Monday, August 20, 2012

China Not a Peace-Loving Country?

A group of Hong Kong-based 'activists' has approached the Senkaku Islands by a boat.  They were not armed, but they threw lumps of concrete at the Japanese Coast Guard ships which tried to intercept them around the islands.  After landing with their national flags, all the all the fourteen were captured and sent back to Hong Kong, where they are now heroes.
I would ask the Chinese government several questions.
First, I ask if the Chinese authorities were not in a position to stop them on the sea.  Apparently they came with the full knowledge of the authorities, even perhaps with their hidden encouragement.  The Chinese government announced as soon as they were captured that they should be released unconditionally.  This shows that they watched their activities from the beginning.  The Coast Guard, though armed, did not use any of their weapons this time.  This shows that the Chinese government knowingly let the attackers face the firearms of the Coast Guard, a fact that the human lives are not valued in China at all.
Second, anti-Japanese demonstrations are reported not only from Hong Kong, where the attackers are publicly saying that they would try in October again, but in a number of cities in Mainland China.  Is it spontaneous?  Or is it the manipulation of the un-informed masses by the authorities, who want, as usual, to make a noise to the extent they see it fit, and then suppress it themselves.  The common people are mere tools.
Third, China is a huge, gigantic country.  It is trying to lay its hands one-sidedly just on any place where natural resources are present.
Fourth, China's outward expansion, backed by its military power, causes more and more anxiety in surrounding countries.  Some of them are trying to make use of it to enhance their own military power.  I hope Japan is not one of them.  It is true, however, that China's increasing militarizatiion has tended to strengthen the Japan-US military alliance to the greater despair of the people.  Unlike some decades ago, no one here is anymore in a position to depend on China to put a stop to the American imperialism together. The same applies to North Korea.  This is what worries the Japanese people most at present.
Finally, I will briefly state why an average intellectual like me is of opinion that the Senkaku belongs to Japan.  There are broadly two.  It was annexed into Okinawa Prefecture in January 1895.  For 75 years until 1970, until it was ascertained that the islands are located in resource-rich waters, China never put a claim to them or protested against the Japanese possession at all.  Also, contrary to what China is telling the world, the islands were not mentioned anywhere in the Treaty which transferred Taiwan and the nearby islands from China to Japan.
Will the Senkaku remain an explosive between Japan and China for some more years?  I for one do not think so.  There are easy ways to solve them.  The democratization of the Chinese regime is one of them, which is indispensable to all of us concerned.       

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

500th Anniversary of Reformation

A current rover in Europe, as this writer was last week, would notice that 2017, five years from now, is the 500th Year of the Reformation.  It seems, therefore, that lots of intellectual activities are planned, or already under way.
Reformation is of course connected with the name of Martin Luther.  This is not the place to discuss him, nor do I have the capacity to.  However, it is apparent that these 500 are based on the famous 95 Indulgence Theses that Luther put up against the papal behaviour in 1517.
The action led to the excommunication by the Pope, and his being summoned before the Imperial Diet at Worms four years later.
We saw at Worms, in Southwestern Germany, Luther's statue with the famous 'Hier Stehe Ich, Ich Kann Nicht Anders, Gott Helfe Mir! Amen!'(Here I stand.  I cannot do otherwise.  God help me, Amen), inscribed.  He was supposed to have said them before the Diet but they are actually a legend.
He also translated both the Testaments into plain German, and got them published in one volume at Wittenberg, the central place of his activities, in 1534.  By so doing, he showed his idea that there should not be an intermediary between the God and man.
May I add two more things.  One is that, when the German Peasants' War broke out under his former colleague Thomas Muentzer, he advised non-violence, but when it was ignored, supported the repression by the princes and landlords, although he originally held them responsible.  This reliance on the landed forces made some of his followers part with him.
Second, we not only saw at both the Luther House and the Bach House at Eisenach, in Central Germany, that Bach laboured very hard to edit Luther's works, but also got a feeling that some elements of the anti-Semitic prejudices traditional in Christianity had been retained in Luther's Reformation and through him in Protestantism.  I sincerely hope that this point will be discussed in the coming five years.
This much is a continuation of the previous blog.  My own interest, however, is if and when Reformation took place in the Asiatic religions.  Can't we think Mahatma Gandhi as one such  Reformer as far as India and Hinduism are concerned?  I am separating anti-Semitism in this case.  

