Current Issue: KJ #67

KJ #67 is diversely peopled: We meet Afghans, young and old, as they daily absorb the brunt of endless war; sumo wrestlers as they slam into one another in the ring, then loosen up together with comics, DVDs and Gameboys. We travel back in time with a family that endured Stalin’s mass deportation of Soviet Koreans to Central Asia. We enjoy artworks and observations from eight newly-discovered children’s book illustrators living all across Asia, prizewinners in Japan’s Noma Concours. We explore Arab cinema with directors from Kuwait and Afghanistan, both featured artists at the 2007 Singapore Film Festival.

Bloggers check in from Iraq, three Iraqis and two Americans, telling us what they see (and do) in the former “cradle of civilization.” Classic diarist Sei Shonagon is here too, as fresh and penetrating as ever, in extracts from a new translation of her Pillow Book, along with a marvelous essay by her new English translator. In rural Japan, an American expat offers lucid insights and images gleaned from years of living in a village that bears the name of her husband’s family.

Koreans modernize their lunar New Year, with fortune-tellers morphing into “life counselors.” Japanese schoolchildren decorate their hands for a peace exhibit at Iraq’s Children’s Protection Center, and we hear from long-term peace activist Oda Makoto about his life-altering childhood experience in WWII. A new Japanese short story intimately explores ethnic and ethical tensions in primary school life circa the mid-1960s. Afghan American Lida Abdullah reconstructs her world as a ‘70s child refugee in the haunting poem “Kuchis.” In another short story, master poet Basho and a young companion wander cantankerously on an Edo-Period journey of leisure. Author Dazai Osamu amuses himself on a sultry summer night by slyly deconstructing the classic “Summer Moon” renga. We even encounter, up all too close and personal, the loathed oni (child-scaring demons) of Kyoto’s Mount Yoshida.

As always, there are reviews and plenty more. See full contents below, or better yet, subscribe. KJ consistently puts us in touch with the lives of people we might never otherwise meet. Four issues a year. An affordable and treasured gift.

FULL CONTENTS:

03 Peace Monuments by Children, Iraq Aug. 2007
Kinoshita Mutsumi, Japanese organizer

04 In the House — A Foreign Wife in Rural Japan:
The Japanese Heart, Strokes, Dance, Harvest
Rebecca Otowa

I've danced here almost every summer of my married life. I’ve danced in yukata and fancy dress, with my husband and my in-laws, with neighbors I didn’t like at all, and friends I was glad to see. I’ve taught the dance to my sons when they could barely walk, and given them my beer can to hold when they towered over me. But mostly I’ve fitted myself into that groove and danced the bon-odori, making circuit after circuit, because this is one of the times when I can hold close to my heart the elusive certainty that I too am part of this place.

10 CONVERSATION
Inside the Smoke: Oda Makoto, Author and Activist
Brian Covert

Arched over the coffee table in his seaside apartment in Nishinomiya, Japan, Oda Makoto is looking through New York Times pages from World War II. The page he is looking for — dated June 15, 1945 — shows an aerial photo taken during the U.S. carpet bombing of the merchant city of Osaka, where he was born and raised. “I was there,” he says, “inside the smoke.” Exactly two months after that photo was published, Japan surrendered.

As one of Japan’s most celebrated postwar authors, as an activist against the U.S. war on Vietnam, as an advocate for disaster victims neglected by the Japanese government, as a voice for peace in the wake of September 11, 2001, and as an uncompromising critic of racial and ethnic discrimination — Oda has remained right there in the midst of the heat, using the power of his words to appeal to the conscience of society.

We regret to note that Oda-san passed away on July 30th, 2007, just before this issue came back from the printer.

16 Origami Lion
Jacob Adelman
The sumo wrestlers stood on the woven-straw floor, looking like grounded parade balloons as they fidgeted on their feet in baggy sweat clothes. They had bandages on their arms and ankles, bruises and welts on their faces, bulbous ears scarred into sickly nuggets. They towered over me at six and seven feet, some pushing 400 pounds. At five-and-a-half feet and 135 pounds, I was the oddball. I was ready for a beating.

