Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

Bitstream Vera? Not for me, thanks!

Commenting on Burningbird’s recent switch to Georgia for her main content font, Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote:

As far as sans-serif fonts go, choices are unfortunately limited on the web. Arial rather sucks. You could do the typical thing and use Verdana like the other 348,893,474,681 websites out there. If more individuality is what you’re after, you can try Lucida Sans for Windows people and Lucida Grande for MacOS X folk.

I wish the Bitstream Vera (download) family would spread beyond the Linux crowd; not hard, considering it’s free in both senses. These fonts are great: the Serif is very similar to Georgia, and is decent; the Sans is great, Verdana-ish but warmer, more elegant, more readable; and the Sans Mono is just drop dead gorgeous.

I’d downloaded the Bitstream Vera family a while ago (from the Gnome site) but hadn’t got around to installing the fonts. Aristotle’s comment encouraged me to try them—mainly because I’ve been unhappy with how Firefox (for both Windows and Macintosh) renders macron characters in Georgia, such as the lower case macron characters that I use a lot when transliterating long “o” and “u” vowels in Japanese. For example, in the title of Miike Takashi’s film, Chūgoku no chōjin (The Bird People in China).

So I could see the differences more easily, I prepared a comparison chart (using inline CSS to apply the different fonts, with the font size set to 1em). Of course, what you see next will depend on your OS and installed fonts.

However, since the results weren’t anything like I’d expected, I made some screen captures for Firefox on Macintosh and Windows, Internet Explorer 6 on Windows, and Safari on the Macintosh.

Here’s the executive summary:

• Safari on the Macintosh does the best job of rendering the o-with-macron and u-with-macron characters (though they look ugly in Georgia in Safari too).
• Firefox for Windows does a much better job than Firefox for the Macintosh (on the Macintosh the o-with-macron and u-with-macron characters frequently look as though they come from a totally different font).
• Bitstream Vera Serif produces ugly macron characters in all four browsers.
• Internet Explorer 6 for Windows does not display the o-with-macron and u-with-macron characters at all when the font is either Bitstream Vera Serif, Bitstream Vera Sans, or Lucida Sans (although the macron characters appear properly in Lucida Sans Unicode).

So—despite Aristotle’s enthusiasm and my own desire to do something for the Linux crowd—poor (or non-existent) macron character rendering makes it unlikely that I’ll be adding any of the Bitstream Vera faces to my font-family declarations. Unless someone can point out a flaw in my test methodology, or suggest a reason for Firefox’s lousy performance and IE’s refusal to display the characters at all.

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Matango: Attack Of The Mushroom People

Browsing through the Recent Releases in the International / Avant Garde > Asian Languages > Japanese Language category at DVD Empire yesterday I noticed an unfamiliar title. Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People. How could I resist clicking on the link?

Then, as I read the synopsis, my heart skipped a beat and my mind raced back nearly fifty years:

After a yacht is damaged in a storm and stranded on a deserted island, the passengers: a psychologist, his girlfriend, a wealthy businessman, a famous singer, a writer, a sailor and his skipper take refuge in a fungus covered boat. While using the mushrooms for sustenance, they find the ship’s journal describing the mushrooms to be poisonous, however some members of the shipwrecked party continue to ingest the mysterious fungi transforming them into hideous fungal monsters.

One of the strangest and most horrific TOHO productions to date.

I’ve never forgotten seeing this movie on TV at a friend’s place when I was nine or ten years old. Although television was introduced into Australia in September 1956, my family didn’t get a television set until I was well into my teens. But a neighbor, Gordon Charles, worked for the Australian subsidiary of the British Radio Rentals company so his family owned the first TV set in our street. Since I was close friends with his two young sons (Duncan and Humphrey), I would often stay over on weekends to watch TV until late into the night.

One Saturday night we watched a movie about a group of people who are shipwrecked near a mysterious island. Any attempts to investigate the island are repulsed by the dense foliage so they make camp on a tiny beach. While exploring the perimeter of the island in the yacht’s dinghy, they discover an abandoned freighter in which all the mirrors have been smashed. They soon run out of food and resort to eating the fungus that covers much of the island’s vegetation…

No, that’s not correct. The yacht wasn’t shipwrecked, it was moored near the island although the skipper and his girlfriend found that they couldn’t penetrate the dense foliage. One night they hear the sound of a dinghy bumping against their hull but, when the skipper goes on deck with a lamp to investigate, a voice pleads with him not to shine the light in that direction.

