Author: Roy Berman

New Photo Galleries

Since I’m about to leave for Taiwan I thought I would finally upload some of the previous travel photosets that I had been meaning to post ever since I created the blog. Click each thumbnail for the corresponding gallery page.

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Beijing, 2004

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While in Beijing I of course had the visit the Great Wall.

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This is a set of photos I took of the outside of an abandoned Beijing Opera house I found in a sidestreet. The decaying hand-painted posters are great, I only wish I could have somehow taken them down and saved them from the inevitable demolition.


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Urumqi, 2003 and 2004

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Turpan, 2004 and 2004


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Almaty, Kazakhstan, 2004

Fear of protesters will keep Jackie Chan from Taiwan

From the Taipei Times

Movie star Jackie Chan (成龍) says he will stay away from Taiwan for four years to avoid protests over remarks he made calling last year’s presidential elections a joke, TVBS reported yesterday.

At a news conference in China last year, the action hero said Taiwan’s disputed presidential election was “the biggest joke in the world,” provoking calls from politicians in this country to ban his movies.

In an interview in Cannes with TVBS broadcast yesterday, Chan said he wanted to avoid Taiwan for the time being.

“If I come, some people might organize something at the airport,” Chan said, alluding to recent political protests at CKS International Airport.

For the record, I don’t think that Taiwan’s presidential election is a joke. Please don’t throw things at me when I come off the airplane in Taipei next week.

Jenkins obtains a U.S. passport

Charles Jenkins, who spent nearly 40 years in North Korea after deserting his U.S. Army unit in 1965, has been issued a U.S. passport, the embassy in Tokyo said Tuesday.

Jenkins, who served 25 days in a U.S. military brig last year after his court-martial, is believed to be planning a trip to the United States to visit his ailing mother.

Jenkins, 65 and frail, has said he has no plans to return permanently to the United States but would like to visit his home in North Carolina with his family.

His wife, Hitomi Soga, was kidnapped by North Korean agents when she was a 19-year-old student and taken to the reclusive state in 1978.

She married Jenkins soon afterward but was only allowed to return to Japan in 2002 when North Korea reversed years of denial and admitted it had kidnapped 13 Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s. Jenkins and their daughters left North Korea and joined Soga last July.

Earlier this year, he told reporters he wants to see his 91-year-old mother as soon as possible. She lives in a nursing home in Roanoke Rapids, N.C.

The Japan Times: May 18, 2005

Attention Saru and Adam- North Carolina isn’t all that far from DC. Think you can manage to track down Jenkins for an interview when he comes to visit? I can’t wait to read the long version of this guy’s autobiography.

Hey China, don’t ask Japan for any more apologies!

Last friday I had to go into Manhattan to　drop off my passport and visa application at the Taiwanese Consulate Taipei Economic and Cultural Center located near the corner of 42st Street and 5th Avenue, conveniently only about a block away from the New York City branch of the popular Japanese used book store Book Off to look around for a bit and spotted last year’s special March issue of the magazine Bungei Shunju (文藝春秋) containing the two stories that won the Akutagawa literary prize for new writers that year on sale for only $2, and having read the beginning of one of the stories (蛇にピアス / Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara) and I decided to pick it up to have something a little lighter to read for the five hour bus ride to DC than the books on Taiwanese history that I had brought with me. As it so happens, I was distracted by one of the more serious articles in the magazine, a piece by a Mr. Ma Li-cheng.

Ma Li-cheng was born in 1946 in the Sichuan province of China. He become a commentator for Hong Kong’s Phoenix Television in 2003, but in August 2004 quit that position and returned to Beijing. He has written several controversial pieces on Chinese/Japanese relations, one of which has been published in Japanese as Japan Doesn’t Need to Apologize to China Anymore (日本はもう中国に謝罪しなくていい）. The following article is a summary of that book’s argument, translated into Japanese and with commentary by Japanese journalist Satoshi Tomisaka. Mister Tomisaka’s comments will be in italics, and I will not put add any of my own, although I may post some of my thoughts after finishing the translation of the entire piece. I am not posting Ma Li-cheng’s article because I agree with everything he says, but I think that he does represent a different position from what is currently avaliable online in the English language, and that readers will find something interesting to think and comment on.