28 FICTION
A Day and a Half of Freedom
Otani Shogo (Translated by Ralph McCarthy)
In mid-1960s Tokyo, kids went to school until noon on Saturday and most grownups worked at the office until two P.M. or so.

Of course, everyone who worked or went to school loved Saturday afternoon—the start of a day-and-a-half of freedom. But what Kazuo especially liked was the atmosphere of the streets, the way time seemed suddenly to slow. Perhaps just the prospect of Sunday was enough to impart a collective sense of ease and luxury. The town, normally crowded with people rushing about as if prodded by the second hand of some frantic clock, seemed to sit back and heave a great sigh, releasing all the tension and fatigue of the week. Kazuo often took walks by himself on Saturday afternoons, just to enjoy the feeling in the air and that sigh-like slowing of time.

The Green Summer Wind
John Givens
The old man sat gazing out on summer mountains stacked beneath a white sky, the heated masses of green and blue-green resolving themselves back into the more distant layers of brown and beige and dove gray before leaching away finally into a pale wash of heat haze. His road companion—a youth postponing the burdens of adult responsibility—scowled petulantly at him, as if to question how long they would be perched here in this wilderness of mountains and sky and how far they would have to walk before they could stop and sit down again, both conditions displeasing to the boy.

Tengu
Osamu Dazai (Translated by Ralph McCarthy)
Smells of things / In the marketplace / The summer moon.
That's a good verse. A precise expression of a very specific sensory experience. I always visualize a fishermen's market. Others may picture Jinbôchô in Kanda or be reminded of the night stalls in Hatchôbori—it's different for everyone, I suppose, but any scene that comes to mind will do. What's amazing is how vividly the verse serves to bring back a summer night from your own past... If a man were to compose only three verses as outstanding as this in the course of his life, he might well go down in history as a master of haikai.

40 REALIZATIONS
Setsubun
Sage Einarsen
It is astonishing how a few words can change the way we see the world. They can imbue us with that extra dash of hope that makes each day shine a little more brightly, or strip it of any glow whatsoever. Words can give us a glimpse of true beauty, inspire us to greatness, instigate social change through a single speech; yet conversely, words can incite anger and hatred, spark horrific wars, and rob even our happiest moments of any fulfillment. Words are what we frame our experiences with, and the labels we attach to our memories. It is easy to forget how such tremendous power rests in a tool we wield daily, and the influence it has on others.

42 Korea Modernizes the Lunar New Year
Hyejin Kim
On the first day of 2007, six hundred thousand Koreans visited the fortunetelling section of the popular internet portal Daum and a further four hundred thousand logged on to a similar section at another site, Naver. On Jan. 13, Daejon Daily reported that there are 250 fortunetelling sites in internet in Korea and twenty of them earn several billion US dollars annually. About sixty percent of users are women and seventy percent are aged ten to thirty.

44 Gateway for the Imagination
The Noma Concours for Picture Book Illustrations
Holly Thompson
To submit to the Noma Concours, illustrators enter five or more original illustrations from one story — either an unpublished picture book or a published one that has not been launched in Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand or Japan. A brief description of the story in English accompanies each submission. The illustrators who submit works to the Noma Concours range from beginners through published professionals. Many pieces are submitted without significant consideration as to picture book design or the concept of marrying text to art. Kodansha publisher Otake points out, however, that while entrants should be aware of book layout and design matters when creating their artwork, these artists can learn such techniques later.

50 ENCOUNTERS
Little Soman’s Little War
keith harmon snow
Children not yet ten push on the barrel and run with it, rotating the turret and running with it, around and around. The barrel rises and falls across their chests or bellies or noses as the ground rises and falls beneath their feet, and when they reach a certain point in the cycle they throw their bodies over the barrel and tuck their legs and together they are carried forward on the momentum of a long steel pipe cast with the intent to commit murder.

58 Arab Cinema at the Singapore Film Festival
Vinita Ramani
The Singapore International Film Festival has always shaped its programming with a keen sensitivity to political shifts occurring around the world. In 2003, the year of the Second Gulf War, the festival first decided to track Arab cinema on its radar in a serious way.

No wonder then, that as the violence continues and the festival celebrates its 20th anniversary under increasingly difficult financial circumstances, another program dedicated to that part of the world somehow seemed poignant and necessary. Entitled “The Secret Life of Arabia,” the 2007 festival paid homage to Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz and his influence on Egyptian cinema, while showcasing a fantastic array of films from countries, including Tunisia, Kuwait, and Afganistan.

