Tokyo Babylon

Looking around at the interior of the Tokyo subway car it occurred to Robert that the ads, their arrangement and their content had something to say about Japan.

There was the beer ad that featured a man so wound up by his world that seemingly only beer offered release from it, a release so forced through the strictures society had placed upon him that it brought an expression of physical anguish with it, like a dislodged vertbrae being snapped back into place. He could only shake his head in wonder at a society that boxed its people in so tightly that it required chemical surgery of this magnitude. He also had to wonder at the kind of people who would consent to this masochistic living, if indeed it could be called that.

Then there was the subway map itself, which contrary to the western way of doing things did not conform to compass directions. The left side of the map was the east and the right the west. Was this positional relativity a feature of Japanese life? Was it designed to be deliberately confusing or did the Japanese live in a world where constant re-orientation was a fact of life. He had read in a book called the Enigma of Japanese Power that the Japanese morality was relative rather than absolute, that the direction of the poles of right and wrong, like the subway map, could change depending on external circumstances.

Then again, he thought, looking up at the Japanese woman jogging along a beach to sell vitamin supplements, that this woman looked almost exactly like an English woman he had known, loved and left in London. He smirked thinking of the irony of that. Morally relativistic, aren’t we all?

Perhaps that explained why he and everyone around him put up with life in boxes, distorted by social expectations and the grey suited authority of supposedly economic necessity. The beer ad seemed to him almost tragic, the subway ad disappointing. However there jogging woman made it seem universal, like Japan was the rule rather than the exception. Perhaps it was only his outsiders eyes that saw it this way.

He recalled that some big wig at Intel had said that to be successful organizations had to live in a world of perpetual fear bordering on paranoia. This was the new economics of fear where your job could pack its case for India. Doubtless it was  the child of the old economics of fear, where your job simply left without telling you. Outsourcing was the new buzz word. However growing up as a child in Glasgow he had known that the shipbuilder’s jobs had moved to South Korea, he just hadn’t had a word for it. Perhaps it only deserved a name when it was middle class people whose jobs were moving? Fear was upwardly mobile it seemed. Was it environmental or was someone messing with the faucet?

The new fear of what tomorrow could bring had many adherents to judge from the people inside th e car. The rule was grey, black and dark blue, as if they were trying to blend together to confuse a predator, whether fickle fate or the amoral market. The occasional flare of color amidst the civilizational pallor seemed as much a blaze of defiance as a style statement. On the other hand fear it occurred to him that fear had pervaded this society completely.  The government had started to fingerprint foreigners entering Japan, so the fear was apparently being felt on high as well as down here in the bowels of society. They said that it was to guard against terrorism, obdurately oblivious to the irony that the only terrorists in Japanese history had been home grown. He recalled news reports of the sarin gas attack on the same Tokyo subway system he was himself riding. He shrugged thinking that he could die any number of ways. Living in fear was hardly the answer.

These were desperate people, wound to explosive self destructive tension. Perhaps it was the desperation to find any escape that had turned their moral compass. Then again, pretty girls looking down from ads was universal, so was the cramped interior of this Tokyo subway train a metaphor for modern living, regardless of domicile?

One day I hope to live in East Timor. When I was a young man, some year ago, I read about the East Timor independence fighter’s struggle to free their land from Indonesia. It always seemed unjust to me that a small independent nation, a former Portuguese colony, should be wiped out by Indonesia, with US blessing. The fact that these ragged men continued to fight when the international community had abandoned them meant they always had a place in my heart.

Now that I am older and have experience of living in Asia I would like to do my bit to help this impoverished nation, which is the newest in Asia. They’re having a hard time of it at the moment. The Australians have screwed them over the division of oil rights in the sea between Australia and East Timor, but the East Timorese are getting something out of it.

I wish I could say that my interest was entirely selfless, however I definitely do not qualify as a saint. One reason I want to go there now is that it’s close enough to Australia that I can virtually commute when I’m in need of an English conversation in a English speaking pub.