Wait, that’s not quite it. Now I’m uncertain as to whether the guy on the yacht had a girlfriend or whether he was sailing alone. But I’m sure that the man in the dinghy agrees to tell the yachtsman how he had come to be marooned on the island. He and his wife were passengers on a freighter that ran aground near the island. When they were out of food, the ship’s crew went scavenging but all they could find was a kind of fungus covering all the vegetation. At first the fungus appeared to be quite nourishing but, after a while, everyone who’d eaten it became covered with a kind of fungal growth. The man in the dinghy was the sole survivor, his beautiful wife gradually being covered with fungus before perishing, along with the rest of the crew.

The yacht’s skipper gives him some food and he starts to row away. But the skipper can’t resist the impulse to shine the lamp towards the dinghy and its glare reveals an elderly man, covered completely in fungus. The End.

While the credits were rolling, Mr Charles crept in behind us and shrieked “Fungus!” Three young boys jumped out of their skins.

Although it took me a couple of attempts to remember the actual story (and even now I’m not confident I’ve remembered the narrative correctly), I do recall many details with great clarity: the yacht glistening white in the darkness, the tiny beach surrounded with dense vegetation, the beautiful young wife, the swinging lantern, the final shot of the fungal man in the dinghy, even the cramped fifties living room where we watched the program, and—most clearly of all—the feeling of terror when Mr Charles cried out “Fungus!” Yet I don’t remember any mushroom people. Nor do I recall that the actors were Japanese. In fact, we couldn’t have watched Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People that night because Matango wasn’t made until 1963—by Honda Ishirō (本多猪四郎), the director of the first Godzilla movie in 1954 (and many other monster movies, including some of the best Godzilla sequels). And by then my father had finally succumbed and bought us a television.

As Jasper Sharp’s highly favorable Midnight Eye review reveals, Honda made Matango (マタンゴ) “in a brief break between two of his more characteristic monster movies, King Kong vs. Godzilla (Kingukongu tai Gojira, 1962) and Godzilla vs. Mothra (Mosura tai Gojira, 1964)”.

Never released theatrically in the US but dubbed and sold to TV by American International Television in 1965, Matango, or Attack of the Mushroom People to give it its alternative title, is one of those films that is better known for its title than the actual film itself.

Sharp’s analysis of the film’s subtext is fascinating, whether one has seen Matango or not. He argues persuasively that its supposedly humble B-movie exterior masks a sophisticated critique of Japan’s rapid post-war economic growth, human estrangement from nature, and the hallucinatory appeal of the drug culture.

But, even if I missed it, plenty of people saw and loved the dubbed version of Matango on TV, if the Amazon.com user reviews are any guide:

‘Matango,’ like ‘Carnival of Souls,’ is one of those movies that people accidently stumbled across when they should have been sleeping, and remembered forever after. It would insidiously etch itself on your tired brain. And, if you were lucky, maybe it gave you some pretty f***ed up dreams whenever you finally got to sleep. I actually first found this in the middle of the afternoon at the babysitter’s house. It was still too much.

Wow! Was I glad when I discovered “The Attack of the Mushroom People”, as I always remembered it, was coming to DVD! I remember seeing this on tv years ago, and never forgot how damn creepy it left me feeling.

It’s here. One of my favorite movies - and most eagerly-awaited DVDs - ever. And EVERY single bad scenario I could think of for its DVD release has been stamped out soundly by Tokyo Shock/Media Blasters. Because THIS is exactly what I wanted from a DVD of “Matango” (Attack of the Mushroom People). My dream came true, and it’s sitting in my hands.

One reviewer, Nick Tropiano, asks: “Was this the Inspiration for Gilligan’s Island?”

…and that’s a serious question. It predated the premier of Gillian’s Island by several years. There’s a millionaire who owns a yacht that looks like the Minnow. On board is a professor, the captain, a goofy (though somewhat sinster in the film) first mate, a pretty but shy country girl named Okiko, and a singer/movie star. There are seven castaways in all. “Lovey” is replaced by another male character, a writer named Roy. The boat crashes into an island where they are castaways… Course on Gilligan’s Island they didn’t all turn into mutated mushrooms monsters. Rent or buy the DVD (one of my favorite films in Japanese cinema, finally getting its due…) and you tell me if Gilligan’s Island isn’t a complete rip-off of this film.

If I was Toho I would have sued Sherwood Schwartz for copyright infringement.

(Just as Kurosawa Akira, who—realizing that Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars was “nearly a scene-to-scene, shot-by-shot remake” of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo—sued Leone and won 15% of the profits from Leone’s film.)

Of course, I couldn’t resist adding both Matango and Honda’s The Mysterians (地球防衛軍, Chikyū Bōeigun, 1957) to my current DVD Empire order. Now I can’t wait until both DVDs are sitting in my hands.

Still, the question remains: What Fungus Island film did I see on that Saturday night all those years ago? And should its producer have sued Tōhō and Honda Ishirō for copyright infringement?

