Difficult to believe...
I find it very difficult to understand sometimes how people can behave. It's all very well when we see the best of people, and wouldn't it be great if that was all we ever saw? People at their very best are the very best. In the sense that they do credit to themselves, have a right to feel good about themselves and enhance, by their good behaviour, the world we all live in. Some people, it is likely true, are born good in that (I would like to believe) they cannot conceive of ever behaving in a manner that would be harmful to others, let alone themselves. That their inbred, inborn sense of ethical values and human morals lead them to behave in a universally loving (for want of another, perhaps better descriptive) manner.Others, and that is, sadly, most of us, require the strictures and structures that society places upon social, public behaviour to ensure that we (at least most of the time) behave in a manner befitting a member of a civic and civil society.
It's when the state to whom the individual is answerable and vice versa somehow fails, that we have a true problem. We think that we know which states can lead their populations astray and it is never the civilized ones, those which have reached a pinnacle of human achievement in the arts and culture, science, philosophy, medicine, architecture. But we also know that is not so, since World War II was initially waged for supremacy against other nations by a country whose culture was widely respected by those very other countries whom it sought to gain hegemony over.
I am personally puzzled by a country and a people which I grew to love and respect when I had the good fortune to live there for a short while. My head was completely turned when we lived in Tokyo. It felt as though I'd somehow fallen through time, space and geography to a wonderland of the exotic where the jewels of history, culture, art and public civility shone with a brightness and an allure that nothing could dispel.
All the while we lived in Tokyo I was aware that Japan had behaved in a tragically horrible way toward Korea and China from around the first quarter of the 20th century until the Second World War was over. I also knew that much of Japanese culture, its language, its religion, its art was originally derived from India, China and Korea over millennia through a slow process of absorption, although I also was aware that Japan was more than a little reluctant to admit this osmosis from its neighbours in the mists of history.
Living there, I delighted in the people, their public courtesy and kindness, for all of this was very evident and much practised. I admired their physical beauty, the characteristics of their outer selves, their manner of living. I thought of Tokyo (a true megopolis with a very crowded population of some 14 million people) for so it was, as a city of neighbourhoods, each portion of which was fairly self-sufficient unto itself, with its temple, gardens, neighbourhood mom-and-pop shops (the rice, vegetable and fruit, tea, fish, coffeeshops, garment, household items) everywhere serving the close neighbourhood. There was a small local police presence in every such neighbourhood whose function was to keep order by knowing what was happening at any given time in their precinct (not, I felt, insiduously, but rather in an openly avuncular manner). These Kobans (small police stations the size of a garden shed) could be approached for any type of assistance, including locating a destination from a detailed map (most of Tokyo's streets locations are unnamed and the houses thereon unnumbered) hung for that purpose in the Koban).
Ambient noise was frowned upon, so very seldom did cars use their horns, and people had a tendency to speak quietly in public. Every evening at five o'clock a sweet sounding electronic tune sounded in every neighbourhood in the city to inform the residents that it was 5:00 p.m. Time to leave work, time to gather for the family meal. (Most Salarymen prided themselves on working overtime, then partly to avoid the crush of traffic as people wended their way home from the office, they would visit local bars, and exit when thoroughly soused. Despite which, one seldom sees a nasty drunk; rather they become sentimental and sweet as they lurch their way along the streets.)
How did such a people who pride themselves on their conformity (the old adage of the square nail in the round hole being pounded to fit is quite acceptable there) to social mores, their peaceable nature, their manifest love of nature, their adherence to Buddhist teachings, their respect for the tradition of the Imperial family, their cleaving to the place of authority on their crowded little isles with their countless mountains ever give themselves over to pillage, rape and murder of their near eastern neighbours?
Human nature. In which we demean or demonize others to permit ourselves to look upon those others as less than human to enable dominance and worse, over them. We see the results of this in every hemisphere, every country in the world, to greater or lesser degree.
Little wonder that China, harbouring ancient grudges against the Japanese invaders, let alone those of more recent times, is doing its utmost as one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council is attempting to bar Japan from joining. Although China, during its Cultural Revolution was capable of regarding millions of her own people as dispensible to the greater cause, they now use Japan's dreadful history of cruel imperialism to inflame their people against Japan, resulting in mass demonstrations within China.
It is true that after the war, when Japan reflected what American General MacArthur constructed of it in bringing it back into the fold of acceptable humanity, the Japanese although (rightfully) bitter about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, did feel great regret and militarization was strictly forbidden, written into the new Constitution of the country. Their armed forces became self-defence forces only. Members of the armed services dressed in street clothing, to change into uniforms only when they reached the Ministry of Defence. It was not unknown for uniformed members of the military to be attacked on the streets by still-outraged and bitter Japanese.
Still, official Japan dislikes admitting it was ever wrong to invade its neighbours, to wage war. Case in point: the recent publication of school textbooks in which Japan's role in the war is never quite admitted. The Rape of Nanking does not appear with an admission of commission and wrong. Pride is extremely important, it does not admit to gross wrongdoing. Another human trait.
The more things change the more they remain the same. Human nature is so profoundly blighted, we will never, it seems, rise above the very worst of which we are capable. Instead of realizing our potential for accommodation with one another, we appear destined to go marching through history repeating our dismal acts of outrage against 'the other'. Sad, sad.
posted by Pieface @ Monday, April 18, 2005
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