The permaculturists says that borders are the most fertile. If that really is the case then East Timor, where Asia meets Australasia might be just the place to be.

The way we think about things is often channeled by the terms that are used to describe them, in very much a half empty, half full fashion. In my international classes I came across the term “containment’, which was used to describe the way the Soviet Union was ringed by US allies, the way that a nuclear reactor is contained within a pressure vessel. This predisposes you to think of containment as a good thing, since it is holding back something lethal. Containment is generally the answer to things that have no cure, like radiation sickness and the ebola virus.

On the other hand if you described the reality as “forward deployment” then what was manifestly a virtuous response to something vile turns into standing on a neighbour’s doorstep with a gun in your hand.

There are many such altered realities in our everyday world. Homeland Security becomes Government Intrusion, the “war on terror” becomes “keeping citizens in a state of fear”. However, the one I came across recently was subsistence. To people who believe in markets this amounts to a cardinal sin (You mean you don’t trade! - How primitive!), whereas exactly the same reality could also be described as being self-sufficient, providing for your own needs. Since when did growing our own food make you a pariah?

When you consider the amount of junk we as citizens produce every day there seems to be a crying need for more of us to start growing our own food. It’s fresh, trustworthy, hasn’t travelled the world to get to your plate. How much oil do you really want with your food? But we keep coming back to this derogatory term subsistence.

When you think about it, you take shit from your boss so that you can get the money you need to drive to a Walmart, fight your way up and down aisles and drive home again. In the process given the way these soul-less hell bound execs run their business you’ve screwed over small farmers in every corner of the planet. It doesn’t sound like a virtuous cycle to me. Shit from your boss. CO2 from your car. Making evil corporate SOBs richer. Screwing smallholding farmers. Having someone drive a trolley into your heel.

On the other hand with just a bit of ingenuity and maybe a sizeable backyard you can count the days till you tell your boss to go screw himself, send Walmart into bankruptcy where it belongs, save the planet by walking into your garden rather than driving to the supermarket, and hit back at the system that’s killing farmers, all by having a few potatoes and tomatoes running up your wall.

When you think of subsistence in these terms it’s really not a vice at all. Pro-marketeers will try to convince you otherwise. There’s no money they can make out of you growing your own food.

I expect every civilization the world has ever known never saw the bad times coming. Willful blindness is apparently an essential component of what it is to be human. If to err is human then I think of late it is the unconscious past-time of virtually every citizen of the developed world.

Don’t know what I mean? Well, look out your window at the building opposite you. It will seem unremarkable most likely, a building that could be almost anywhere in the world. The fact that it does so is remarkable. Is it not incredible that this virtually global tangible manifestation of uniformity should be before us yet we do not think about what it represents?

Ever heard the expression ‘don’t put all your eggs in the one basket’?

It is likely that the building you are looking at is made from brick or concrete. Bricks fired in kilns, concrete made using cement that has been fired in massive industrial complexes before being transported in a cheap energy vehicle to the construction site. The world over it’s done the same way. Globalization is perhaps just another way of saying one system, one market, one basket. Is it basket or basket-case I wonder?

It seems to me, and I may be wrong, that the building opposite you is a symbol of a world built on cheap energy with no consideration of how that energy, or the materials it processes, seeps into the environment and into you, into me. If it is a new building you can be certain that it was not built to last. You can be certain that it was not built to be deconstructed at the end of its life. It was not always so.

One of the reasons so many buildings in ancient times are mere shadows on aerial photos is that they were disassembled and their materials put to good use in providing a family with shelter, because it was cheaper in terms of energy expenditure than starting from scratch. Such is not the case now. Buildings now are designed to be reduced to unusable fragments, those fragments shoved under the corner of the carpet, out of sight out of mind.

Surely a case of all’s well before it ends badly.