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Before the Revolution

Every time I read about how the blogging “revolution” will “change the world,” I think of Talleyrand. More exactly, I think of the remark by Talleyrand that Bernardo Bertolucci used as the epigraph to his 1964 film Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione):

He who has not lived in the years before the revolution cannot know what the sweetness of living is.

According to The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Talleyrand’s remark was recorded by François Guizot, in his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps (1858):

M. Talleyrand me disait un jour: “Qui n’a pas vécu dans les années voisines de 1789 ne sait pas ce que c’est que le plaisir de vivre.”
(Monsieur Talleyrand said to me one day: “He who has not lived during the years around 1789 can not know what is meant by the pleasure of life.”)

That Talleyrand’s observation and Bertolucci’s version of it can be interpreted quite differently is, of course, what interests me most.

In the aristocratic system into which Talleyrand was born, it was common for the eldest son in a family to enter the military (and to inherit the property and titles) while the second son made a career in the clergy. However, Talleyrand’s impaired physical mobility (due to a malformed foot, which some attribute to Marfan syndrome) meant that in his case the custom was reversed: his younger brother was named heir while Talleyrand—although a notorious unbeliever—was ordained a priest in 1779 at the age of 25.

The biographical entry at Everything2.com elaborates:

…the club foot was to loom large in Talleyrand’s life. His parents obviously felt that the disability made him unfit to carry on the family lineage, and stripped him of his birth right and inheritance at an early age. He lost the right to pass on the family wealth to any children he might have, as well as most of his inheritance. While he was still technically part of the nobility, Talleyrand was essentially without any class or standing from birth.

Talleyrand’s ordination did little to put a damper on his libido. A son was born of his affair with Countess Adelaide de Flahaut in 1785, and was named for his father…

In 1788, Talleyrand was appointed Bishop of Autun by King Louis XVI (with some reluctance), following a petition by his dying father (the same father that had disinherited him thirty years ago). Talleyrand did not linger long in his diocese ; after three weeks, he departed, having been elected deputy of the clergy (the First Estate) to the Estates General.

In addition to the clergy (the First Estate), the Estates General included representatives of the nobility (Second Estate) and the commoners (Third Estate). The First Estate was divided into “upper” and “lower” clergy: the former being a kind of clerical nobility drawn largely from the aristocratic families of the Second Estate; the latter having more in common with the commoners of the Third Estate.

In the context of a discussion about the “blogging revolution” it’s fascinating (or ironic) that, as Mick Underwood explains, “within the model of a pluralist liberal democracy, the mass media are often seen as fulfilling the vitally important rôle of fourth estate, the guardians of democracy, defenders of the public interest. The term fourth estate is frequently attributed to the nineteenth century historian Carlyle, though he himself seems to have attributed it to Edmund Burke.”

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact,…. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable…… Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures: the requisite thing is that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite.

The ongoing argument about weblogging and journalism revolves, at the most basic level, around a struggle for power, as webloggers—not content to form a Fifth Estate—seek to wrest control of the Fourth Estate from the current incumbents.

But I digress…

Tallyrand supported the revolutionary cause and was excommunicated by Pope Pius VI for proposing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy that nationalized the Church.

It’s worth noting that despite his status in the Church, Talleyrand had been exposed to revolutionary philosophy during his term at St. Sulpice (and presumably later on as well). He is reported to have celebrated mass on the Champs de Mars in 1790 to commemorate the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Thus it is perhaps not entirely surprising that he was appointed to the constitutional committee of the National Assembly in 1789, and became a signatory of the constitution that the committee presented to the King. However, one must also keep in mind that Talleyrand had earlier urged the King to dissolve the assembly, and only joined when he felt that the democratic movement was becoming unstoppable. (Everything2.com)

As Talleyrand himself explained, “The art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.”

During The Terror, while he was in Britain attempting to avert war, a warrant was issued for his arrest. Talleyrand escaped to the United States, returned to France in 1796, and became Foreign Minister in the Directory (the group of five who held executive power in France).

It was in this position that he met Napoleon Bonaparte, and in him recognized the man who would put an end to the many vicissitudes of revolutionary France. Sensing the way the wind was blowing (something at which Talleyrand was exceptionally skilled) he resigned his post with the directory, and began working to prepare the foundation for the coup that would bring Napoleon to power. (Everything2.com)

Although Tallyrand resumed his post as Foreign Minister after Napoleon seized power as First Consul, he had little to do since Napoleon preferred to control foreign affairs. The 60 million francs that Talleyrand received for his services provided adequate compensation.

