him the prize.” It was the year after Sputnik. Cliburn returned home to a ticker-tape parade in New York. This clip may be from his visit of 1962 for the second competition. The first prize then was shared by Vladimir Ashkenazy and John Ogdon.

The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition was held first in 1962 in Fort Worth.

The real Telstar (launched Cape Canaveral July 10; note mention of Toynbee):

The cup of Lethe

Love has [...] become the axle-tree of the vehicle of the Mahāyāna; and its conquest of Buddhism is more surprising than its outburst in Christianity; for the Christian religion of Love is in conscious and deliberate revolt against the Stoic philosophy of Detachment, whereas the Mahayanian religion of Love purports to be fulfilling the Hinayanian law and not destroying it – though, in Hinayanian eyes, the Mahayanian Bodhisattva is a Hinayanian arhat manqué [...]. The Bodhisattva is in fact an arhat who, at the moment when his age-long efforts to attain Detachment have brought him at last to the brink of Nirvāna, refrains from immediately entering into his rest through taking the final step that would precipitate him into the bliss of self-annihilation, and decides, instead, to postpone the consummation of his own spiritual career – and this, may be, for countless ages more – in order to devote himself to the self-imposed task of helping other beings, by communicating to them some of the light of his own enlightenment [...] (see Thomas, E. J.: The History of Buddhist Thought (London 1933, Kegan Paul), pp. 169-72). A follower of Christ will agree with the follower of the Mahāyāna that the Bodhisattva who, for love of his fellows, forbears to drink of the liberating elixir of Lethe when the cup is at his lips, is overcoming the Self in a far profounder sense than the arhat who exercises his duly earned right to consummate his own self-annihilation without being deterred by any pity for a groaning and travailing creation. The labour of Love to which the Bodhisattva dedicates himself is not unworthy to be compared with the self-sacrifice of Christ [...]. [...]

A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939 (footnote)

Draftee from Kamisuwa

This is in the Wikipedia article on the Japanese flag – Nisshōki, or Hinomaru – and needs to be seen fully enlarged (it should be bigger than a laptop screen). It was posted by Takato Marui from Osaka. The date is August 17 1939. It shows the “enrollment of my granduncle. The text of the sash says ‘Draftee from Kamisuwa (city)’.”

Marui has more on Flickr. Kami-Suwa is part of Suwa city in Nagano prefecture.

The flag on the right shows its conventional design from 1870 to the present. On the left is the variant sun disc with sixteen red rays in a Siemens star formation which was used by the Imperial Japanese Army from 1870 to 1945 and, in a different form, the Imperial Japanese Navy from 1889 to ’45. To the dismay of all other East Asian countries, it was re-adopted for the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force and the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force in ’54.

Where is the conscript off to? Obviously, China. Japan had been, as Toynbee would have said, intoxicated by a string of victories. It had defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and Russia in 1905 and had been on the Allied side in the First World War. In 1931, it had occupied Manchuria and from there, in 1937, it had launched a full-scale invasion of China. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45 was the largest-scale war in Asia in the twentieth century.

The Japanese had been drilled into a submission to ultranationalist causes. In war, their human feelings were suppressed further than war normally suppresses them. Spontaneity, and often even common sense, were sacrificed to strict performance of the soldier’s role. Relationship between the new ethos and the ethos of the samurai. Effect on soldiers of the propagation of myths of the Emperor and of Japan through State Shinto. The British who fought the Japanese in Burma and Malaya, or were enslaved by them, spoke more bitterly about their cruelty than their fellow-soldiers spoke about the Germans. They would not forgive them.

Despite the earlier victories – there would be many more in the early stages of the Second World War – there is a conspicuous look of strain on most of the faces in the photograph. And, in fact, in 1939, things were no longer going well in China. The war seemed to have reached a stalemate. The Japanese were losing many men. They were fighting the Russians at the Manchurian border as well. It was expensive. They had started to meet the resistance of the Kuomintang, who were headquartered at Chongqing, with the repeated indiscriminate bombing of Chinese cities. The photograph was taken just on the eve of their unprecedented defeats at Changsha and at Guangxi.

It isn’t polite to write about a photograph some of whose subjects might still be living, but Mr Marui has placed it in the public domain. There could be many reasons for the expression on their faces. Still, one might have expected such a send-off to be upbeat or at least merely solemn (the Japanese tended to look solemn in photographs); but the faces are sombre and troubled. Toynbee would have told us that they betray not only a response to immediate events, but a “schism in the soul”. It was an ordeal to live in a society in which so many were required to kill. State Shinto and its causes opposed the calls of Buddhism and of common kindness. Perhaps they knew unconsciously that they were heading towards disaster. But the main subject of the picture looks as if he is already fighting. I am not sure that I would like to have met Mr Marui’s granduncle in the Malayan jungle.

The Ashikaga Shogunate

Background in May 21 post.

An attempt to re-establish a civilian government [...] was made immediately after the downfall, in A.D. 1333, of the military regency which had been ruling Japan from Kamakura since A.D. 1184. [Footnote: See Sansom, G. B.: Japan, A Short Cultural History (London 1932, Cresset Press), p. 319: Murdoch, J.: A History of Japan, vol. i (London 1910, Kegan Paul), p. 539. The civilian Imperial Government at Kyoto had made one previous attempt, as early as A.D. 1221 [the Jōkyū War], to overthrow the Kamakura Bakufu (ibid., p. 442).] This rally, however, was abortive. Within five years the restored civilian régime had been superseded by a new military regency which was not the less true to type because it made the conciliatory gesture of establishing its official headquarters at Kyoto – the ancient Imperial Capital – instead of simply entrenching itself in the north-eastern stronghold from which Japan had been ruled for 150 years by Minamoto Yoritomo and his successors. This swift reversion to Militarism was the first symptom of a fresh rout. In the days of the Shoguns of the Ashikaga Dynasty who succeeded one another at Kyoto from A.D. 1338 until the last of the line was hustled off the stage by Hideyoshi in A.D. 1597, Japan suffered worse tribulations than she had known in the days of the previous line of Shoguns who had succeeded one another at Kamakura from 1184 to 1333.

