2009-11-30

Post from past

Japan was a veritable battlefield in 1969.

By William Wetherall

People were fighting everywhere -- in the streets, on campuses, in the countryside, on the big screen and in the press.

The 21 November 1969 issue of Shukan Posuto is packed with war stories. It was the 14th issue of a magazine launched that August. The contents page also calls it "Post: The Opinion Weekly for Men".

My mother turned 56 on its cover date. I was 28, single, and barely certain of where I was and what I was doing at the moment. I was incapable of thinking where I would be and what I'd be doing four decades later. It never occurred to me, then, in nine years I would become the father of a girl and sue Japan for her nationality.

As a major in Japanese language, literature, and anthropology, though, I had managed to stay abreast of current events in Japan, albeit from California. April 1969 had witnessed the peak of violence in clashes between students and police at Tokyo University. I was then at Berkeley, itself a war zone by the time I returned to the campus in 1967 after a four year absence.

I had dropped out in 1963 after studying electrical engineering, a Sputnik generation techie who lost his political innocence during the Cuban Crisis of 1962. Found eligible for the draft, I chose instead to join the Army.

John Kennedy was assassinated while I was in boot camp. I was trained as a medical corpsman, the specialty I selected when I enlisted, then assigned to an ambulance company. When the Vietnam War broke out in the fall of 1964, I was retrained as a medical laboratory technician, and worked at hospitals in California and New Mexico before serving the last nine months of my three-year obligation at a general hospital in Yokohama.

I had seriously studied the Pacific War in high school, built model fighter planes, and collected some war souvenirs. I had long been interested in Asia, and a friend at Berkeley had switched from Math to Chinese. So I migrated from Engineering to Oriental Languages, as the department was called when I returned to college in the fall of 1967 after working half a year as a surveyor in the Tahoe National Forest.

I got my BA in June 1969, then worked as I had every summer with the forest service, taking advantage of my engineering background. This season, though, I stayed in the field through the fall and until the first snow, making as much money as I could while preparing to go to Japan in January the following year. I would be living with a family and teaching English, both opportunities which came through people I had met at Berkeley.

I can't remember where in the Sierras I was camped when the 21 November 1969 issue of Post came out. For sure, the woods were quieter and more peaceful than most parts of the world -- at least for humans. Other members of the food chain -- bears, mountain lions, wolves, coyotes, deer, hawks, quail, and other furry and feathery fauna, the snakes and lizards, fish, insects, and myriad microorganisms, not to forget the trees and plants -- probably have less romantic understandings of life.

Mishima Yukio

The issue features a three-page black-and-white photo feature on Mishima Yukio in uniform with his Shield Society. A cartoon in another feature shows a member of the society lifting his hat when, while walking alone, he gets a lot of attention from admiring girls.

Barely a year later, on 25 November 1970, Mishima and a few members of his private army staged a coup d'etat. After giving a speech, he ripped open his belly and a comrade cut off his head before following him in death.

All this happened a short walk from where I was teaching that day. The incident set me off on studies of self-destruction and mass media that continue today. My daughter was born on the same day eight years later.

Oda Makoto

Yet another article in the 21 November 1969 issue of Post introduces Oda Makoto's launch on 17 November of the weekly magazine Shukan Anpo, which aimed to undermine the planned renewal in 1970 of the Japan-US mutual security treaty, called Anpo in short.

The magazine reported that prime minister Sato Eisaku would leave for the United States on 17 November. He would also arrive that day.

On 21 November, Sato and president Richard Nixon would agree to the restoration of Okinawa as part of Japan three years later -- but that development was not known at the time the Post went to press. Okinawa had been under US administration since the end of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945.

In 1974, the year Nixon resigned in the Watergate scandal, Sato received half the Nobel Peace Prize, ostensibly for his promotion of three principles regarding nuclear weapons -- "Never to produce arms of this nature, never to own them, and never to introduce them into Japan." His reception of the ward became as controversial as Barrack Obama's 35 years later.

Antiwar movement

21 October had witnessed the 4th annual International Antiwar Day. On this day in 1966, the General Council of Trade Unions of Japan had held a nationwide strike protesting the war in Vietnam. In subsequent years, the union called upon other labor organizations in the world to join the cause.