In early 1804, Talleyrand’s involvement in the kidnapping and execution of the Duke of Enghien led to his most famous quip: “That was worse than a crime; it was a mistake.”

Later the same year Napoleon appointed him Grand Chamberlain; in 1807 he resigned as Foreign Minister; in 1808 he betrayed Napoleon by engineering an alliance between Austria and Russia and was then dismissed as Chamberlain when Napoleon, describing Talleyrand as “a piece of shit in a silk stocking”, suspected him of involvement in an assassination plot.

Just as surprisingly, in 1814 Napoleon empowered Talleyrand to negotiate on his behalf with the allied European powers, even as he was criticizing Talleyrand for his private politics. By this time, Talleyrand seems to have once again smelled change on the wind, and hastened to reconcile himself with the vestiges of the Bourbon dynasty, becoming advisor to the future Louis XVIII. (Everything2.com)

The Answers.com assessment of Talleyrand is generous given that his style of diplomacy (which Henry Kissinger emulated) has fallen out of fashion:

The prototype of the witty, cynical diplomat, Talleyrand has been either exalted as the savior of Europe in 1815 or damned as an opportunist or even a traitor. His corruption was undeniable, and his pliability enabled him to hold power under the ancien régime, the Revolution, Napoleon, the Restoration, and the July Monarchy. Yet Talleyrand was a good European, and his policy was aimed consistently—and often courageously—at the peace and stability of Europe as a whole.

Ever since I first saw Before the Revolution in the late sixties, I’ve thought that Talleyrand’s remark about the revolutionary period (or rather Bertolucci’s use of it) was masked by ambiguity—an ambiguity that, I now realize, sprung from my focusing on Talleyrand’s aristocratic background rather than on his diplomatic career.

Having only ever seen the (subtitled) English translation of the Italian translation of Talleyrand’s remark, I wrongly assumed that he was looking back nostalgically at the life he enjoyed in the years before the revolution. Now, knowing a little more about his life—most particularly, his passion for politics and influence—and (despite my shaky grasp of French) having seen the French version of his comment, it seems clear that Talleyrand was celebrating the years immediately before and after 1789 (“dans les années voisines de 1789”), the heady days when the absolute monarchy was overthrown and the influence of the Catholic Church diminished, when everything seemed possible, and—most importantly—when Talleyrand was at the center of events.

This interpretation must be played against Bertolucci’s, which I always took as meaning that life only becomes sweet after the revolution—a belief that accords with both the Marxist sympathies of Fabrizio, the protagonist of the film, and those of Bertolucci himself (he joined the Italian Communist party in 1969, leaving ten years later). I was wrong about that too.

Louis Menand, in a long New Yorker essay that combines a review of Bertolucci’s most recent film, The Dreamers, with a survey of his earlier work, discusses Before the Revolution (the film and its title) at length. About the title, Menand writes:

By 1968, student radicals were citing [Bertolucci’s film] as explanation and inspiration, and the phrase “before the revolution” appeared in accounts of the events of May in the French press.

The words are taken from a remark of Talleyrand’s: “He who did not live in the years before the revolution cannot understand what the sweetness of living is.” Bertolucci insisted that he meant the title ironically, that life “before the revolution” is agony; he has his protagonist mutter, despairingly, “It’s always ‘before the revolution’ if you’re like me.” But with movies you believe the camera—what the camera loves cannot be all bad—and the camera tells us that although Talleyrand was undoubtedly on the wrong side, he was not wrong. “At first my story was a modern ‘Charterhouse,’” Bertolucci explained in an interview in the Cahiers in 1965, “but then it gradually developed into ‘Sentimental Education.’” Fabrizio is not a revolutionary; he is playing at being a revolutionary, because that is what young people in the postwar middle class do. His kind of revolution is just a chapter in the bourgeois family romance (thus the incest: it violates the norms of the nuclear family). If “Before the Revolution” is a prophecy of the rebellion of May ’68, in which students from the Sorbonne marched in solidarity with workers from the Renault auto plants, it is also a prophecy of its failure.

If Bertolucci “meant the title ironically,” then it’s clear that he interpreted Talleyrand’s remark as I originally did: that Talleyrand was a reactionary who yearned for the good old days before the revolution destroyed the aristocratic way of life. In 1965, when Bertolucci offered his explanation, it was still possible for the idea of revolution to inspire hope: the Chinese Cultural Revolution would begin in the same year and continue until October 1968, when Mao’s rival, Liu Shao-chi, was expelled from the Party (and the “revolution” had to be brought back under control). Ironically, during the same period that Jean-Luc Godard was making films extolling the virtue of the Red Guards, Chen Kiage (who would eventually direct films such as Farewell My Concubine and The Emperor and the Assassin), had joined the Red Guards in attacking his own father.