This post will be a centralized table of contents for the article, and as I translate each section I will post it in a new blog entry and update the table of contents below with a hyperlink to the appropriate post.

Hey China, don’t ask Japan for any more apologies!

By Ma Li-cheng
Edited by Satoshi Tomisaka

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: China has also invaded Japan
Part 3: Set aside the history probem
Part 4: Japanese nationalism
Part 5: The ‘Chinese Threat Theory’
Part 6: To a ‘Normal country’

Two interviews discuss Japan’s war apologies

The Asahi, one of Japan’s three major daily newspapers, has two contrasting Q&A format opinion pieces regarding Japan’s recent problems with China and Korea that some people may find interesting. The first is with a German freelance journalist Gebhard Hielscher, who was formerly Far East correspondent for the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

Q: What was your reaction to the recent outrage against Japan in China and South Korea?

A: My impression is that all along, Japan has been deliberately not trying to face the past, and hoping that these issues would go away. Japan has been more concerned about its relationship with the United States.

Running away from the issue of compensation to the two countries that were the main victims of Japan’s aggression, the Japanese have had it (protest) coming for all these years.

Our (Germany’s) main victims, aside from the Holocaust, were the Soviet Union and Poland, and we have done a lot for them. I always leave out the Israel issue because it is not part of the comparison: Japan did not commit a Holocaust. But what we did in Poland, which is colonize it, can be compared to what Japan did in the Korean Peninsula.

Germany didn’t pay direct reparations to Poland, or the Soviet Union, but the Allied Forces took a lot of industrial property out of Germany as a form of reparation. Also, Germany gave up 24 percent of its traditional territory to these two countries, the two biggest victims. We saw that as one way to pay our moral debt.

The intreview given as a response to Herr Hielscher, which disagrees from what I would consider a rather moderate position, and not the extreme nationalist stance that has been irritating everyone, is by Keio University professor Tomoyuki Kojima an expert on Chinese and East Asian affairs.

Q: Do you think Japan has compensated enough for wartime aggression, compared with Germany?

A: In terms of state-to-state compensation, I would say Japan has done more through the process of normalizing relations with many of its neighbors.

While there are countries that did not demand compensation, for those countries that did, we have paid compensation.

In the case of China, both Taiwan, with whom Japan normalized relations first, and mainland China, declared they would forfeit claims for reparations.

Taking the example of forced labor, a court has ruled that the former employer of forced laborers from China and Korea pay damages. But the same court did not rule on whether the state was liable, as that issue has been settled through bilateral negotiations.

In the case of South Korea, for example, Japan agreed in 1965 to provide grants and loans to the country. There is a problem that it was not clearly referred to as “compensation,” but in reality both sides agree that is what it was.

There are individual issues pertaining to the war that remain unresolved, and that is undeniable. Definitely Japan must do something.

But my view is that it is not worthwhile to simply consider Germany a model and criticize Japan for lack of atonement for the past.

Japan not yet totally cut off from East Asia

The Mainichi’s English language Waiwai feature reports that not all of Japan’s international relations have been damaged beyond repair by recent diplomatic gaffes.

One intrepid reporter braved the frontlines of China to find out.

“Welcome, I’m Nana!” one of the older-looking hostesses in a black dress greeted him in Japanese. “Is this your first visit?”

“Are you participating in a boycott of Japanese goods?” the reporter then asks her.

“What you say? Me no understand?” she replies.

“Never mind. Tell me, what do you think of the recent controversy over Japanese history textbooks?”

“You know, your eyes have got a horny glimmer,” she counters. “It means you wanna do ‘rabu-rabu’ with me, right?”