The immediate sequel to the establishment of the Ashikaga Shogunate was the unprecedented scandal of a schism of the Imperial House itself into two rival courts. This enormity, which was a sin against religious ritual as well as a breach of political etiquette, had to be atoned for by fifty-five years of civil war (gerebatur A.D. 1337-92); and, even when the Ashikaga Shogunate – acting in the name of the court which was its puppet – eventually succeeded in suppressing the rival court which had refused to acknowledge its title, the tale of calamities did not cease. In the fifteenth century of the Christian Era a feudal anarchy which the Shoguns were impotent to reduce to order goaded an intolerably oppressed peasantry into a chronic state of revolt and stimulated the monasteries to militarize themselves – in flat defiance of all precepts of both the Greater and the Lesser Vehicle – as the only alternative to becoming the lay militarists’ victims. In the War of Onin (gerebatur A.D. 1467-77) the Imperial City of Kyoto was devastated by street-fighting between contending provincial forces who made the capital their arena. In the sixteenth century the Shoguns were overtaken by the ignominious fate which their predecessors had inflicted on the Emperors. The Shogun’s de jure powers were now exercised de facto by a Kwanryo [technically the governor of the eight provinces of the Kanto region]; and this travesty of government by the deputy of a deputy was perhaps the one thing worse than no government at all. [Footnote: The century between the opening of the War of Onin in A.D. 1467 and Nobunaga’s assumption of dictatorial powers de facto in A.D. 1568 seems to have been the worst phase of the whole of the Japanese “Time of Troubles” (Sansom, op. cit., pp. 394. 5 and 419-40).] [In the same way, the shikken regents had ruled on behalf of the Kamakura shoguns.] This was the state of misery to which Japan had been reduced by the second paroxysm of her “Time of Troubles” [the first was under the Kamakura shoguns] before her convulsed and writhing frame was forced into a strait-waistcoat by the successive exertions of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi and Ieyasu (militabant A.D. 1549-1615).

The ensuing Pax Tokugawica – the Universal State which ended a Time of Troubles which had begun, in Toynbee’s view, with the military revolutions of the twelfth century – was cut short by the second collision of Japan with the West.

Kamakura is northeast of Kyoto, but should it be described as a “north-eastern stronghold”?

Other footnotes in this passage give further references to Sansom and Murdoch.

A Study of History, Vol VI, OUP, 1939

A Japanese city-state

Japan [...] has produced only one solitary city-state, Sakai.

Sakai, near Osaka, was an autonomous city run by merchant citizens which flourished during the Muromachi or Ashikaga shogunate, 1337-1573.

Ashikaga is the name of the clan. Muromachi comes from the Muromachi Street of Kyoto where the third shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, established his residence.

At the beginning of her authentically recorded history, Japan was a unitary empire, and in 1868 she became a unitary empire again. During the seven centuries ending in 1868 [from the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate, which lasted from 1185 to 1333, until the Meiji “restoration”] the political map of Japan was a mosaic of local states which had been held together during the latest two and a half of those centuries [Tokugawa shogunate, 1603-1868] under the hegemony of the most powerful of them, but, except for Sakai, these Japanese states had not been city-states. They had been feudal states, each of them ruled from a castle by a baron [daimyo] commanding a war-band of retainers [samurai].

The shoguns were military dictators. Kamakura was the city, thirty miles southwest of Tokyo, where the Kamakura shoguns were based. The most decentralised of the shogunates had been the Muromachi.

The establishment of the shogunate or bakufu at the end of the twelfth century saw the beginning of a de facto samurai control of Japan which lasted for seven hundred years, until the Meiji Restoration.

So three shogunates:

Kamakura (at Kamakura) 1185-1333
Muromachi or Ashikaga (at Kyoto) 1337-1573
Tokugawa (at Edo) 1603-1868

Tokugawa Ieyasu, who founded the Tokugawa shogunate at Edo, was from the Matsudaira clan of daimyos in Mikawa province and gained supremacy at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600.

Toynbee seems to be implying that Edo was a feudal state, rather than merely the seat of the shogunate. No doubt it was: parts of Mikawa province (and others?) were administered directly by the bakufu. I assume that it also controlled directly some land around Edo.

Cities on the Move, OUP, 1970

The significant experience

In the encounter between the world and the West that has been going on by now for four or five hundred years, the world, not the West, is the party that, up to now, has had the significant experience. It has not been the West that has been hit by the world; it is the world that has been hit – and hit hard – by the West; and that is why, in the title of this book, the world has been put first.

The World and the West, OUP, 1953

The World and the West

This is from the first of the 1952 BBC radio Reith Lectures, given under the title The World and the West. I posted the fourth, The Far East and the West, here. Background on Reith Lectures here.

In writing both the world and the west into my title, and writing the two words in that order, I was doing both things deliberately, because I wanted to make two points that seem to me essential for an understanding of our subject. The first point is that the west has never been all of the world that matters. The west has not been the only actor on the stage of modern history even at the peak of the west’s power (and this peak has perhaps now already been passed). My second point is this: in the encounter between the world and the west that has been going on now for 400 or 500 years, the world, not the west, is the party that, up to now, has had the significant experience. It has not been the west that has been hit by the world; it is the world that has been hit – and hit hard – by the west; and that is why, in my title, I have put the world first.

Let us try, for a few minutes, to slip out of our native western skins and look at this encounter between the world and the west through the eyes of the great non-western majority of mankind. Different though the non-western peoples of the world may be from one another in race, language, civilisation, and religion, if we ask them their opinion of the west, we shall hear them all giving us the same answer: Russians, Moslems, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, and all the rest. The west, they will tell us, has been the arch-aggressor of modern times, and each will have their own experience of western aggression to bring up against us. The Russians will remind us that their country has been invaded by western armies overland in 1941, 1915, 1812, 1709, and 1610; the peoples of Africa and Asia will remind us that western missionaries, traders, and soldiers from across the sea have been pushing into their countries from the coasts since the fifteenth century. The Asians will also remind us that, within the same period, the westerners have occupied the lion’s share of the world’s last vacant lands in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South and East Africa. The Africans will remind us that they were enslaved and deported across the Atlantic in order to serve the European colonisers of the Americas as living tools to minister to their western masters’ greed for wealth. The descendants of the aboriginal population of North America will remind us that their ancestors were swept aside to make room for the west European intruders and for their African slaves.

This indictment will surprise, shock, grieve, and perhaps even outrage most of us westerners today. Dutch westerners are conscious of having evacuated Indonesia, and British westerners of having evacuated India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon, since 1945.

That was almost all the imperial evacuation that had happened by 1952, except for the abandonment of concessions in China. Hard as it is to believe now, the British Empire handed over no territory (except the Anglo-Egyptian “condominium”, Sudan; I don’t count Palestine or the military base at Suez) between the end of the Raj on August 15 1947 and the independence of Ghana on March 6 1957. 1952 was also a year of direct British and American interference in the internal affairs of Iran.