But events in Soviet Russia, China, North Korea, Cambodia, and elsewhere confirm that life “after the revolution” is agony too—and not just for the displaced ruling class—since one dictatorial regime has simply been replaced by another. As Samora Machel observed, “The revolution eats its children.”

Menand suggests that “although Talleyrand was undoubtedly on the wrong side, he was not wrong.” I assume Menand means that Talleyrand was on the “wrong” side in the sense that, although he played a crucial role in dismantling the monarchy and the Church, his primary concern was to ensure the stable transfer of power whilst staying close to the center of power himself—he had little interest in changing how power was exercised.

Talleyrand was right in that he understood that each revolution contains within itself the seeds of its own eventual destruction, whilst being sufficiently adroit to ensure for himself both a successful career and a long life. By the time Talleyrand died in 1838, at the age of 84, he had accumulated a 30,000 acre property, a 10,000 volume private library, a hotel in Paris, and a huge personal fortune.

My intuition says that the blogging revolution will turn out in much the same way: rather than supplanting mainstream media, weblogs will become an integral part of the Fourth Estate. The ongoing argument that bloggers be recognized as “citizen journalists” and the rush to put advertising on weblogs are only the first signs. Jim Kloss at Whole Wheat Radio put my own thoughts into words in a post titled Tsunami (Thought for the Day):

It feels like the web has 3 tiers now:

1. Commercial/Corporate sites where the entire motivation is traditional advertising.
2. Everyday people who are now including traditional ads with their content.
3. Everyday people who create content with no traditional ads.

#2 is the tsunami. I’m running to higher ground so fast I don’t have time to look back and see how high the water is on the beach. Occasionally I look to the side and see others running too…

I’ve unsubscribed from 98% of the feeds I was following. I’m no longer even attempting to keep up with webgeist. I’ve become super selective. I am choosing ignorance; to bury my head in the sand. No more scanning of audio.weblogs.com or bloglines searches to see the direction things are going. I don’t like the vast majority of what the web stands for anymore, with a few glaring exceptions—the same ones that have been on the radar screen all along.

I want to continue making ‘content’ but I want to do it in a vacuum. I don’t want to debate, I don’t want to justify, I don’t want to predict, I don’t want to answer the critics.

Nor do I. This morning, following a link from Phil Ringnalda’s Three Days Worth post, I found and installed the Hide AdSense script for GreaseMonkey. That’s made browsing a little more tolerable. All the same, I can hardly bear to watch as the Talleyrands corrupt something that was, for a while, magical. I’m tempted to say this, though:

Those who did not blog in the years before the revolution cannot know what the sweetness of blogging was.

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Curtis LeMay’s Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the first American firebombing attack on Japan. On the evening of March 9, 1945, 325 B-29 bombers took off from their bases in the Marianas, the first planes arriving over Tokyo just after midnight on March 10 where, over a three hour period, they dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs. According to the most authoritative book on the firebombing campaign, Kenneth P. Werrell’s Blankets of Fire:

The bombing and fire destroyed almost 16 square miles, over 10,000 acres of Tokyo, which was approximately 8 percent of the urban area, and included one-quarter of the buildings in the city… One million people were left homeless and left the city. Casualty figures are inexact, as might be expected in such a mammoth event, ranging from about 80,000 to more than 100,000 killed. Surely the Tokyo fire raid is one of the deadliest air raids of all time, surpassing Hamburg, Dresden, and Nagasaki, and on the scale of Hiroshima, and is certainly one of the most destructive.

In the three years I’ve been weblogging, I’ve written many posts that deal with or mention the Tokyo fire raid:

• There is no moral clarity in war
• Never a good idea, Caleb…
• Japanese remorse? Hardly.
• A disagreement or three
• Civilians in the front line
• Fire
• Consequences
• From Dresden to Tokyo
• As We May Incinerate
• Furisode
• Denunciation

The reasons for my interest in (some might say, obsession with) the night of March 9-10, 1945 are varied and complex. The simplest explanation might be that the firebombing of Japan—which continued for over five months (from March 9 to August 15, 1945)—is, compared to the atomic bomb attacks, little known outside Japan. Yet nearly half the built-up areas of sixty-four cities were totally destroyed while (according to the estimates of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey) 330,000 people were killed, 476,000 injured, 2.5 million buildings destroyed, and 8.5 million people made homeless.

Earlier in the week, knowing that I did not wish to let this anniversary go unacknowledged yet wondering what else I could possibly write about, I did a Google search on tokyo + firebombing. Amongst the results was a page at Rense.com which reproduced a Japan Times article by Satō Hiroaki which begins with the astonishing revelation that:

On Dec. 7, 1964, the Japanese government conferred the First Order of Merit with the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun upon Gen. Curtis LeMay — yes, the same general who, less than 20 years earlier, had incinerated “well over half a million Japanese civilians, perhaps nearly a million.”