Those who talk about the end of oil, the beginning of expensive energy and what this means to a civilization whose every artifact, whose every structure and machine requires cheap energy are mostly ignored. But consider that every aspect of your life is made possible by cheap energy, the house you live in, the plastic wrapped food you eat, the car you drive to work in the morning, the lights you leave on accidently when you go out. Now imagine what it means when energy becomes less abundant. I would imagine that like leprosy this energy starvation will affect the extremities first, the life blood of the system doesn’t make it all the way to the fingertips and slowly but surely they darken, atrophy and fall off. 

Your government suddenly talking about nuclear energy begins to make more sense doesn’t it? 

On the other hand is it forlorn attempt at maintaining a system that is increasingly unaffordable? It’s probably just my opinion, but I think I need to make arrangements while the going’s good.  On the other hand if you look at insurance costs and security companies the signs are that I’m not wrong in my thinking.  It’s likely that we’re heading towards market failure, bank runs and refugees fleeing those darkened extremities in their millions. The problem is that too many people are making too much money from the way things are. It’s rather like entrepreneurs selling the wood of the lifeboat you are sitting in. These men are feted for the moment “Neutron Jack” Welch - called this because like the neutron bomb he left buildings standing but killed people, Donald “Apprentice Master” Trump - whose genius was that he borrowed so much that his debt became the bank’s problem not his, and the master Entrepreneur Richard Branson, who is investing in space like he knows something the rest of us don’t.

I really need to get my act together, get a piece of land to call my own, make it more fertile than Eden, get my energy generation systems together before they can’t be bought for love nor money. But you know as well as I that the rich will be able to buy their way out of a dead end, but the rest of us will be like those who wandered the American heartland in the 30s with a sign saying will work for food.  Back when the Berlin wall fell an American called Fukuyama said it was the end of history, that the evolution of our civilization had come to a close, there was no more. 

Maybe he was a couple of decades too early?  

Take it anyway you want, either creep as a noun or creep as a verb. Perhaps using  both senses simultaneously would most apt. In any case the spectre of security again raised its ugly head, inserting itself into the private lives of ordinary people everywhere. This week thanks to my special visa status I was perhaps the only foreigners on my flight into Japan who was not photographed and fingerprinted. The immigration waiting line for foreigners was longer than I’d ever seen. The contrast with the Japanese national side, a half acre of unoccupied carpet, had never been so stark. The television screen detailing the procedure featured a seemingly delighted blonde western woman. She had her photo taken in a manner reminiscent of a graduation ceremony. She had her fingerprints taken like she was expecting to have her fortune read. I trust the blonde lady was well paid for her part in that fiction.

Ostensibly the reason for fingerprinting was to prevent terrorism. This completely overlooked the fact that the only contemporary terrorist attacks on Japanese soil were committed by Japanese nationals. Interestingly foreigners arriving at some Japanese hotels have been asked to present their foreigner identity, or gaijin, cards. The fact that there is no legal basis for such a request does not stop it happening.

The stench of zenophobia wafting from the hallowed halls of officialdom contrasts starkly with the reception foreigners recieve from young Japanese people. I sometimes wonder how it is that a country whose citizens disavow war and aggression should have such a government. On the other hand when you consider that the same group of people have run Japan since the mid-50s it makes more sense. In Japan politicians don’t come to power they inherit it, it is passed down from mandarin to protege much like lands and titles in monarchies, and as in monarchies, the ordinary citizen, or should that be subject, has little say in the matter.

Interestingly the next day I read a column by Naomi Klein in which she wrote that investments in alternative energy solutions to growing environmental problems were playing second fiddle to investments in security systems. Apparently there is more money to be made from protecting people from the consequences of their consumption than in seeking solutions to those problems. In the contest between make a better world or ley it rot and buy a gun - the gun is winning. The walls are going up, in Japan, in the EU and in the US.

Interesting that the market should give signals of business as usual and preparing for doomsday at the same time isn’t it?

Robert returned from his job, teaching English to employees of a multinational financial services company, in the evening. The sweat, both wet and dry, made him feel like he’d just gone for a dip in the Dead Sea.

“I am a boil in the bag meal” he said to himself. It was an old joke, almost a friend and companion.

