Kyoto Journal #72 – Spring 2009 Special Issue
The Power of an Ideal: Article 9 and the Imagination

CONTENTS:

1 POETRY My Pacific War on the Hidaka Plain
Tsumura Yumiko

2 The Power of an Ideal (PDF) – John Einarsen & Jean Miyake Downey
With more than 60 years of hindsight, and the planet’s cultures evolving toward unprecedented levels of interdependence, complexity and integration, both economically and systemically, it is clear that war as a political solution is obsolete. Yet war can still stupidly break out. And as someone once said, “Winning a war is like winning an earthquake.”
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6 Japan’s Peacemaker, Shidehara Kijuro and the origins of Article 9 (PDF)
An interview with Peace Historian Klaus Schlictmann
by Jean Miyake Downey
After the war, Prime Minister Shidehara conceived the idea of a war-abolishing provision which should be included in the Japanese Constitution, and visited General MacArthur on 24 January 1946 to get his approval. MacArthur was enthusiastic and made sure that it was included, more or less with the wording Shidehara had suggested. Shidehara proposed it, and the Americans put it in. Both deserve praise.

12 Defining the Debate on Constitutional Revision and Peacekeeping, an interview with Prof. Murata Koji (PDF)
by Susan Pavloska and John Einarsen
Substantially, the U.S. Security Treaty has protected Japan’s position in international security, but at the same time, because we have kept the Peace Constitution, Japan didn’t have to expand its military organizations, and did not have to send its troops abroad until the 1990s in a PKO operation. In some sense, the Peace Constitution gave us a kind of moral power for our diplomacy.

15 Collective Insecurities
Paul Scott
It has been 55 years since Japan came under the defense umbrella of the United States. The initial treaty was signed when the Korean War raged, the Cold War was frozen, Japan was poor, and communist expansion seemed intractable. The world of 2009 is a vastly different matrix.

18 Into the Atomic Sunshine
Post-war art under Japanese Peace Constitution Article 9
Jean Miyake-Downey talks to Watanabe Shinya
I think of modernism itself as negentropy (saving information in an efficient way). This negentropy of modernism appears as the microchip, nuclear power plants, or nuclear weapons. These are examples of the mindset of modernism that reached its zenith in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The nation-state is also a product of modernist thought. www.spikyart.org/atomicsunshine

20 Article 9 and Japan's Future (full version as PDF text file here)
Anzai Ikuro and Johan Galtung on cultivating Article 9
There are 7,000 A9 associations throughout Japan. This is unusual. We have had three similar experiences in the post-war history of Japan. The first one was in 1954, after the U.S. hydrogen bomb was tested at Bikini Atoll. The second was during the 1960s. There was a strong anti-Vietnam War movement here in Japan, including the four million union workers who went on strike against that war.www.article-9.org

26 How to Make Article 9 Global (PDF)
Klaus Schlictmann
This is what Article 9 is really about: it is an explicit proposal to limit national sovereignty in favor of “an international peace based on justice and order.” Japanese commentators usually interpret Article 9 as comprising the first step toward a legally binding international order, or even a world federation, where all nations have disarmed, and feel safe under the rule of law.

28 Shared Thoughts on Article 9
Revisiting a landmark peace conference
It is only fair to request Japan maintain Article 9 so that other countries may adopt it. It isn’t fair if only Japan remains disarmed. What about North Korea or China? Their large armies and nuclear weapons only threaten peace. If Japan keeps Article 9, it is only fair for China, North Korea, and South Korea to consider draft¬ing something similar. Then we can convert the money that is now used for buying weapons into education, into helping the poor, and solving economic problems.

36 Transforming Tragic Memories into Peaceful Strength
Syed Sikander Mehdi on Japan’s role in the world
Paul Scott
“Japan should make it a part of their cultural diplomacy to encourage the establishment of a Hiroshima-Nagasaki peace museum in every country of the world because all the people cannot visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A campaign against nuclear weapons is also a campaign for human rights.”