Although Satō-san exaggerates the number of civilian fatalities caused by the firebombing, he is correct about the medal. I thought I was well-informed about General LeMay’s career—before, during, and after World War II. When I first read about this award I was, to put it mildly, flabbergasted. But a list of LeMay’s decorations includes “The First Class of the Order of the Rising Sun (Presented Dec. 7 1964).” (I’ve linked to a cached copy of the page since, when I wrote this entry, the Wright-Paterson Air Force Base website appears to be offline.) I note in passing the irony in LeMay’s award being conferred on the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

This history of the Thunderchief fighter squadrons (F-105D and F-105F) based the Yokota Air Base in Japan includes a reference to LeMay’s award:

When the 36th TFS returned to Yokota in December 1964, it participated in a huge ceremony: on 07 December the Japanese Government presented retiring USAF Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay with Japan’s “First Order of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun.” In the flyover that followed the ceremony, 8th TFW Thunderchiefs formed the letters “C E L” in the General’s honor.

There is, therefore, little doubt that General LeMay received the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun, First Class, which—although not the highest Japanese decoration—is an exceptionally prestigious award.

The official Japanese award system was introduced during the Meiji period in 1875. According to the Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan:

Besides the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum (Daikun’i Kikkashō) as the highest degree of honor for men, the The Order of the Rising Sun (Kyokujitsushō) also for men, the Order of the Precious Crown (Hōkanshō) for women, and the Order of the Sacred Treasure (Zuihōshō) for both men and women were also established.

The Order of the Rising Sun is awarded for services to Japan, both military and civilian, by citizens or foreigners. The highest grade is the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun, Paulownia Flowers (勲一等旭日桐花大綬章). The second-highest grade—the one LeMay received—is the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun, First Class (勲一等旭日大綬章). Then there are seven lower grades of the Order of the Rising Sun (Two through Eight).

How is it, then, that General Curtis LeMay—who conceived, planned, and prosecuted the firebombing campaign against Japan that resulted in the deaths of at least 330,00 Japanese civilians and the wounding of another 470,000—received one of the highest official awards that can be bestowed by the Japanese government? The same General LeMay who, when asked about the morality of the firebombing campaign, replied:

“Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at that time… I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal…. Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.”

Although the analogy is not quite exact, it is almost as though Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku—the Japanese naval commander who conceived and led the attack on Pearl Harbor—had not been killed in the South Pacific in April 1943 when his aircraft was shot down by US fighters acting on the basis of decrypted Japanese radio reports, but instead had survived the war, managed to evade being convicted and executed as a war criminal, and twenty years later, been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Lyndon Johnson.

A Google Japan search on the English text string LeMay + “Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun” yielded two results, one of which is a weblog post by “komada” titled ルメイはなぜ開戦記念日に叙勲されたか (Why did LeMay receive a decoration on the anniversary of the outbreak of the War?). Although I could make some sense of the Japanese, it is written in the circuitous style common to Japanese academic discourse. I printed out the weblog entry and took it to my Japanese/English exchange lesson last night. Keiko, my exchange partner, read through it and said: “Mawarikudoi desu ne…”

Mawarikudoi (回りくどい) means “roundabout, circumlocutory, indirect,” as in:

「回りくどい言い方はしないで。」 (Mawarikudoi iikata wa shinaide.) “Don’t beat around the bush.”

Keiko explained that in this weblog post Komada-san:

• notes the dearth of information about LeMay’s medal on Japanese government sites;
• points out that the medal is not mentioned in profiles of LeMay, even though awards from smaller countries are listed (this, as we’ve seen, is not correct);
• explains the process by which potential award recipients are selected and vetted (recommended by the Foreign Minister then supported or opposed by government bureaucrats with the final decision made by the Prime Minister);
• remarks on the lack of any publically-stated reasons for LeMay’s receiving such an award from the Japanese government;
• notes that athough LeMay’s award was opposed by the Socialist Party, it was strongly supported by Genda Minoru, who had been the naval officer Admiral Yamamoto chose to draft the details of the plan for the attack on Pearl Harbor;
• mounts a complex argument suggesting that LeMay’s award was given in return for an award given to Genda by the United States government, probably in recognition for Genda’s involvement in the purchase of 180 F-104 fighter aircraft;
• adds that Genda, who had joined the Air Self Defence Force after the war, was involved in the Lockheed scandal in 1976 (he was convicted of accepting bribes to influence the purchase of Lockheed aircraft for the Self Defence Force).