America mounted and supported the war in part from US bases in Okinawa and Japan. Okinawa, still under American administration, had not yet been returned to Japan.

Oda's magazine was published by Anposha, a company set up by antiwar activists, some of them involved, as he was, in an underground railroad for US soldiers AWOL in Japan from Vietnam. The inaugural edition, Post remarks, also came out in an English version.

Some of the covers of Anpo were as gory as the wars they protested. A friend who saw one wrote: "One doesn't see political passion like the good old days. Maybe I'll dust off my old Zengakuren helmet, grab me a geba-bou and march on the Diet building, just for fun. Might get my name in the paper." I, too, would make the news, since I'd have to bail (or break) him out of jail.

Twenty-nine years later, I was to publish an autobiographical short story by Oda in the journal Japanese Literature Today. Oda died in 2007, shortly before the story was translated, into Italian, with some of my notes.

The Post article also connects Oe Kenzaburo with Oda's weekly Anpo project. Oe, a novelist, had already made a name for himself as staunch antiwar critic. I became deeply involved in translating some of his early short stories after returning to graduate school at Berkeley in 1973. One of these translations was later published, and I also collaborated with a friend on a translation of one of Oe's novels.

Terayama Shuji

The early issues of Post had a two-page black-and-white photo feature in the back called "Post Beauty / Monday" since the magazine hit the stands on Monday. The "beauty" in the 21 November 1969 issue consists of two photographs of a woman a la naturel against a natural background.

These are only nude shots in the magazine, which by the end of the century was the leading commuter weekly. It was banned by a number of international airlines because of its over exposure of provocative photography that included pubic hair.

The photographs were accompanied by a poem attributed to Terayama Shuji (1935-1983) -- poet, dramatist, novelist, film director, critic, essayist, actor, and otherwise jack-of-all artistic trades. The received poem, which I have translated here, is untitled -- unless the title was meant to be "Monday".

Three women have died
one of illness
one of love
one of being forgotten

At a harbor on Monday
gulls alight on the roof
I in the dark attic room
blankly watch the offing

My mother was ill
my younger sister was in love
my wife was waiting for my return
but
I on a journey
today too am watching a cloudy sky
thinking of an aimless tomorrow

Three women have died
one of illness
one of love
one of being forgotten

Armed and dangerous

I would be remiss were I not to mention the two-page feature on Fuji Junko -- now Fuji Sumiko -- then on the rise to the zenith of her enormous popularity and still high on my list of favorite actresses. Post observes that she won acclaim without having to undress.

One still shows her and starmate Takakura Ken on horses in Hokkaido, ready for trouble. Another shows her standing beside a horse, with a short rifle instead of a sword, looking more like a western frontier woman than a yakuza scarlet peony gambler.

Fuji Junko's photographs follow a two-page spread showing US Marines on live-ammunition field exercises at the Higashi Fuji Firing Range at the foot of Mt. Fuji. They had come to Japan from Okinawa to undergo training related to the Vietnam war on the eve of the renewal of the Anpo agreement.

One photo shows some farmers, in straw hats, watching shells explode on rolling hills in the distance. The title of the article is "'Foeless battleground' spewing fire".

Hunters and gatherers

All this from a weekly magazine published in Japan in November 1969. I did not buy the issue until 24 November 2009, on the eve of my daughter's 31st birthday.

My mother was 89 when she died in 2003. She had raised a pet deer from a fawn on the farm where she grew up and hated guns. Her father hunted deer and her mother's maiden name was Hunter. My grandmother put up venison in Mason jars for winter.

I qualified, as do most soldiers, as a Marksman with a rifle. I was somewhat disappointed that I didn't make the Sharpshooter grade. Before the Vietnam War began, I had become a Conscientious Objector.

Looking back, I realize that the sucking chest wound packs, IV kits, and morphine ampules borne by medics can be every bit as lethal to the cause of peace as the automatic rifles, fragmentation grenades, and flamethrowers carried by infantrymen.

30 November 2009

2009-11-17

Self-disposal

What do you with your own body when you've killed someone?

By William Wetherall

After an accident or an impulse of rage, if not a premeditated act, your choices are few. You turn yourself in, or do yourself in. Or you leave the victim's body and run, then turn or do yourself in. Or you go underground and disinter yourself as a different person.