41 The New Peace Museums
Wai Yee
Regrettably, among the nation’s younger generation, the defining wartime image remains that of the atomic bombings. Surprisingly, many Japanese know very little about their county’s own history of aggression and colonialism during that period.

42 POETRY Clarity Compassion Peace
Patricia Donegan
Usually we get the experience of war through a male perspective, but there are some courageous women writers, such as Ishibashi Hideno, who lived through the bombings of Tokyo during World War II and simply documented her experience through haiku.http://books.google.com/books?id=YUH6DV2oWPIC

44 The Sutras of Abu Ghraib
Aidan Delgado http://books.google.com/books?id=e_9wsW-K5uIC

46 Becoming a Pacifist in Iraq
An Interview with Aidan Delgado (PDF)
John Einarsen
"It may be crazy, but like Dante’s Inferno, the way to heaven is through hell… through the deepest pit of hell...then you come out the bottom and pass through it. For me, it was impossible to have real compassion living a normal life, because in America it was so easy to “turn off the volume.” I had to go to Iraq and see suffering, real deep suffering, before I could get to that point..".

53 “And So Make Peace...”
Maxine Hong Kingston talks story
Trevor Carolan
"Technically, writing and telling stories is traditional in all cultures: it’s probably built into our DNA that they have rising action that leads to a violent climax. We all love that sense of drama, that frightening climax. Well, I got to thinking ‘can we write a story in which this climax is non-violent and still be exciting?’ That is against everything our culture is teaching us. Television, movies…there’s that violent climax. Can I write counter to this? Will people buy these stories? What will all the critics say?" http://www.vetsofwarvetsofpeace.org/introduction.php

56 Kachin Independence: The AK or the PC? (PDF)
Tim Patterson and Ryan Libre
On the path of the sword, it is possible to buy guns and train soldiers to fight well together in a matter of weeks. On the path of the pen, it can take much longer to forge a group of people who can fight effectively with words and photos.www.idioimagers.org

60 Vegetable Weapons – Ozawa Tsuyoshi

69 POETRY Varanasi – Gail Gutradt

79 POETRY What the Japanese Perhaps Heard
What We Heard About the Japanese
Poems by Rachel Rose

80 Wrestling with Myths
Trevor Carolan
But when the Japanese terror had wiped the floor with every good guy in local Christendom, by default it was up to Kiniski, former terror of the meek, to take on the demon Shibuya and whup him once and for all — preferably in each lower mainland and Vancouver Island wrestling market.

50 IN TRANSLATION
Rainbow over Hell
Mori Tsuneyuki
How then did individual Japanese negotiate the mental terrain that led from glorious self-sacrifice to participating in the future? Mohri Tsuneyuki describes the pivotal moment in Arakaki’s psychological transformation below. The radical disjuncture that he experienced helps explain why so many Japanese think of 1945 as a fundamental turning point for their society yet find it hard to express the precise nature of that change of heart.

62 REALIZATIONS
My Grandfather’s Robe
Aekyong Moore
I was happy that my grandmother also had come to stay at my brother’s house for a while. She was a traditional Korean woman who had held on to both custom and kindness through 36 years of Japanese occupation, a brutal war and a cultural transformation that saw more change in the forty years since the Korean War than in the more than four thousand years that had preceded it.

How I Choose to Give Myself
Vinita Ramani Mohan
We have spent the morning considering genocide from the perspective of former low-level perpetrators, though we are increasingly unsure of what “low-level” means when considered within the context of general human brutality.
That is when we run into Roath.
He lives here. He is about 24, or 25 years old. It doesn’t matter. He is in his twenties and he has had enough of all the seriousness associated with Cambodia.