British westerners have no aggressive war on their consciences since the South African war of 1899-1902, and American westerners none since the Spanish-American war of 1898. We forget all too easily that the Germans, who attacked their neighbours, including Russia, in the First World War and again in the Second World War, are westerners too, and that the Russians, Asians, and Africans do not draw fine distinctions between different hordes of “Franks” – which is the world’s common name for westerners in the mass. “When the world passes judgment, it can be sure of having the last word”, according to a well-known Latin proverb. And certainly the world’s judgment on the west does seem to be justified over a period of about four and a half centuries ending in 1945. In the world’s experience of the west during all that time, the west has been the aggressor on the whole; and, if the tables are being turned on the west by Russia and China today, this is a new chapter of the story which did not begin until after the end of the Second World War. The west’s alarm and anger at recent acts of Russian and Chinese aggression at the west’s expense are evidence that, for westerners, it is today still a strange experience to be suffering at the hands of the world what the world has been suffering at western hands for a number of centuries past.

The lectures introduced ideas which would be developed in the eighth volume of the Study.

In the encounter between the world and the west that has been going on now for 400 or 500 years, the world, not the west [...], has had the significant experience

is the most striking sentence. These views were shocking, as he says, to many listeners in 1952. They seemed defeatist.

I have taken this from a transcript on the BBC website, not from the printed book: there may be differences. The transcript probably shows what was printed in The Listener. I have made the use of upper case in references to world wars consistent.

The lectures were published in book form as

The World and the West, OUP, 1953

Revolving restaurants

A list.

The one at the New Otani in Tokyo

Salvation and the Mediterranean diet

How can a sacrament that is thus indissolubly associated with the regional diet of Homo Mediterraneus be expected to serve as a means of grace for the rice-eating majority of Mankind, in continents where the vine does not grow, and in archipelagos that know no name for bread? [Footnote: The writer of this Study vividly remembers how forcibly his own provincialism was borne in upon him when – landing in Japan in the autumn of A.D. 1929, and making his way up country from Nara to Koya San, the Mahayanian Olympus – he found himself compelled to ask for an unobtainable form of food in Portuguese, because, in the Japanese language, there was no indigenous word for “bread”.]

The loan word was and is pan (パン), from pão. Portuguese wine was chintashu (珍陀酒), combining tinto, red, whence chinta, and shu (酒), liquor. Nowadays the word is wain (ワイン). (There were no olives in Japan either, or tomatoes.) Rice is the staple food of about half the world’s population, but perhaps not of the majority.

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

No surrender: Japanese holdouts

List at http://www.wanpela.com.

Hiroo Onoda, who now lives in Brazil

Modern towns

Tyler Brûlé recently.

Excessive veneration of social media by entities such as the BBC and the World Economic Forum:

“Why should it be only Facebook and Twitter that get namechecked as vehicles where people make statements or do stupid things? Why should all things digital get so much attention? What happened to people just ‘making a comment’? Do we really care where they SMS-ed it or tweeted it? If companies such as Bic, Pentel, Conqueror, FedEx and Panasonic were all more aggressive they would demand that newsreaders, copy editors and announcers stop plugging Twitter and Facebook or else ensure their brands also get a mention in relation to public statements.

“‘The politician wrote in Bic blue ink on Conqueror 100 gramme paper that he’s a confirmed family man and the name-calling must stop.’ Or ‘in a telephone conference over Deutsche Telekom landline the footballer explained …’ Anyway, you get the idea.” (FT, May 27.)

Brûlé occasionally makes serious points. This is the man who writes about Brand Nippon and Brand Beirut. (I never thought Wallpaper was the best-looking magazine ever. And why does Monocle have the fogeyish name?)

He has some stunningly superficial ideas which have a grain of truth in them. The British economy would get a boost if water-pressure was stronger and people had proper showers before going to work. But he is genuinely interested in urban planning and in public services, for old people as well as for young.

His world is essentially Canada, northern Europe, Switzerland and Japan. In his cities people lead modern lives. Monocle contains articles, never long (there are many photographs, but none full-page), about coffee-shops in Kagoshima, waste disposal in Wuhan and policemen in Porto. The first issue (in 2007) had articles on the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, Chinese investment in Africa (could that have been fresh then?), the best Portuguese-language Sunday newspapers. Monocle is staid. It is not about popular culture.

City liveability ranking in the current issue:

1) Helsinki, 2) Zürich, 3) Copenhagen, 4) Munich, 5) Melbourne, 6) Vienna, 7) Sydney, 8) Berlin, 9) Tokyo, 10) Madrid, 11) Stockholm, 12) Paris, 13) Auckland, 14) Barcelona, 15) Singapore, 16) Fukuoka, 17) Hong Kong, 18) Portland, 19) Honolulu, 20) Vancouver, 21) Kyoto, 22) Hamburg, 23) Lisbon, 24) Montréal, 25) Seattle.

A very Brûlé list. Last year the winner was Munich. BMW designer’s comment in Brûlé’s Munich podcast: (paraphasing) “If you want to attract creative people, the city must give them energy, not take it away.” That’s the difference between exciting and exhausting. It’s received wisdom in the English-speaking world that German cities are dull. They were all bombed and the architecture of their rebuilding, if it wasn’t replication, took nothing that was interesting from the German past, a past about which Germans were anyway uncertain, and much from the dullest tendencies of the mid-twentieth century. The socialist architecture of the ’20s could be depressing as well, but its best German elements could have been reused.

But the post-war buildings have mellowed. Our eyes have periodised them. They have been discovered to have their own style after all. They have been broken up and set off by newer buildings. Trees have been planted or have matured. Early and horrible Fussgängerzonen have been replaced by better ones. And a few large towns survived, such as Heidelberg.

“The English, for example, like nothing more than having a go at German cities, beating them up for being boring while failing to mention that it’s far easier and cheaper to get a good glass of wine at 2am, secure a palatial apartment and get around by bike in Berlin than it is in London.” (FT, June 10.)

Germans, on the whole, live in bigger spaces than English people do. Even if it’s a boring flat, it will have a cellar space that exceeds the total storage space of an English flat. Houses in the suburbs are big. Look at the size of German farmhouses.

“When I first travelled to South Korea seven years ago I found it grey, a little grumpy and largely unattractive. In less than a decade it’s fashioned itself into a major passenger and logistics hub, is home to some of the best hotels in the world and crackles around the clock. Korea Inc’s executives want to work and learn from the best and leaders at both the local and national level have embraced the liveability mantra to retain and attract talent.