65 Stalin’s 1937 Korean Deportation:
One Family’s Memory
Jon Chang
Japan’s actions in 1931 ignited Soviet fears about its control of the Russian Far East as well as prejudice towards the Koreans and Chinese who had helped develop that region. The end result was that the Far East Koreans were among the first minority groups to be deported in a long series of Soviet minority deportations that were to last until 1970. The entire Korean population of 171,000 people, as well as 8,000 Chinese from the same area, were declared “enemies of the state” and deported to “administrative exile,” over 3,700 miles away in Central Asia, as well as to gulags (political prisons) throughout the USSR.

69 My Life as a Koryo Saram
German Kim
Yes, we, Koryo Saram, after the deportation during a relatively short period of time have adapted and achieved great success. From a practically totally agrarian population we have transformed into a well-educated, urbanized community. Among Kazakhstani Koreans there are dozens of heroes of Socialist labor, hundreds of Ph.Ds, former and present ministers, Members of Parliaments, well-known people in culture, art, sports etc. Koryo Saram have never constituted even one percent of the total population of Kazakhstan. But we are noticeable, and it seems that there are more of us. Whenever I am asked the number of Koreans living in Kazakhstan, my answer causes a great deal of surprise: “So few?!” Yes, we are 100,000 in Kazakhstan or 0.6% of the total population.

71 RAMBLE
“Mada Da Yo!”
Robert Brady
Every American who comes to Japan for a length of time sufficient to observe children playing kakurenbo (hide-and-seek) is profoundly shocked. The shock is prolonged for an American who raises children here, and then grandchildren, and watches over the years as descendants play this game all unaware of their gross violation of American childhood’s eternal rules.

72 IN TRANSLATION
Translating a Classic
with excerpts from The Pillow Book
Meredith McKinney
Haru wa akebono — yôyô shiroku nariyuku yamagiwa wa, sukoshi akarite . . . Most people in Japan can reach back to their school days to unhesitatingly recite the famous opening lines of the thousand-year-old classic known in English as The Pillow Book. The sounds roll off the tongue like poetry, with the same resonance and authority that transcends mere meaning. They are accompanied by a little swarm of facts worn almost meaningless by repetition and familiarity: Sei Shônagon, gentlewoman at the court of Emperor ? (the name often slips the memory), mid-Heian period “woman writer,” contemporary and rival of the author of The Tale of Genji.

And yet, when it came to translating The Pillow Book, the ironies of its classic status suddenly became acute. Sei Shônagon is in fact still very much alive and asserting herself, at the very centre of her work. Without the vividness of her personality, the words turn to dust. It was she herself I realized I must translate, quite as much as “the text.”

See also The Lists of a Lady in Waiting - David Greer (#45)

82 REVIEWS
A Changing Shanghai: Through the Lens of an Ordinary Citizen, by Xu Xixian & Xu Jianrong – John Einarsen
Leaving Mother Lake, by Namu and Christine Mathieu – John Einarsen
Reiki’s Birthplace: A Guide to Kurama Mountain by Jessica A. Miller – Deidre May
Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives) by Ko Un, translated by Brother Anthony of Taize, Young Moo-Im and Gary Gach.
Cherry Blossom Epiphany: The Poetry and Philosophy of a Flowering Tree, by robin d. gill – Harold Wright
Enso: Zen Circles of Enlightenment, by Audrey Yoshiko Seo – Eric Luong
A Zen Life: D.T. Suzuki, by Michael Goldberg – Preston Houser
Korea Witness: 135 Years of War, Crisis and News in the Land of the Morning Calm, ed. Donald Kirk & Choe Sang Hun, Eric Johnston
Japan’s Contested War Memories: The “Memory Rifts” in Historical Consciousness of World War Two, by Philip A. Seaton – Charlie Canning
Koryo Saram, The Unreliable People, directed by Y.David Chung – Michael Rank

88 BLOGOLOGY
Blogs from Iraq: Envisioning the Unimaginable

98 BEYOND
Kuchis
Lida Abdullah

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