THE RECENT SEISMIC EVENT IN JAPAN, besides the extremely tragic human suffering that it has provoked and possibly will provoke for some time in the future through nuclear fallout, is proving something of a difficult issue for those responsible for foreign policy and diplomatic relations in the USA and the United Kingdom.
BRITAIN’S INEPT WILLIAM HAGUE, who recently has been far too occupied with blundering the Libya issue, busily trying to play down the fact that Colonel Gaddafi’s elite troops, who are at this moment murdering innocent citizens, were trained in 2009 by Britain’s SAS troops under the “ongoing defence cooperation” agreement between Britain and Libya, has been extremely quiet on the matter of Japan.
WHILST THIS SPARES US ANOTHER of his horrendously mispronounced definite articles and irritating Yorkshire nasal pronunciation of all his other ill-chosen words, it does suggest that he, like many others, is slightly worried about how to approach the issue of seeing most of the northeast of Japan reduced to rubble and Tokyo now threatened with obliteration by a nuclear disaster.
THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT AND BRITISH PEOPLE have expressed immense sadness over recent years when facing such tragedies as the Tsunamis and earthquakes in the Indian Ocean and Haiti, as well as flooding and poverty in Africa, but the revolutions in the Arab world and this disaster in Japan have revealed underlying prejudices and ambiguous feelings towards these peoples which in turn dictate government attitudes.
WIDESPREAD TURMOIL IN ARABIA, including the “crushing” of the “dogs supported by foreigners” by stand-up comedian, drag artist and sometime dictator Gaddafi, have met with little sympathy among our prejudiced classes, who, either sitting around in pubs or in the House of Lords, openly merrily chat about Muslims killing each other.
NO ONE SEEMS TO BE DOING THE SAME about the disaster in Japan as yet, but silence often speaks volumes. World War II may be nearly seventy years ago, and Britain and America appear to have forgiven Germany (although not totally in Britain, and in the USA half of the intelligent Wasp middle classes are Germans anyway) but Japan seems to be a different kettle of sushi.
JUST IN CASE WE HAD FORGOTTEN PEARL HARBOUR, Randall Wallace and Michael Bay gave us Pearl Harbor in 2001, a blockbuster movie playing on Americans’ dread of being attacked from abroad and coinciding with the Islamic airline attack on New York City, which no doubt left many American citizens fusing Japanese and Muslims into one amorphous enemy who deserved to be bombed out of existence. American politicians and military strategists duly obliged in 1946 and since 2001.
IF WE ADD THE FACT THAT MANY PEOPLE in both countries still harbour a grudge against the Japanese people for their army’s and air force’s mind-bogglingly inhuman cruelty during the war, and are resentful of Japanese industrial and technological domination of world markets since the nineteen sixties, then we may understand why buckets of tears are not being shed.
THE 1954 JAPANESE MOVIE GODZILLA played upon Japan’s destruction by the Atomic bomb by personifying the disaster as a mixture of a gorilla and a whale, a “Gorira Kujira”, a monster actually created by nuclear fallout and which comes from the sea and flattens a good deal of Tokyo, then disappears, apparently killed, but leaving radiation in the air and the threat of a return.
IT WOULD BE PERFECTLY NATURAL for anyone in private to comment on the similarity between this tale and what has happened over the last week, or even to directly compare today’s photos of some of Japan’s cities and those of Hiroshima in 1947 – indeed, as I write I have just seen footage of Japan which I mistakenly believed to be post-Hiroshima images – but to do so in public is apparently dangerous.
A COMMON TRAIT AMONG THE FEEBLE-MINDED is to accuse others of sentiments about which we feel guilty for having ourselves, rather as aggressive anti-homosexual male politicians are secretly dreaming of being taken by surprise, or anti-drug campaigners are dreaming of a white Christmas; this may explain the furore surrounding giggly, pouting CNNI anchor Rosemary Church, perhaps the first victim of news reporting on Japan.
COMMENTING ON PICTURES OF JAPAN, cheerful Ms Church stated: “I think the footage we are seeing largely, of these waves of debris, it is almost like a monster movie. Seeing this stuff wiping out entire sections of coastline.” This was stated in Church’s acquired Australian accent, fashionable at the moment on rolling news channels for its lightness of tone and rising intonation, making every statement either sound like a question or a joke, which is presumably how Australians see the world. Anyone who follows Twitter will see that the world is calling for her head, a picture of which is above.
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