Some Jewish Museums in Europe

During our recent European tour, we have visited several Jewish Museums.
The first was the "Resistance Museum", Amsterdam.  As the name suggests it was on the repression on, and resistance by, the Dutch people against the Germans during the Second World War, and, although under a different name, it was a de facto Jewish Museum by half.
It analysed the behaviour of the Dutch people under the occupation using the concepts-very useful and interesting-of adjust(or adapt), collaborate or resist.  The Unie(Union) movement may be called a way of adjusting.  It was started in July '40, shortly after the invasion, in order to prevent the Dutch Nazi Party from grasping the administration.  One photo showed a large number of men and women, mostly well-dressed, lining up in the streets to join it.  But the movement did not collaborate as much as the Germans had hoped, and was banned in December '42.
After one year of occupation the Jewish were given their own ID, with a large 'J' on it.  But their first uprising took place in February '41, and although it was suppressed it was  joined by a large number of Communists, transport and dock workers.  In March '43 they burnt the Registry Office.
The "Jewish Historical Museum", Amsterdam, is mainly on their history, and is also worth seeing.
The Jewish people started coming to this area around 1600.  They came from different directions where, like Eastern Europe, there was not much freedom.  Interestingly the development of the  Dutch overseas commercial empire also gave the Jews an opportunity to migrate to Brazil, Surinam, West Indies, or New Amsterdam(New York).  There were 60,000 Jews in the last-mentioned when the Second War broke out.
The number of Jews in the whole country at present is 43,000, of whom about half live in Amsterdam and nearby.  57% are not practicing their religion.  Could this be one reason why they
prefer to remain in the Netherlands than to migrate to Israel?
Finally, after leaving Amsterdam, we visited the "Jewish Museum" in Berlin.  It is a huge building intended to make you feel that you are in an underground room, made of concrete, cold, without windows, and prison-like, and are likely to lose your sense of equilibrium with the slopes and all that.
We have learned that of the 520,000 Jewish people who were in Germany at the time of the Nazi seizure, 260,000, just half, had escaped abroad.  But it was banned in October '38, which opened the way to the 'last solution'.
One more interesting figure was that after the unification in '91, there has been a steady flow of the former Soviet Jews according to a treaty, and most of the 100,000 Jewish people living at present in Germany have come by this way.
As the reader may know, there is another museum in Amsterdam without that name.  It is the famous Anne Frank's House.  Unfortunately we noticed a long queue of tourists there, and gave up the idea of a visit.
I would like you to kindly consult the next one.  There may be a short reference to the Jewish question there also.          

Monday, August 13, 2012

Enough is Enough, No More of Shooting Rampage

Within days of a shooting rampage in the US, when the single criminal had as many as four guns of various types to himself, and Mr.Obama said, rather feebly, 'such violence is senseless',  another struck, this time inside a Sikh temple, out of all places, in suburban Milwaukee, leaving four dead and several wounded.  It was on 5 August.
The Sikhs are originally from the Punjab in northwestern India.  They(the men) are well-built, wearing turban, and are easily recognizable.  They are also known to be good-natured, hard-working.  It may be said that they have become the victims because they are recognizable, as the suspect is reported to be a US Army veteran, who might, or might not, have a fighting experience abroad.  Although nothing is as yet known on his career, it is said that 'Everyone here is thinking this is a hate crime for sure.  People(local Americans) think we are Muslims'.
If I may exaggerate a little here, whether or not the suspect has gone to the Middle East to fight, the 9/11 and the ensuing prolonged wars by the US have ensured that the idea is ingrained in the American mind that the Muslims are an enemy.  It is a wrong idea.  It is a wrong idea still to say that the Sikhs are Muslims.  And the US could have taken a different course than what she actually did, wasting enormous lives and money.  My hearty condolences to the six Sikhs.
Every time this kind of thing happens in the US, we inevitably point our finger at the rules, or non-rules in the US. which defend the private possession of 200 million guns.  They have a powerful organizational and industrial back-up.
But this writer thinks that the freedom of having guns make the atmosphere in the US dangerous not only to the local Americans, but the foreigners as well, as the above case would show.  It is also helping to make the US. all the more war-like and fearful in the world.                 

What a Chinese Scientist Has to Say on China's Nuclear Policy

The Akahata, the Communist Party of Japan's daily, carried an interview with an 85 year-old Chinese nuclear physicist, on 27 July.  He was formerly a member of China's Political Consultative Conference, the CPC's united front with other political organizations in China.  His comments are full of his valuable experiences, and are worth listening to.  The interview was given at Beijing.
 
  He said that the Fukushima nuclear accident of March last year shock China.  The policy of the government was influenced by it.  Many Chinese, including himself, changed their thinking on the nuclear power generation.
  As for himself, he was a part of the study of atomic and hydrogen bombs in China, and thereafter was saying that the nuclear power generation should be developed.  At the Three Mile Island's and the Chernobyl's accidents, he thought that they were due to either technical defect or lack of experience.
  On hearing the Fukushima accident, however, he thought that the matter was no longer within these limits.  He began to think that the humanity is not in full command of the nuclear technology,  and therefore should feel more humility.  This is the greatest lesson he got from the accident.  Accordingly he greatly revised his thinking on the nuclear power development.  He is not against such development, but he has come to think that at least its speed should be slowed down.
  What China is planning to install is six reactors belonging to the third generation developed in the US.  They have not yet been put into practice even there.  China has a plan of installing six, and another one of having as many as 30 of them.  30 are too many.  It takes a long time to prove the safety of the new reactors by experiments.  Mere theoretical 'safety' is not enough.
  Another problem is that the government is developing nuclear power inland.  I am not in agreement with this either.
  China is a country where large-scale droughts often take place.  Around the reactors under construction along the Yangtze in Jiangxi(Kiangsi) Provence, there was a drought last year.  It takes a large amount of water for cooling the reactors.  If the water is not available it would lead to a grave accident.  Moreover if an accident occurs upstream, it might affect an enormous population down to Nanjing or Shanghai downstream.
  The Fukushima accident has shaken the Japanese government.  Naturally I support the non-nuclear power movement in Japan.
  I hope that, in China also, the government will listen to the opinions inside and outside the country before reaching its final policies.