Or -- you dispose of the victim's body and hang around town until police discover it -- then surrender, fight to the finish, or flee and live to die another day.

Getting rid of the bodies

Hiding a woman's body under a mat in an outhouse behind his home, in the mountains of Miyazaki prefecture in 1874, proved successful for a man named Gitaro -- until a dog sniffed out the corpse and hauled the woman's head into the village. Gitaro was immediately arrested. He was probably beheaded within weeks if not days.

Then as now, it was possible to flee to another part of the country and change one's identity. But you would have hoofed it. There were few horses, no planes, trains, buses, automobiles, bicycles. No convenience stores, Internet cafes, capsule hotels. No ATMs or cellphones. Photography was not yet common. Telegraphy was just beginning. Radio and fingerprinting were decades away. Television and DNA were unimaginable.

In late March 2007, Lindsay Hawker, of Tokyo, was reported missing. The following day, Ichihashi Tatsuya fled through the ranks of the police who had come to the door of his condominium in Ichikawa city, near Tokyo, to question him about her disappearance. The police then found her body in a sand-filled bathtub on his veranda.

Ichihashi, reportedly barefoot when he dashed off, simply vanished. And for over two and a half years, he gave Japanese police, and the whole world, the slip.

Then, on 4 November 2009, news began to break of reports that someone who might have been Ichihashi had gotten a nose job at a Nagoya cosmetic surgery clinic in late October. The next day police released a pre-op photo.

The next several days were full of one flash report after another about the hot pursuit of Ichihashi's past and present whereabouts and activities. His choices, though, remained the same -- to continue to flee, give himself up, or kill himself.

By the 10th the police had arrested their man at an Osaka ferry terminal where he was awaiting a boat for Okinawa. He did not resist, but submitted -- very much like an antelope that races and darts away from a chasing lion, is finally hauled down, struggles against the first tears of claws and teeth, then suddenly jerks still and resigns itself to its fate.

Dead or alive

Immediately after Ichihashi ran off in 2007, police put out the usual bulletins and wanted posters. In time they also offered a huge reward for information leading to his arrest.

A lean 180 centimeters, he would have stood out in most crowds. His face, too, was not the sort that would easily have been missed in a herd of commuters, shoppers, or amusement goers.

Disposing of a body is difficult, especially if the body is one's own. Any vanishing act, regardless of the circumstances, is a form of self-disposal.

Changing one's identity is not an uncommon form of self-disposal. All manner of people adopt aliases and guises to pursue livelihoods or obsessions in a world other than the one in which they are known and recognized by their parents, neighbors, friends, even spouse.

But suicide is also a form of removing oneself from the present world. And suicide is a much more predictable behavior following homicide or suspicion of homicide.

Most people who commit suicide, following an act they know will extremely and unfavorably change their lives, do so in order to avoid the consequences of their act. In the case of a crime, the consequences include not only investigation, suspicion, detention, arrest, prosecution, trial, conviction, imprisonment, and possibly execution -- but, often, also overwhelming guilt and shame.

Suicides following homicide are usually seen as admissions of guilt, but some people kill themselves by way of denying charges. Some suicides are committed in flight. Others are committed by resisting arrest and provoking police to shoot to kill. Still others are committed in captivity. And a few are committed by exploiting a penal system that allows a death sentence.

Fleeing, and committing suicide in a place and manner in which one's body will not soon if ever be discovered, however, requires considerable planning and effort, including knowledge of local geography and a long list of other conditions.

Bodies wash ashore. They are exposed when the snow melts. Hunters, gatherers, and lovers who stray off trails trip over roots, fallen limbs, and skeletons.

If you drive to the locality where you intend to die, the car will be found. Drive it off a road into a reservoir behind a dam, and it will be seen in the next drought. Cliffs, piers, ravines, and wrecking yards are equally uncertain venues.

Life wish

It is easy to view Ichihashi as a cold-blooded killer who deserves to die. It is quite another matter to understand his human desperation to survive under conditions and pressure that would have defeated most people -- driven them to give themselves up or take their own lives.

Most criminal psychiatrists will focus on the reasons someone would murder another human being and dispose of the body in the manner Ichihashi is alleged to have done regarding Hawker. While she is not to be blamed for her tragic death, students of victim behavior will want to know what she might have done to trigger the violence that killed her.