“As I crossed Oxford Street on Saturday afternoon there was little of this sort of crackle – just a lot of crack. Up and down the street tummies were hanging out over jeans, food was being stuffed into faces, and bums were falling out of trousers. Was this a nation at rest and play on a gorgeous spring day? Perhaps. Was this also a fleeting snapshot of a nation that’s lost its dignity and sense of pride? For sure.” (FT, May 1 2010.)

Did it take a big airport and expensive hotels to make Brûlé like Seoul? I first went there in 1984 and loved it then. Occasionally you have moments when you connect with a place so much that you realise you are slipping into a life there, but life pulls you out. It was a rough place, still traumatised by the Korean War. The nightly curfew in the city had only been lifted in the previous year. Nobody wore jeans. Few people knew any English (even the word hello). I haven’t been back in the last seven years, but I’m sure I’d still love it. The Korean countryside is also wonderful. I am surprised Seoul does not get into his liveable cities list.

But his point about London touches on something true, and troubling. I walked though Covent Garden and Soho yesterday evening and I have never seen it look less attractive, further removed from any sort of urban douceur de vie. This was not even one hundredth of one per cent of what city life should be like. In ordinary liveability indeces, London always scores badly, even though it has so many points in its favour. On the other hand, it is the city of pageantry, and the city of choice of the world’s rich, nearly all of whom have a stake in it.

The causes of this dichotomy could take a book to analyse. London is not the capital of a republic and doesn’t feel like one. And what people enjoy in London is not, for the most part, the achievement of this generation or the previous one or the one before that. It’s something inherited. Other cities are improving themselves now, partly through having properly-empowered mayors.

Lance Knobel (blogrolled here) wants the FT to sack Brûlé, I suppose on grounds of shallowness, although he shares many of his interests: urban planning and progressive local government and everything that they entail, and industrial design.

I share Brûlé’s scepticism about magazines on the iPad. They look wonderful, but I suspect the renewal rates will be low. And I love Kindle for books (with reservations that could fill another post).

Most Japanese love London. If you ask them what they don’t like, you will get different answers. It’s expensive: most insist it is compared to legendarily-expensive Tokyo, the myth of whose expensiveness has been generated by Americans who don’t know what to look for. The Internet is slow. Public transport is still unreliable. People don’t recycle much. The thing they will agree on is Wagamama: no Japanese person will enter it knowingly more than once. It stands for a whole class of ersatz Asian food served in places (Yo! Sushi is another) which would not survive a day in Japan.

Posts here:

China and Japan (about cities of the whole and cities of parts)

London in 1927

Tokyo in the spring

Tyler Brûlé, FT, April 15, a corrective to gloomier accounts. Brûlé reads like a modern, global version of a between-the-wars correspondent from the Riviera.

Looting and spitting

You can’t imagine the Japanese looting. Or spitting.

A late antique tsunami

Adrian Murdoch quotes Ammianus Marcellinus’s description of the tsunami which hit Alexandria, the Nile Delta and Libya in AD 365 after an earthquake near Crete.

“Huge ships, thrust out by the mad blasts, perched on the roofs of houses [...] at Alexandria.”

The most powerful earthquake ever recorded, off southern Chile on May 22 1960, caused a tsunami which killed 140 people in Japan.

Fishing boat at Ofunato, Iwate prefecture in 1960 (Ofunato was entirely destroyed in the recent Sendai earthquake)

The 1933 Sanriku earthquake, conversely, had been off Iwate prefecture and caused a tsunami which reached Chile.

The recent Sendai earthquake, the most powerful ever recorded in Japan, also caused a tsunami which reached Chile.

Otsuchi, Iwate prefecture in 2011

Wikipedia on the 365 tsunami: “The sophist Libanius and the church historian Sozomenus appear to present it as either divine sorrow or wrath – depending on their viewpoint – for the death of emperor Julian.”

Wikipedia list of historical tsunamis.

Earthquakes in Japan

Bombing Japan

Yokohama 1923

Earthquakes with 1,000 or more casualties since 1900. Richter scale unless otherwise stated.

September 1 1923 – Great Kanto – 8.3

Epicentre beneath Izu Oshima island, Sagami Bay, Honshu. Struck Kanto plain at 11:58 am. Devastated Tokyo and Yokohama and surrounding prefectures of Chiba, Kanagawa and Shizuoka. 100,000 to 142,000 deaths, mostly in fires. Latter figure including 40,000 missing and presumed dead.

Koreans, Chinese and Okinawans were made scapegoats. Koreans were accused of arson, looting and well-poisoning: thousands were murdered. Japanese used the shibboleth ba bi bu be bo (ばびぶべぼ) to distinguish them from the ruling race, as the Koreans would say pa, pi, pu, pe, po.

Wikipedia list of shibboleths (fascinating).

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March 27 1927 – Kita Tango – 7.6

Epicentre in Tango peninsula, Sea of Japan, Honshu, Kansai region (regions are not official administrative units), Kyoto prefecture. Destroyed almost all houses in Mineyama (now part of Kyotango). Felt in Tokyo and Kagoshima. 3,020 deaths.

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March 2 1933 – Sanriku – 8.4 (moment magnitude scale)

Epicentre in Pacific 290 kilometres east of Kamaishi, Honshu, Tohoku region, Iwate prefecture. Most damage caused by subsequent tsunami, to towns on Sanriku coast. Over 3,000 deaths.

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September 10 1943 – Tottori – 7.2

Epicentre in Sea of Japan off Ketaka, now part of Tottori city, Honshu. Felt in Tottori prefecture and 170 kilometres away at Okayama on the Inland Sea. 1,083 deaths. Although it occurred during the war, information was uncensored and relief volunteers and supplies came from many parts of the Japanese empire, including Manchukuo.

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December 7 1944 – Tonankai – 8.1

Epicentre in Pacific about 20 kilometres off Shima Peninsula, Honshu, Kansai region, eastern Mie prefecture. 1,000 deaths, many from tsunami.

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January 13 1945 – Mikawa – 6.0

Epicentre in Pacific, Mikawa Bay, Honshu, off Kansai region and Mie and Aichi prefectures, at depth of eleven kilometres. 6.0 reading was for Tsu in Mie. 1,180 dead, 1,126 missing. Information was censored, which contributed to large number of deaths.

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December 20 1946 – Nankaido – 8.1

Epicentre in Pacific, Nankai Trough, off Honshu. Felt in Nankaido region and less strongly from Northern Honshu to Kyushu. 1,362 deaths.