“Um, okay, let’s move on to a different subject. How do you feel about the prime minister’s making visits to worship at the Yasukuni Shrine?”

“Hey, listen, if you no take me out, I’m really pitiful,” she nags. “I don’t make money hanging around this bar. You Japanese men are all lechers, but I’m good at doing ‘etchi.’ How about I give you nice blow job and then ride you on top?”

And another conducted similar field research in Korea.

There he is introduced to a hostess named Ruby, who croons a currently popular Korean tune, a stirring melody entitled “Tok-do belongs to us.”

“This song used to be banned, but these days you often hear customers in Korea singing it,” she explains.

“Should I take that to mean you intend to declare war on me?” the reporter asks.

“Shhhhhs,” Ruby whispers. “Our ‘mama’ told us to avoid discussing political problems here at the club.”

“You know actually,” the reporter thinks out loud, “I’d like to make that generous cleavage between your breasts my territory for a little while. What do you say?”

Christopher Hitchens, full of dogshit

The new installment of Christopher Hitchens’ column in Slate describes North Korea in the typical Hitchens fashion: a dose of humor, erudite writing, high-brow cultural references, but in the typical pundit tradition has no real insights and at least two extraordinarily glaring mis-observations.

He claims that he “tries to avoid cliché” and yet still tells us that “North Korea is rather worse than Orwell’s dystopia.” Is there anything more cliché than comparisons with 1984? I would be a fool to disagree with his assertion here, but it is one that is horrifyingly obvious to anyone who has read even a single article about the situation in contemporary North Korea, and one which takes absolutely no imagination to make.

He also mentions that he has even been to North Korea, although his claim that “North Korea is almost as hard to visit as it is to leave” is quite false. While it is rather difficult for Americans to get tourist visas for the DPRK, urban-dwelling Chinese can enter quite easily, albeit restricted to certain tourist friendly zones. Actually it is quite easy for civilians (with the possible exception of US citizens) to book a North Korea tour through agencies such as Koryo Tours, based out of Beijing. This one company, and there are others, has one special tour listed per month, and advertises that they can arrange special ones for groups. The only caveat is that the government apparently bans journalists. Their website tells us:

On meeting with us at Koryo Tours’ office in Beijing we will require you to sign a form stating that you are not a journalist and that you will not publish anything about your trip. We are sorry to have to insist upon this but at the present time Journalists are not permitted to enter the DPRK, if you are a journalist and are interested in travelling to the DPRK then please let us know and we will be sure to let you know of any future opportunities.

Just because Christopher Hitchens can’t easily get a visa doesn’t mean that everybody else is so restricted.

But I save the best for last.

I was reduced to eating a dog, and I was a privileged “guest.”

So he’s been to North Korea, good for him. But has he ever been to South Korea? If he had, he would know that dog is not a meat of last resort in Korea, but traditionally eaten as a source of virility and considered a delicacy by many. How is somebody who knows so little about Korean culture writing about the region?

Teikoku Oil seeks rights to test-drill in disputed seas

From The Japan Times:

A Japanese oil company on Thursday requested test-drilling rights in the East China Sea, in disputed waters just a few kilometers from where China is preparing full-scale drilling.

Teikoku Oil Co. submitted an application to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to drill for oil and natural gas in three areas totaling 400 sq. km. Two of the areas lie flush against the Chun Xiao and Duan Qiao gas fields, where China’s drilling rigs are set up along the border of the exclusive economic zone claimed by Japan.

If Japan is going to piss off China by prospecting in contested waters, the least they could do is give the license to a company with a less offensive than than IMPERIAL OIL! If you look at any random Japanese article on this topic then you’ll see that ‘Teikoku Oil’ is written as ‘帝国石油’ – and that Teikoku(帝国) is the Japanese/Chinese word for Empire. It’s like they’re writing their China’s anti-Japan propaganda for them.