It really isn’t over. Vengeance deferred, festering. Till what?
A mere apology apparently, could never suffice. Irritation a constant, until you can have
your hobnail on some innocent decedents throat, or until you move through the
infamy and claim your own dignity that isn’t dependent on anyone else.
An official Chinese news portal associated with the Party’s
flagship paper has introduced a game that allows people to shoot dead convicted
Japanese War Criminals. The same War
Criminals who were hung and lay buried in the Yasukuni Shrine. The game makers claim this “exposes the
crimes” of those who were already long since hung for their crimes. This is simply racist jingoism. The people who made this, the people who
promote this, the people who play this, should be ashamed of themselves.
China never had their moment with the boot on the throat at
the end of the war. These War Criminals
each dropped to their deaths, with their necks snapped by their own weight,
falling on the rope. But neither China,
nor Korea ever got to open the trap door, or to hold fast the rope. And, this is the hard part, they never
will. The War Criminals, are already
dead.
It is shameful of Japan to officially honor these particular
war dead. They shouldn’t. China and the United States, and South Korea
and North Korea are right to say that such activity is offensive. But officially promoting a vehicle where
Chinese people, and in particular, Chinese young people who enjoy first person
shooter games, can blow the heads off of War Criminals, executed some sixty-nine years ago, under the guise of education
encourages violent fantasies and racist hatred and does nothing to educate,
resolve, evolve or in any way speak to the majesty of Chinese
civilization. Instead, the nation is wilfully infantilized. They cultivate what is
most base, most craven and most cowardly in the national character and impede
the China’s reclamation of anything glorious.
It is human to indulge in fantasies of wanting to put the
boot on the throat of an aggressor. If
you're the victim of a mugging, you can’t help but heal by imagining, at least,
revenge. But to cultivate that sentiment
as a national policy for generation, after generation, after the fact gets the
nation absolutely nowhere. Indeed, it gets you further away from a point of
healing and reconciliation. Reasonably
intelligent Japanese people will only dismiss this as the nonsense of a violent
simpleton. If you want to change behavior,
if you want to cultivate what is best in the nation, show your degree of
civility by arguing matters with dignity.
Japan will be influenced positively by a China it can once again, look
up to, not some place taught to growl or endure stentorian, racist, theatrics.
And certainly there aren’t more than a dozen people who give
a toss about what I say on the topic.
Where is the Chinese person brave enough to stand up to this scurrying
behavior and speak out clearly against racism, against the official cultivation
of hate? Where is the Japanese brave
enough forcefully call an unconditional official reckoning, to shame the
equivocation of the neo militarists with their trucks and their speakers? We need the courage of 淑人君子[1], not the fitful scurrying of 小人[2].
“Imani” is the Swahili word for “faith.” Faith in humanity’s potential to evolve and
cooperate is, if not a more likely an outcome than self destruction, at least a
possibility. We are here, after
all. I need a steel rail to hold on to
when I reckon with all the default hatred in this neighborhood. I’ll choose to ascribe faith, Imani in that. But faith is dark, angular and tested,
always, like the Dewey Redman song of the same name. It appears on “The Ear of the Beholder” from
1973. Majestic, sad, resolved,
resolution of wounds long scarred will be a similarly complicated
progression.
Dewey Redman is usually associated with “free jazz’ or the
avant garde through his work with Ornette Coleman that dates back to their time
together in the high school marching band.
This disc is pushing the boundaries of melody in a way that, for that
time at least feels warm and genuine.
Born in Fort Worth Texas in 1931, he lived long enough to see his son
Joshua secure great fame as a tenor player as well. I hope we will one day see the sons and
daughters of bitter Chinese and complacent Japanese, do better than their
parents and certainly their grandparents did at finding an honorable
resolution.
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