Yet there is also considerable interest in the measures Ichihashi took to implement his obviously strong motives to remain both free and alive. The crimes he is supposed to have committed may be heinous. And his evasion of judicial review and possible punishment may reflect a lack of remorse if not a lack of faith in the courts.

Despite the various scores of music Ichihashi apparently did not want to face, his desire to remain free -- at all cost of imprisoning himself in a new identity -- is an act that is full of extraordinary human drama. The extremes to which he went to remain both free and alive demand as much understanding as everything else.

Police did not anticipate the surgically alterations. They are now shortlisting clinics that perform feature-altering operations as places to notify and canvass when a suspect takes flight and is not quickly apprehended.

As time passed and there was no scent of Ichihashi's trail, I began to imagine him finding a place to take his own life where his body might never be found, at least not in my epoch. Suicidal vanishing would take a bit of smarts and resources in any country, and would seem especially difficult in Japan. But not a few people have died in the middle of even cities like Tokyo and its sprawling suburbs and not been found for weeks, months, even years.

Parental feelings

Hawker's parents and family showed the usual range of emotions. Her father's feelings toward Ichihashi, after his arrest, were more compassionate than vengeful -- which reflects the depth of his character in a world where too many families of murder victims think only of retribution.

Ichihashi's parents -- his father a brain surgeon who resigned his post after his son's flight, his mother a former dentist -- were as shocked as any parents would be to learn that a child was wanted for murder. Of course they hoped he would turn himself in and wear the proverbial shoe if it fit him.

They also appear to have been genuinely shocked to hear, two and half years later, that he was still alive -- and to learn of the lengths to which he had gone to become another person -- the multiple surgeries to change some of his facial features, the various forms of dress including women's clothing, wigs, and makeup to disguise himself -- the manner in which he financed his new life with money earned while working for a construction company and living in its dormitory under an assumed name -- the possibility that he had been seeking a bogus passport to help him leave the country.

In interviews Ichihashi's parents gave shortly before and after his arrest, they said they had not thought him capable of surviving as he had. They also revealed that, as the days, weeks, and months passed after his flight, they had feared -- then concluded and even hoped -- that he was dead.

By all accounts, Ichihashi was a normally disfunctional young man of the kind who had been raised to achieve, with all the advantages of opportunity and support. He played basketball and ran track, and had friends -- but was also known for his fits of anger and, in the end, his isolation.

After graduating from college, he had not worked but continued to live, mostly off his parents, while residing at the Ichikawa condominium, which apparently belonged to a relative. Something was obviously missing in a life that left him short of his own dreams of becoming a doctor. Apparently he then aimed to polish his English in preparation for seeing if the grass was greener abroad, and led to his acquaintance with Hawker, who taught English.

As of this writing, a week after his arrest, Ichihashi has reportedly eaten nothing nor answered questions about Hawker. He is also said not to want authorities to contact or otherwise involve his parents.

Media-friendly psychiatrists are making a killing in TV appearances speculating as to what continues to make Ichihashi tick -- or not tick. Time may not tell, even as it heals some of the wounds.

I would predict that, at some point, Ichihashi will begin to talk -- and substantiate all the gory details that Hawker's father understandably hopes the police will confirm but not reveal. In the meantime, the fact that he is drinking tea is no assurance that he is not still thinking of ways to vanish -- by defeating the 7/24 suicide watch.

17 November 2009

2009-11-12

Transphiliaphobia

Is it possible to overcome a morbid hate of morbid love?

By William Wetherall

Asiaphilia is a warped love of Asia. Asiaphiliaphobia is emotional opposition to Asiaphilia, whereas anti-Asiaphilia is reasoned opposition. Then there is "beyond Asiaphilia".

Color fevers

An Asiaphile or Asiaphiliac is a person who loves Asia. These words are also used to mean a person who suffers from "Asiaphilia" defined as a racial fetish for Asian men or women.

Asiaphiles and Asiaphiliacs are mostly "non-Asians" who suffer from "yellow fever". But some "Asians" are also inflicted by this disease -- caused by a virus that has white, black, and other variants.