Keiko then pointed out the word tsuzuku (to be continued) at the end of the post and, sure enough, when I got home I discovered that Komada-san had written another twoentries following the one I’ve summarized plus a preceding entry titled Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.

At this point, then, the mystery of why General Curtis LeMay received the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun, First Class, remains unsolved. Today I received an email from Keiko asking whether I’d found Komada-san’s other entries and suggesting that we continue to examine the Japanese sources. She added:

When I read about the person who you are interested in today, I was amazed about the fact that Japanese government awarded him the highest honor and he received the medal. Besides such surprise, I couldn’t believe he actually came to Japan to receive the medal. He stood on the land that he bombed until thousands had lost their lives. I wonder what he was thinking when he was walking on Japanese soil then? Did he feel proud?

A Google Japan search for 勲一等旭日大綬章 + ルメイ site:go.jp (LeMay + “Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun, First Class” — Japanese government sites only) yields but a single result: the transcript of a National Diet (parliament) session in which the former Japanese ambassador to the United States, Saitō Kunihiko, is being questioned about LeMay’s award.

However, a Google Japan search for 勲一等旭日大綬章 + ルメイ (LeMay + “Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun, First Class”) yields 3,360 results—many of which are Japanese weblog entries. The Japanese weblogging community is on the case. It’ll be fascinating to see where this leads.

In the meantime, I’ve made a note to ask Keiko next week how one says “fact check your ass” in Japanese.

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Denunciation

In The Specters Haunting Dresden Theodore Dalrymple suggested that, nearly sixty years after the end of World War II, Germans are unable to take pride in their cultural heritage, which they regard as irretrievably tainted by the atrocities of the Nazi era.

Collective pride is denied the Germans because, if pride is taken in the achievements of one’s national ancestors, it follows that shame for what they have done must also be accepted. And the shame of German history is greater than any cultural achievement, not because that achievement fails to balance the shame, but because it is more recent than any achievement, and furthermore was committed by a generation either still living or still existent well within living memory.

I have no idea whether Dalrymple’s assertion is correct. It’s been 25 years since I was briefly in Germany, where I visited only Frankfurt and Heidelberg. Nowadays, the occasional German movie, W. G. Sebald’s books, and Scott Hanson’s weblog are as close to Germany as I get.

Sebald drew attention, as Dalrymple notes, to “a curious lacuna in German literature of memoirs or fictional accounts of the bombing and its aftereffects. Millions suffered terribly, yet there is hardly a memoir or a novel to record it”

In Air War and Literature, the first chapter of On the Natural History of Destruction, Sebald writes:

There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described. The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as experienced by the great majority of the German population, remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that perhaps could not even be privately acknowledged.

The lectures upon which Air War and Literature are based were delivered in 1997. Even then, as Sebald notes, accounts of the Allied bombing campaign against Germany were relatively sparse:

Apart from Heinrich Böll, only a few authors—Hermann Kasack, Hans Erich Nossack, Arno Schmidt, and Peter de Mendelssohn—ventured to break the taboo on any mention of the inward and outward destruction, and as we shall see, they generally did so rather equivocally. Even in later years, when local and amateur war historians began documenting the fall of the German cities, their studies did not alter the fact that the images of this horrifying chapter of our history have never really crossed the threshold of the national consciousness.

Nossack’s Der Untergang has been recently translated into English and published as The End: Hamburg 1943. Sebald compares it favorably with the Hiroshima Diary of doctor Hachiya Michihiko, who documented the plight of the victims in the two months after the first atomic bomb was dropped. Sebald quotes Elias Canetti, who “asks what it means to survive such a vast catastrophe, and says that the answer can be gauged only from a text which, like Hachiya’s observations, is notable for precision and responsibility.”

“The same may be said of Nossack’s account of the destruction of the city of Hamburg,” adds Sebald, “which is unique even in his own work. The ideal of truth inherent in its entirely unpretentious objectivity, at least over long passages, proves itself the only legitimate reason for continuing to produce literature in the face of total destruction.”

Unfortunately we shall never know how W.G. Sebald regarded Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand (The Fire, 2002) and Brandstätten, (Fire Places, 2003), Klaus R. Röhl’s Verbotene Trauer (Forbidden Mourning, 2002), Stephan Burgdorff & Christian Habbe’s Als Feuer vom Himmel fiel (As Fire Fell from the Sky, 2003), Christoph Kucklick’s Der Feuersturm - Bombenkrieg über Deutschland (Firestorm: The Bombing against Germany, 2003), or Volker Hage’s Hamburg 1943 (2003) and Zeugen der Zerstörung (A Witness to the Destruction, 2003)—all of which were published in the two years following Sebald’s tragic death in a car accident in 2001.