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June 28 1948 – Fukui – 7.1

Epicentre near Maruoka, on Sea of Japan, Honshu, Fukui prefecture. Felt most strongly in Fukui city. 3,769 deaths.

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January 17 1995 – Great Hanshin – 6.8 (moment magnitude scale)

Epicentre at northern end of Awaji island, between Honshu and Shikoku. Felt most strongly in Kobe and southern part of Hyogo prefecture, Kansai region. Name Hanshin comes from the kanji used to write the names of Osaka and Kobe. 6,434 deaths.

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March 11 2011 – Great Sendai – 8.9

Strongest in recorded Japanese history. Epicentre in Pacific, off Oshika peninsula, northeastern Honshu northeast of Sendai, east coast of Tohoku region, Miyagi prefecture. Created tsunamis. Total deaths not yet known, but will be fewer than Kanto/Tokyo (of course) and more than Hanshin/Kobe.

Images at LA Times.

All the earthquakes except Sanriku and Sendai mainly affected the main island, Honshu, at or south of Tokyo. Sanriku and Sendai mainly affected it north of Tokyo.

New building standards prevented several other strong post-1948 earthquakes from bringing heavier loss of life.

Kobe 1995

 

Bombing Japan

Tokyo after March 9-10 1945

The first American air raid on Japan took place on April 18 1942, in retaliation for Pearl Harbor: the Doolittle Raid on military and industrial targets in Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka.

America resumed bombing in June 1944 and continued until August 1945. From February 1945, large areas of cities were firebombed.

Night of February 24-25 1945 – Tokyo firebombing.

Night of March 9-10 1945 – extensive Tokyo firebombing. 80-100,000 deaths, the largest number before Hiroshima.

Night of March 11-12 1945 – Nagoya firebombing.

Night of March 13-14 1945 – Osaka firebombing.

Night of March 16-17 1945 – Kobe firebombing.

Night of March 18-19 1945 – further Nagoya firebombing.

That marked the end of the first campaign.

Additional raids on cities, including smaller cities, took place up to August. Taking all non-nuclear bombing during the war into account, the percentages of the areas of Japanese cities that were destroyed were:

Toyama 99

Fukui 86

Tokushima 85.2

Fukuyama 80.9

Kofu 78.6

Kuwana 75

Hitachi 72

Nara 69.3

Tsu 69.3

Okayama 68.9

Mito 68.9

Takamatsu 67.5

Shizuoka 66.1

Tsuruga 65.1

Hachioji 65

Nagaoka 64.9

Maebashi 64.2

Matsuyama 64

Imabari 63.9

Gifu 63.6

Kagoshima 63.4

Toyohashi 61.9

Hamamatsu 60.3

Yokohama 58

Isesaki 56.7

Ichinomiya 56.3

Kobe 55.7

Kochi 55.2

Kumagaya 55.1

Tokyo 51

Akashi 50.2

Wakayama 50

Himeji 49.4

Hiratsuka 48.4

Tokuyama 48.3

Sakai 48.2

Saga 44.2

Choshi 44.2

Utsunomiya 43.7

Numazu 42.3

Shimizu 42

Kure 41.9

Sasebo 41.4

Ujiyamada 41.3

Chiba 41

Nagoya 40

Ogaki 39.5

Shimonoseki 37.6

Kawasaki 36.2

Omuta 35.8

Osaka 35.1

Yokkaichi 33.6

Omura 33.1

Okazaki 32.2

Kumamoto 31.2

Aomori 30

Oita 28.2

Miyakonojo 26.5

Miyazaki 26.1

Nobeoka 25.2

Fukuoka 24.1

Moji 23.3

Sendai 21.9

Yahata 21.2

Yawata 21

Ube 20.7

Amagasaki 18.9

Nishinomiya 11.9

Source, not in this order: Wikipedia.

YouTube comment on this clip:

“It is completely true to say that the Americans had a policy of using precision bombing in Europe and yet firebombed Japan. That is a historical fact. It is also true that on a few occasions – particularly towards the end of the war – the Americans bombed cities in Germany like Dresden and Berlin in support of the British. But that caused considerable disquiet in the American ranks and was never the general policy as it was in Japan.”

Is this too kind? Britain, at least, began area bombing Germany in early 1942. Bombing was supposed to undermine the morale of the civilian population and in particular of the industrial workers. Factories were no longer the main targets. Hamburg was firebombed in 1943.

Morning of August 6 1945 – enriched uranium nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. 90% of city’s area destroyed. 140,000 deaths by end of 1945.

Morning of August 9 1945 – plutonium core nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki. 45% of city’s area destroyed. 80,000 deaths by end of 1945.

Both cities had been spared in earlier raids to allow a pristine environment for measurement of the damage caused by the atomic bomb.

Singing alone in Japan

http://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2011/03/06

Russian ordeals

A Tsardom that had had the wisdom to take the sting out of the Russian people’s sufferings, defeat, and humiliation in the Crimean War by conceding the reforms of the eighteen-sixties had paid with its life for its stiff-neckedness in refusing to forestall trouble once again by paying a corresponding ransom for subsequent military reverses. The sufferings, defeat, and humiliation that the Tsardom had brought upon the Russian people by an imperialistic policy in Korea that had precipitated the Russo-Japanese War of A.D. 1904-5 had provoked the abortive Russian Revolution of A.D. 1905; the far worse tribulations of the General War of A.D. 1914 had cost the Tsardom its existence in the double revolution of A.D. 1917; and the breakdown of the Russian people’s endurance on that occasion was noteworthy, considering that in A.D. 1917 the Russian peasant army had been fighting in self-defence against invading armies on Russian soil – a posture in which it had shown itself indomitable in A.D. 1812 and in which it was to display the same invincibility in A.D. 1941-4.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954

From Waterloo to Mons

The Walloon towns of Waterloo and Mons are less than thirty miles away from each other.