70 JUST DEEDS
Collateral Repair for Collateral Damage
Kimberly Hughes
The situation now facing Iraqis in exile is nothing less than a humanitarian crisis. Amongst the nearly 5 million estimated Iraqis who have been driven from their homes due to war and occupation-fueled violence and instability, an estimated 750,000 are presently in Jordan. Many fled their country with literally nothing other than their accumulated savings and the few possessions they could carry—often after having endured extreme traumas such as kidnapping threats by armed militias, nighttime raids by U.S. soldiers in their homes, and the death of family members from U.S. air aids or militia killings. www.collateralrepairproject.org

74 FICTION The Smell of Sulphur
Jill Widner
The girl is sitting cross-legged in the grass, holding the glass of lemonade with both hands. If air means water, then what can jeruk mean, when sometimes it can be a kind of tangerine and sometimes a lime. Maybe manis means sweet and nipis means sour. Or maybe nipis means small. Maybe nipis means small and sour with a tight thin skin that is sometimes yellow and sometimes green. Maybe in Indonesian, a single word can mean all of those things...

82 REVIEWS:
Maps of Reconciliation – Literature and the Ethical Imagination, ed. Frank Stewart & Barry Lopez, Manoa – Vinita Ramani Mohan
Beyond National Egoism: the Road to a Nation for International Peace and the Environment, Shohei Nomura – Kimberly Hughes
Field of Spears: the Last Mission of the Jordan Crew, Gregory Hadley – Ken Rodgers
An American in Korea: Two Decades of Photography, by Drayton S. Hamilton – Robert J. Fouser
Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution, David R. Loy – David Cozy
Japanese Iraq War Documentaries – Anastasia Fedorova
Tengu, written & directed by Roger Walch – Susan Pavlovska www.rowmuse.com
Japanese Constitution Cinema – Akamoto Mariko
Making Forest of Bliss: Intention, Circumstance and Chance in Nonfiction Film, Robert Gardner & Akos Oster – Christal Whelan

96 RAMBLE
On Contentment
Robert Brady
I've always loved the mystery in that Tao Te Ching phrase that each time I read it shimmers with the gleam of truth that cannot be pinned down, that coruscates in the mind’s eye: "There is no disaster greater than not being content."

ONLINE

My Grandson the Marine: A Homecoming – Connie Vigil Platt

Blogology for Peace

More articles from this issue will be posted as downloadable PDF files.

URLS FROM THIS ISSUE

Manoa: manoajournal.hawaii.edu
Tomas Svab photos: http://www.23degrees.net/
Japan Focus: www.Japanfocus.org/
www.spikyart.org/atomicsunshine
www.globalartproject.org
www.waging peace.org
peacemaking.kr/English/
www.article-9.org
www.haguepeace.org/
Proposition One: prop1.org/
www.peaceboat.org
www.transcend.org
haiku mind: http://books.google.com/books?id=YUH6DV2oWPIC
sutras of abu graib: http://books.google.com/books?id=e_9wsW-K5uIC
www.yasusuzuka.com
rugsofwar.wordpress.com
Veterans of war, veterans of peace:
http://www.vetsofwarvetsofpeace.org/introduction.php
Ryan Libre: www.idioimagers.org
Independent Travel: www.matadornetwork.com
www.collateralrepairproject.org

RELATED:
Peace Abbey (sponsors of Stonewalk Japan and Stonewalk Korea: www.peaceabbey.org/
Peace Not War Japan : www.soundsphenomenal.org/pnwj/en/what.htm
Kikuchi Yumi: JUMP (Japan United for a Ministry of Peace):
ministryofpeace.jp/english/
6th Annual Tokyo Peace Film Festival (June 12-14th) http://www.peacefilm.net/
Psychologists for Social Responsibility: Building Cultures of Peace with Social Justice www.psysr.org/
Peace and Collaborative Network www.internationalpeaceandconflict.org/
Global Movement for a Culture of Peace www.culture-of-peace.info/
Pacific Freeze Campaign: pacificfreeze.ips-dc.org/
Washington Peace Center: www.washingtonpeacecenter.org/
Global Article 9 (Vancouver): www.article-9.org/en/vancouver/peacephilosophy.blogspot.com/ (excellent blog on Global Article 9 related issues)
www.centeronconscience.org/
www.couragetoresist.org/

OTHER RELATED KJ ISSUES

Just Deeds (KJ #53)
Transforming Conflict (KJ # 38)

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