Critics of color philias view tastes in racial traits alone as superficial or shallow, on a par with height, body mass, or earlobe preferences and attractions for facial dimples or washboard abs. They see racial tastes based on stereotypic ethnic expectations as a form of racism. They are probably right.

Yet, as Woody Allen piped about his love for a much younger woman who he had helped raise when she was a girl, the heart knows what it wants. The difference between pathological and healthy feelings is mostly a matter of defining unacceptable or damaging behaviors. Such distinctions beg questions like agreeable or harmful to whom.

Abnormality turns out to be anything not normal. Deviance is that which veers toward the negative. Depravity is possession by evil and wicked thoughts and temptations that cause falls into sin. The most forbidden acts are called taboos.

Sexual transgressions abound. Incest is proscribed. Premarital relations are discouraged. Extramarital affairs are cause for divorce. Rape is criminalized. Prostitution is prohibited but tolerated. The definitions and consequences of such behaviors vary from place to place and case by case, and shift with time.

Drawing lines

The lines between love and philia, and hate and phobia, are also fuzzy. Philias and phobias are addictions, attachments, fetishes, obsessions, paranoias, morbid dreads or fears, abhorrence. Yet love and hate share opposite ends of the spectrum of affect. Both are blind to reason. Thought and dispassion render romantic love unconditional. Understanding and compassion defuse hate.

You can love someone because, on balance, you want to associate with the person -- despite some things you may not like and might actually hate about the person.

You can hate war because you know what war is -- yet you recognize that resisting and counterattacking an invader is as sensible as stopping the spread of, and extinguishing, a raging fire that threatens your home or neighborhood -- if not another country.

Philias and phobias, though, involve infatuations with, indulgences in, or fixations on objects as embodiments of imaginary, fantasized, or projected -- rather than actual -- traits.

A woman may lust after men whose physiques and mannerisms evoke, for her, masculinity, strength, adventure, wealth, and freedom. A man may crave women with physical and behavioral traits which, in his mind, promise sexual pleasure and servitude. These are only a few of the returns that individuals of both sexes seek from social investments in objects of sexual desire -- including, of course, everlasting love, companionship, and children.

What is the difference between an act of love and the feeding of a habit? When does craving swarthy skin or long blond hair become a form of substance abuse?

Luring a person who happens to be an object of carnal philia into marriage or another kind of conjugal relationship, and continuing to imbibe in that person's physical charms, may be like drinking wine for breakfast. But what if the dependency is coincidental (concomitant? comorbid?) with a courtship that involves complete recognition and appreciation of, and full respect and gratitude for, the person beneath the skin or under the hair?

Is "love" of the kind that leads to stable marriages and families, in societies that value personal freedom and choice, possible without allowances for the complex chemistries of interpersonal attraction? Across all manner of old fences that may still, today, be posted with no-trespassing signs?

Crossing lines

Romantic crossings of lines of faith, class, caste, blood, nation, and race can evoke the strongest revulsion and draw the most powerful censure from people who oppose mixing -- in their family or community, if not in principle.

I have been a subscriber to Amerasia since its start in 1971. The focus of Volume 25, Number 2, 1999 is "Crossing the Color Line: The End of the 20th Century".

The issue includes an article called "Yellow Visions" by Darrell Y. Hamamoto (pages 169-173). In the article, a review of the Sixteenth Annual San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, Hamamoto says this (page 171).

Each film confronts different aspects of Asiaphilia as it plays out through sexuality, food, and love. In an amusing twist, the autobiographical Beyond Asiaphilia (Valerie Soe, 1997) poses the provocative question as to whether an Asian American woman -- after a lifetime of racialized lust for blue-eyed White men -- can be considered an Asiaphile after falling in love with Hong Kong screen sensation Chow Yun-Fat and thereafter dreaming desirously of Yellow men.

San Francisco video artist and writer Valerie Soe is known for a number of stimulating works and productions. One of the more remarkable and personal -- an interactive video exhibition called "Mixed Blood" (1992) -- examines "interracial relationships" and "cross-cultural intimacy" in "the Asian American community" among other themes related to "miscegenation".

Since December 2008, Soe has had a blog called beyondasiaphilia. The blog, exceeding the promise of its name, is the antithesis of Asiaphilia -- a shrine, in its own right, to numerous counter fetishes.

11 November 2009