Anyone in any country affected by the First World War who was alive and grown-up at the time of its outbreak is likely to have felt that this was an epoch-making event. Someone who was just grown-up, and whose country was England, will have been particularly sensitive to this feeling. Like his elders, he could look back, with a grown-up participant’s eyes, on the life of a period that had now been abruptly and unexpectedly brought to an end; and, for English people, this period had been running, without any dramatic break, for almost twice as long as for the people of most other countries. For the English, August 1914 spelled the sudden end of a period of peace that they had been enjoying by then for all but a hundred years, since the last shot fired at the Battle of Waterloo. The breaches in this English century of peace had been minor disturbances that had not interrupted the even tenor of England’s life. On the other hand, in most other parts of the World there had been a decisive break, for good or evil, about half-way through that century’s course. France had suffered the débâcle and the Commune in the years 1870-1. The same years had seen the completion of the political unification of Italy and of Germany. For Italy this revolutionary change had taken twelve years (1859-70) and for Germany eight (1864-71). Canada, too, had attained political unity in a self-governing federation in 1867. The United States’ unity had been preserved, but its internal balance of power had been at the same time revolutionized, in the Civil War of 1861-5, the greatest, bloodiest, and most devastating war of any in the World between 1815 and 1914. In Russia a new age had opened with the liberation of the serfs in 1861 and the accompanying reforms of other institutions. India had been through the shattering experience of the Mutiny of 1857, and China through the shattering experience of her war with Great Britain and France in 1858-60, which finally brought home to her a realization of her impotence in face of Western military power. These upheavals all round England had either left her untouched or had failed to touch her to the quick. And this exemption from the World’s common lot in the eighteen-sixties and seventies made the shock of 1914 particularly severe for her. Having been born in England in 1889, I felt this shock in its full force, and it must have been affecting my outlook and my work continuously and profoundly ever since.

The Meiji revolution in Japan (1867) should have been mentioned here.

“A” Company of the 4th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers (9th Brigade, 3rd Division) on August 22, 1914, resting in the square at Mons, the day before the Battle of Mons. Shortly after this picture was taken the Company moved into position at Nimy on the bank of the Mons-Condé Canal.

A Study of History, Vol XII: Reconsiderations, OUP, 1961

The Japanese and the Mongols

The great Mongol invasion of Japan in A.D. 1281 [footnote] was such an ignominious failure that it was never repeated; and the Japanese feat of driving into the sea the hitherto invincible conquerors of the Continent must have been as stimulating a triumph as the Athenians’ victory over the Persians at Marathon.

To what are we to attribute this Japanese triumph over a Power which shattered every other adversary that it encountered, with the single exception of the Egyptian Mamlūks? No doubt the Japanese benefited by their insularity; for the Mongols were as much out of their element on the sea as they were at home on the Steppe; and they cannot have been at their best in a fiercely contested landing operation in which their wonderful light cavalry had to fight as an awkward squad of horse-marines. In this amphibious warfare the Japanese long-bowmen were at a still greater advantage over their opponents than the English bowmen were at Crécy or Poictiers (sic). Yet when we have allowed for these points of military technique, we shall have to admit that they must have been of less importance than the psychological forces. For the Mongol horsemen who had penetrated the Russian forests and had stormed the strongholds of “the Old Man of the Mountain” in the fastnesses of the Elbrūz might have subdued the Japanese Archipelago by the sheer terror of their name if they had not met their military match in their Japanese opponents.

The fundamental reason why the Japanese beat the Mongols in A.D. 1281 was that, in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era, the Japanese were as fine soldiers as the Mongols themselves; and the school in which these Japanese warriors had been trained was the school of fratricidal warfare. It was in the course of a hundred years of suicidal struggles with one another on their native soil that the Japanese had acquired the prowess to which the Mongol invaders now succumbed [...].

Footnote:

In this invasion [of 1281] Japan was attacked by a converging movement of Mongol armadas from Korea and from China, and the Mongols were able to throw into the enterprise the forces which had been liberated by the completion of their conquest of South China in the preceding year. Hence the Mongol invasion of Japan in A.D. 1281 was a more formidable affair than the previous reconnaissance in A.D. 1274.

“The Old Man of the Mountain” refers to Hassan-i Sabbāh, an Assassin whose successors had held out in the Alborz mountains of northern Persia in the fortress of Alamut.

The failure of the second invasion was assisted by the destruction of much of the Mongol fleet off Kyushu by the typhoon which became known as the kamikaze or divine wind.

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939

New Year’s Day, Japan 1946

The Emperor Hirohito did not seem to have forfeited his hold on the allegiance of the Japanese people by his public declaration to them, on New Year’s Day 1946, that he was not a god but a man. [Footnote: In his rescript of that date, the Emperor Hirohito declared: “The ties between us and our people have always stood upon mutual trust and affection. They do not depend upon mere legends and myths. They are not predicated on the false conception that the Emperor is divine and that the Japanese people are superior to other races and fated to rule the World” (English text published in The New York Times, 1st January, 1946).]

A Study of History, Vol VII, OUP, 1954

The Sea of Japan

… and its five straits.

View at full size. Shikkoku should have one k. Wikimedia Commons.

East Asia

Wintry Groves and Layered Banks by Dong Yuan, lived Southern Tang Kingdom, China, c 934-c 962, ink and colour on silk scroll, Kurokawa Institute, Kobe, Japan

Till the 19th century of the Christian era, Chinese culture was the formative influence throughout Eastern Asia. Indian culture, which has been disseminated in Eastern Asia by the Indian religion or philosophy of Buddhism, reached Korea, Japan, and Vietnam via China and in forms in which it had already been given a Chinese impress.

No mention of Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia. They, along with Sri Lanka and, for a time, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra and Java, adopted forms of Buddhism which came from India directly. The prevailing one was the southern form which Toynbee calls the Hinayana, an obsolete term, and we call Theravada (which is not quite synonymous with Hinayana).

Hinduism also reached parts of southeast Asia from India – eg kingdom of Majapahit (1293-1527) on Java.

Northern Buddhism is the Mahayana, a term still used. The Mahayana travelled to China and beyond from India via Central Asia/Xinjiang. Tibetan Buddhism is part of the Mahayana. Some of the philosophical differences between the two schools are mentioned here.

The sacred texts of Theravada Buddhism are written in Pali, which is closely related to Sanskrit and to the language the Buddha spoke. The sacred texts of the Mahayana are translated from Sanskrit into local languages.

For this reason, the present book [Half the World, a coffee-table book edited by Toynbee, published in 1973] starts by giving an account of Chinese culture, including Chinese Buddhism, in the first six chapters. The Chinese characters (Chapter I) [Signs and Meanings, E Glahn] are something more than a means of communication; they are the expression of an attitude to life, and they have carried this attitude with them into other East Asian countries in so far as they have been adopted there too. The main thread of East Asian history was the political history of China (Chapter II) [“The Middle Kingdom”, DC Twitchett] down to China’s sudden catastrophic demotion, in and after the Anglo-Chinese War of 1839-42, from being “the Middle Kingdom” of Eastern Asia to being a “native state” at the mercy of the Western powers, of Russia, and eventually also of China’s own former cultural satellite, Japan. [...]