Conversely, books about the firebombing of Japanese cities began to appear in Japan immediately after the US occupation ended, with many being released over the past fifty years. I have ten such books, as well as the five-volume Tōkyō daikūshū sensaishi (The Tokyo Air Raids: A Record of War Damage). The earliest in my collection, Tōkyō daikūshū hiroku shashinshū (A Confidential Photographic Record of the Tokyo Air Raids) was published in 1953. Clearly the Japanese have never regarded the destruction of their cities by the USAAF as “a shameful family secret, a secret that perhaps could not even be privately acknowledged.”

Nor are films about the firebombing uncommon: Takahata Isao’s 1988 animated film Hotaru no haka (Graveyard of the Fireflies) portrays the effects of the bombing on Japan’s civilian population while Imai Tadashi’s 1991 film Sensō to seishun (War and Youth) contains a graphic recreation of the first raid on the night of March 9-10, 1945.

It is hardly surprising—given the sanitized history of the Pacific War taught to Japanese schoolchildren, which glosses over the atrocities committed by the Imperial Army and Navy—that many Japanese regard Japan as victim rather than aggressor. (More than one Japanese friend has pointed out to me that theirs is the only country to have suffered the atomic bomb.) Yet memorials to the victims of the firebombing of Japanese cities are conspicuous in their absence. One local historian in a tiny private “museum” located almost at the aim point of the first Tokyo raid explained to me that the national government regarded the construction of a proper monument as a potential provocation to Japan’s Asian neighbors.

It seems hardly to have mattered to the effort of post-war reconstruction, whether publicly expressed complaint was impermissible (in the case of Germany) or allowed, if not encouraged (as in Japan). And if, as Dalrymple suggests, “resentment… was a powerful stimulus of the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle, into which the Germans in the West threw their potentially resentful energies after the war, for lack of anywhere else to direct them,” then for the Japanese a similar resentment must have been coupled with the humiliation of seeing their country reduced to ruins (a country that—unlike Germany, which had long been a powerful European nation—had transformed itself from a feudal backwater to the first rank of military and industrial power in less than 80 years).

Over the past few years I’ve read dozens of books about the firebombing of German and Japanese cities so there was nothing in Theodore Dalrymple’s article that surprised me, except this:

To the moral complications of a Nazi past were added those of a communist past, the greatest of which was an awareness of just how widespread the practice of denunciation had been. On some estimates, a sixth of the population of the former German Democratic Republic were Mitarbeiter—-collaborators with the secret police, the Stasi-—and had spied upon and denounced their neighbors, friends, relatives, and even spouses. Once the archives opened and people could read their security dossiers for themselves, they discovered in many cases that those to whom they had relayed their private thoughts had relayed them in turn to the Stasi, in return, practically, for nothing except the informer’s satisfaction of being on the right side of the powerful. Those whom people had thought were their best friends turned out to be the very ones whose denunciation had resulted in their otherwise inexplicable failure to gain promotion in their work, sometimes for decades. Such discoveries were not conducive to a favorable or optimistic view of human nature or the trust upon which a secure social life is built. The GDR, founded on a political theory that made a fetish of human solidarity, turned everyone into an atom in the asocial ether.

Although failure to gain promotion in one’s work can hardly compare to the horrific suffering of both the victims and the survivors of the firebombing raids, the idea of being spied upon (and denounced) by someone whom you believed you could trust seems especially terrible—particulary when denunciation to the Stasi could also have had far more serious consequences, including imprisonment or even death. The suggestion that the practice was so common is doubly horrifying.

I believe, however, that Dalrymple is mistaken in attributing the motive for such denunciations to “the informer’s satisfaction of being on the right side of the powerful.” I’d argue instead that resentment was a powerful—perhaps even the primary—motivation; that at least part of the resentful energy used by West Germans to rebuild their cities, imploded in Communist East Germany and was directed against friends, neighbors, relatives, and work colleagues.

It is a tenet of the self-help movement that resentment does most damage to the person holding a grudge. For example, Norman Vincent Peale believed that:

Resentment or grudges do no harm to the person against whom you hold these feelings but every day and every night of your life, they are eating at you.

Yet, for many of the Stasi collaborators, the corrosive effects of holding and nourishing a resentment must have been offset by a profound, ongoing satisfaction at observing the frustration, bewilderment, and bitterness of their victims.

I suppose these betrayals by friends, neighbors, relatives, spouses, and colleagues are common in any totalitarian society (I now recall reading about similar occurrences in Wild Swans, Jung Chang’s account of life in China during the Cultural Revolution). And yet perhaps one can draw comfort from the fact that five out of six East Germans didn’t denounce anyone to the secret police.

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