The other day I stumbled across my name
on a BBS devoted to social and political issues.
By William Wetherall
Some threads of the forum were dominated by activists who follow the needles of one or another ideological compass in their pursuit of happiness. Posters to the thread in which my name appeared were engaged in speculation about contributors to the scandalized (now gone) WaiWai feature of the (now mostly gone) Daily Mainichi News.
One poster linked my name with some lawsuits concerning my children and Japan's Nationality Law between 1978 and 1988. The writer was under the impression the cases were related to revisions that became effective from 1985. I contended, even then, that the law was being revised despite the litigation.
Another poster connected me with a translation of Oe Kenzaburo's A Quiet Life, and also profiled the person with whom I collaborated on the translation. The poster, who appears to have traced our backgrounds on Google, failed to say I had previously published a translation of one of Oe's short stories and an essay about Oe -- and that the principal translator of the novel is a good friend of Oe's.
I was also tied with Doi Takako. A House of Representatives parliamentarian when the nationality cases were in court, she staunchly argued that a child born to a Japanese woman married to an alien should have the same right to acquire Japanese nationality as one fathered by a Japanese man whatever the mother's nationality. Apparently the poster had not discovered that a newspaper columnist at the time had mentioned my name in the same front-page article in which he dropped Doi's name.
The connection of stale dots in the thread was not, however, about me but others I was alleged to know. Thanks to the manner in which the thread publicized the Google-retrieved revelation that we had crossed paths, they too may be said to have crossed paths with the likes of Doi and Oe, neither of whom I have ever met -- but neither have I met Will Smith except on the big screen.
Now imagine all the people that Oe and Doi -- he a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, she arguably the best-known woman in late 20th-century Japanese politics -- have met somewhere. Imagine all the people -- famous, notorious, anonymous -- whose sweaty palms these two celebrities have pressed in the course of their public and private travels and travails. Did I mention that my dad got Babe Ruth's autograph?
I might complain that Internet wolves have too much time on their hands. But they could say the same about me as I write this blog. My dad also has a doubly signed color portrait of Barak and Michelle on his bathroom counter.
The Internet has become a village square, a community well, a public bath (and, let's face it, latrine). Everyone gathers there to spread the latest rumors about local and world affairs. Before I forget, I ought to confess that I spotted Adlai Stevenson II (1900-1965) from my dad's shoulders one afternoon in Golden Gate Park.
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) -- the man to read in the 1960s when I published a couple of essays called "What Shall We Do With Andromeda?" (1965) and "Cybernetics and Semantics" (1966) -- had that much right, among a few other predictions that have turned out to be mostly true.
"Six degrees of separation" is also turning out to be more urban than myth. May everyone caught in the webs of gossipy Internet threads take a deep breath and bask in their fifteen nanoseconds of fame.
28 July 2009
Disclosure 1 I wrote a few articles for WaiWai. They have been posted for many years, and remain entirely public, on my Yosha Research website.
Disclosure 2 My dad is pushing 100. He still drives, shops, cooks, tends large flower and vegetable gardens, walks in the woods, writes inspirational stories, practices law -- and mentions Ruth and Stevenson during the interludes in his praise for the Obamas.