China’s northern neighbours, before the eastward expansion of Russia to the East Asian shores of the Pacific Ocean, were the nomadic pastoral peoples of the Eurasian steppes (Chapter III) [Beyond the Wall, Owen Lattimore]. Pastoral nomadism is now dying out everywhere, but, for about 4,000 years, it was one of the forces that shaped the history of the Old World. The nomads were the first aliens with a distinctively different culture whom the Chinese encountered, and they were a formidable problem for China till as recently as the 18th century. China’s relations with the nomads have a longer history than her relations with India, and a very much longer history than her relations with the West.

Human life is many-sided, but our various activities are interrelated. In order to understand anyone of them, we have to take a synoptic view of them all. We have to take account of philosophy and religion and science and technology and literature and visual art, besides politics. In this book, visual art is presented in the illustrations, but the other non-political aspects of Chinese culture are discussed in the text (Chapters IV-VI) [The Path to Wisdom, Wing-Tsit Chan; The Empirical Tradition, S Nakayama; Worlds [sic] and Language, James JY Liu].

The historic cultural unity of Eastern Asia is a product of the radiation of Chinese culture into the East Asian countries on China’s fringes (Chapter VII) [Chinese Culture Overseas, Zenryu Tsukamoto]. Chinese culture has been attractive, and China’s neighbours have been receptive, but an imported foreign culture seldom maintains itself unmodified, however great its potency and its prestige may be. It has been noted already that China transformed an Indian religion, Buddhism, into something Chinese before she transmitted it, along with the indigenous components of Chinese culture, to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam; and these non-Chinese East Asian countries, in their turn, did to Chinese culture, including Chinese Buddhism, what China had done to Indian Buddhism. They transformed it to fit their own conditions and to meet their own needs.

Japan, for instance, derived her culture from China, but she developed what she had borrowed from China into something so different from the Chinese pattern that the outcome was virtually an original product of the Japanese genius (Chapters VIII-X) [Feudal Japan, Charles D Sheldon; Cult and Creed, Carmen Blacker; A Literature of Court and People, Donald Keene]. The Japanese changed the centralized bureaucratic Chinese system of administration into a feudal system which, in so far as it had any counterpart in Chinese history, was akin to the feudalism of the period of the “Warring States” which had preceded the establishment of the Imperial regime in China [...]. The forms in which Buddhism became a widespread popular religion in Japan had no counterparts in either China or India. Pre-Meiji [pre-1868] Japanese literature was an equally original Japanese creation. Yet some of Japan’s cultural imports from China maintained their identity – for instance the Zen (Dhyana) school of Buddhism [a school of Mahayana Buddhism] and the Confucian philosophy, which, like Zen Buddhism, was adopted (in its crypto-Buddhist neo-Confucian form) by the Japanese military class at a late stage in the evolution of Japanese feudalism.

Zen was introduced from China in 1191, not a “late stage” in feudalism. It soon became popular among the samurai class.

Neo-Confucianism was an important philosophy in Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868). Confucianism had been one of the formative influences on Japan from the sixth century onwards.

The transformation of Chinese culture [including religion and administration] on Japanese soil after its transplantation is not surprising; for, at the date of its introduction – the 6th to the 8th century of the Christian era – the indigenous Japanese way of life was not only very different from the Chinese; it was also very much less sophisticated. The success of the Japanese in adopting and adapting one potent foreign culture perhaps partly accounts for their repetition of this achievement in the 19th century when they decided that they now had to come to terms with the Western civilization. Having already once received an alien civilization and having succeeded in adjusting it to their own way of life, the Japanese did not shrink from doing this for the second time. The Chinese, too, had received a foreign civilization once already before they encountered the West; but the Chinese reception of Indian culture in the form of Buddhism had not been so exacting an experience as the Japanese reception of Chinese culture. China had been on a par with India culturally; the spirit of Buddhism was not aggressive; and the indigenous Chinese attitude to life had a facet, represented by Taoism, to which Buddhism was congenial. Thus China was not so well schooled by her past experience as Japan was for the ordeal of coping with the formidably aggressive civilization of the modern West (Chapters XI-XIII) [Europe Goes East, Paul A Cohen; A New Role for Japan, Y Toriumi; Rebellion, Reform and Revolution, Jean Chesneaux].

Editor, Half the World, The History and Culture of China and Japan, Thames & Hudson, 1973

Istanbul, Lagos, London

The historic areas and buildings of Istanbul may be about to lose their UNESCO World Heritage status: BBC. Hürriyet Daily News: A city unable to care for even its Muslim treasures. The Ottoman wooden houses, the quiet streets left to themselves, are being pulled down. The equivalent has been destroyed in other places, so why not here? Many had recently been left to rough rural and other immigrants. (Cairo is unable to protect its Van Gogh.)

The photogenic scaffolding in Hagia Sophia (a museum, not a holy building) was removed earlier this year after seventeen years. Istanbul (with Essen and Pécs) is a European Capital of Culture. Would it have come down otherwise?

BBC series on Lagos now on YouTube starts here. Recommended at Marginal Revolution.

An East Asian or Second Empire approach to London would be to demolish most of the boroughs of Wandsworth, Lambeth and Southwark and build a new greater South Bank (I hope like neither Dubai nor Poundbury) to balance the historic city on the north bank.

Arts of Asia

Just a nod to one of my favourite magazines, published from Hong Kong since 1971. Ideal bathroom reading.

Living national treasures

Lists.

Mozart in the Congo

Astounding – at least in this clip:

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8709592.stm.

I did not mean that heading in some jokey or generic way. And I hate travel books with titles like that. I meant specifically Mozart in specifically Kinshasa.

But I love it when Elgar is taken out of his “context” – to Ramallah, for example, where he belongs. When European music is taken out of Europe, or English music is taken into Europe. I watched a televised concert when staying in the Grand Hyatt in Hong Kong in 1989 where Chinese players in the PRC were performing Britten’s Frank Bridge Variations. This would not be surprising now, but it was then, and it was wonderful to hear these great European winds blowing through China for a moment.

I loved being with ultracool Japanese who were picking up Vaughan Williams’s sixth symphony, conducted by Adrian Boult, from a pile in a shop in Roppongi, no longer there, called WAVE, one Sunday morning in 1991.

But where there is a personal European initiative with opera houses? Alexander McCall Smith’s opera initiative in Botswana? If I had any interest in Smith, I might know more. Christoph Schlingensief’s opera initiative in Burkina Faso? I did not have to google that: I was recently reading about him. Is that more than an exploitative and egotistical fantasy? Isn’t this just a kind of high tourism for a German director?

New York 1965: Ideology and Intervention

We met Toynbee in Santa Barbara in May 1967 recently, in an informal conversation with fellows of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

Here he is at a session in a meeting organised by the Santa Barbara-based Center in New York in 1965. The Online Archive of California calls it a “‘Convocation on the Requirements of Peace’ held in New York City, Feb. 18-20, 1965. Speakers included U.N. Secretary-General U Thant, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, Chief Justice Earl Warren, J. William Fulbright, Paul Hoffman, Adlai Stevenson, and Arnold Toynbee.” It opened at the UN General Assembly. Where did subsequent sessions take place?

The recordings are at The Donald C Davidson Library at the University of California, Santa Barbara, which holds the Center’s archives. The Davidson site gives the session title as Ideology and Intervention and its blurb as: “The old criteria about ideological differences are no longer useful, as many have been blurred by technological advances. The advent of the nuclear age makes necessary an even more rapid accommodation between different systems.”

The first sentence at first seems prescient. This was 1965, not 1985. But actually it refers back to 1945. Hallock Hoffman of the Center introduces the tape (which is not mentioned in Morton’s bibliography).

“History may one day record our time as the period when the nations of the world took the first significant steps toward achieving a lasting peace, not because men abhor war, but because war in a nuclear age is unthinkable. In February 1965 an international convocation was held in New York City in which more than sixty diplomats, politicians, theologians and intellectuals from twenty nations gathered to discuss the requirements of peace. The convocation was called by Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions to consider the practical implication of Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris, Peace on Earth. The meetings took place in a time of violence, disorder and despair. The General Assembly of the United Nations had adjourned the day before because the nations could not settle the payment of dues. In Vietnam, the war was escalating. At home, Americans demonstrated in Selma, Alabama against racial injustice. [...] The technological revolution which is making it possible to wipe out poverty and hunger threatens also to wipe out Mankind. Technology is outracing the imagination of Man. We have made a new world, but we cling to the status quo of antiquated political attitudes and institutions. [...] Although technology has already blurred the sharp differences in opposing ideological systems, the myths about those ideologies remain. In a panel led by J William Fulbright, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States Senate, Arnold Toynbee of Britain and Yevgenyi Zhukov of the Academy of Sciences in the USSR explored the problems of mutual interest and mutual trust among the nations of the world. Senator Fulbright opened the discussion.” The first omitted passage quotes Senator Gaylord Nelson.

Pacem in Terris (1963) was the most famous twentieth-century encyclical (Darius Milhaud made a cantata from it in the same year), with Pius XI’s Mit brennender Sorge (1937) and Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae (1968).

The 1965 Convocation was, at least later, known as Pacem in Terris I. Pacem in Terris II took place in Geneva in May 1967; Pacem in Terris III in Washington, DC in October 1973; Pacem in Terris IV in Washington, DC in December 1975. There is further audio material at the Davidson site. Toynbee did not participate again. Did the activities of the Center give Klaus Schwab his idea for the, admittedly business-oriented, Davos Symposium?

Fulbright speaks first, then Toynbee, then Zhukov (who was the director of the Institute of History at the USSR’s Academy of Sciences), then Abba Eban, whom Hoffman fails to mention in his introduction.

Abba Eban had given Israel diplomatic respectability at the outset. He brought it into the UN, where he was its ambassador from 1949 to ’59, while at the same time, from 1950 to ’59, ambasssador to Washington. He returned to Israel in 1959 and was its Foreign Minister from 1966 to ’74. He played a role subsequently played by Shimon Peres. He had a similar gift for coining audience-dazzling, audience-pacifying, sometimes empty phrases. He was fluent in many languages. He had clashed publicly with Toynbee in 1955 over the legitimacy of Israel and contributed a piece to MF Ashley Montagu, editor, Toynbee and History, Critical Essays and Reviews, Boston, Porter Sargent, 1956. He sounds here rather like King Abdullah. Note his modern use of the word diversity, as well as pluralism.

Toynbee comes across as genial rather than learned or profound. Is he right in saying that the Romans tolerated the Jewish religion? I suppose he means that their actions against the Jews were directed against a nation rather than a religion, to return to yesterday’s theme. Fulbright reminds me of John Daly in the CBS quiz of the time What’s My Line? It is all quite soothing to listen to. The Cold War world seems two-dimensional compared with the three-dimensional complexities we see now, though the question of when intervention is acceptable and when it is not is still alive. We can compare the half-imaginary enemies of 1965 with those of today, though these are liberal-minded speakers. There isn’t a word about natural resources. Allowing for more complex world-views, is a panel of this type at Davos likely to be better or worse? Neither, but more jargon is available now to mask whatever is being said.

After Eban, we hear comments from selected “distinguished citizens” who, at the end of each day, debated some of the proceedings – not necessarily the panel we’ve heard here. We hear, successively, Claiborne Pell, George Shuster, Frank Warner Neal, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Steve Allen (this one?), Jerome Frank, Carl F Stover.

Santa Barbara 1967, and the age of planning

Insurgent Asia

In the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaya, Indonesia, Indo-China, and Burma in A.D. 1941, the Western strong man armed had met one who was stronger than he; [footnote: Luke xi. 21-22.] and the signal retribution that had afterwards overtaken a Japanese black dragon had not availed to set up a Western humpty-dumpty again in the esteem of his former Asian subjects. In their suicidal act of breaking the West’s spell over Asian souls, the twentieth-century Japanese disciples of the Forty-Seven Rōnin had let loose, out of Aeolus’s [the Greek ruler of the winds’] wind-bag, the long-pent-up spiritual force of Asian resentment against a Western ascendancy which had been all the more galling for being asserted on the cultural level as well as on the economic, the political, and the military; and an anti-Western crusade which had been half-hearted so long as it had had to be carried on by quislings in the service of a nakedly self-seeking Japanese nationalism had been resumed, after Japan’s defeat, with a novel enthusiasm under the banner of a Communism in which a self-seeking Russian nationalism was artfully camouflaged. [And] in 1952 it looked as if Chinese Communist armies that had, in effect, been fighting Russia’s battles in Korea might have it in their power to sweep off the Asiatic chess-board most of the Western pawns that had been precariously replaced on it in A.D. 1945.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954