He was under no illusions however that all the sweat was his, since he had just been on the Tokyo subway system in the middle of the evening rush hour. Standing pressed up against people around him he had almost laughed aloud at the mental image of the subway as a close order Lambada machine; an automated bump and grind device.

Around him on the train the Japanese had stared off into space, their heads angling towards a corridor of personal space which would allow them the illusory freedom to ignore that arm or that leg. Robert for his part considered it, looked down on people’s heads, blew pony-tail whisps away from his nose. Being the big foreigner he got a little more room than the Japanese would give to another Japanese.

Making his way out of the station, a Gaijin particle in the human wave that the Pointer Sisters might refer to as a ‘heated rush’ he had almost laughed again, thinking that on the Tokyo subway any man ‘with a slow hand’ would be subject to arrest or getting poked with a knitting needle. ‘Who does this hand belong to’ would cry the outraged female as the offending member was raised high. It would not be a question, despite the phrasing. Japan is an interesting country. You can almost taste the repression.

Robert stood in the shower and let Old Freddy Kreuger needle the “Tokyo Heat Island Crust” off his skin. It was an exorbitant waste of water and heat, but to Robert rising up till his head came clear of the jet, it was like coming up for air. He felt renewed. The shower was where he meditated on the world around him. A perfect balance of soothing water and socio-political frustration. Ying and Yang with a pulse action.

Teaching at a multinational financial services company was an almost visceral irritation. Oh he’d agreed to the work and by his honor he would complete the assignment, but still… The building the company had literally fortified reminded Robert of the Tyrell Corporation Building in Blade Runner; a company whose business was the production of sub-human slaves. The parallels between the movie and the firm; an engine of unfettered American capitalism, appealed to Robert’s very dark sense of humor. This sense of humor prevented him from grinding his teeth too much, but some people said it gave him sharp edges. He could almost imagine a woman sitting beside a sewing machine in some godawful sweat shop in China, churning out cash for the Firm’s clients. She would look up from her sewing machine and say “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.”

His students were nice enough in their way. They were no different from anyone else you would meet in Japan. They were not ogres. They worked to get what they wanted out of life. It saddened Robert to think of a student as being like the duracell battery that Morpheus had held in The Matrix, since they were quite literally the batteries of an engine that was chewing people up, extracting all the goodness from them like some demonic spider, before spitting them out. But like those glowing pods in the movie they seemed entirely unaware of what they had bought into.

Emerging lobster red from the shower, Robert dried off with an old towel, long since frayed and worn out from use, but like an old friend - not to be discarded. The fashionistas would have been appalled, hating the idea that men actually like their old tired clothes. Crossing the room he sat down at his laptop and dried his hair. Sitting back he navigated through the subterranean tunnels of the real world to Doug’s Drivel, a Canadian blog that was almost always thought provoking and invariably human. There he learned that lizards masturbate and about Naomi Klein and her new book “Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”.

Naomi Klein talks about how Neo-Cons, the IMF and the World Bank beat down the citizenry and imposes”reform”. It explains why every time the IMF goes into a country in trouble there are riots, so much so that they’re now called the “IMF Riots”. It doesn’t matter where they go, or what the circumstances are the prescribed treatment is always the same. Sell off stuff that belongs to the citizens, and which they paid to build, to private companies at fire sale prices. When people oppose this the tanks roll. Be prepared to be horrified.

These days so many people rail at their governments. They shout at them like they were to blame for the ills of the world, but I doubt that this is the case. The other thing they do is stop voting, which in my view is sheer lunacy.

It seems to me that the government could be the defender of the common man if only we would tell them what to do. I’m all for self sufficiency but I’m not one of these US survivalists who wishes there were no government and blows up Federal Buildings. In a Democracy the government is “our” government, if we give up telling the government what to do it will become, or has become, a lapdog of Corporations and we shall all be worse off. And that’s where we are now. In my view a government is only as good as the activism of its citizens and people get the government they deserve.

Up until now the big corporations have had a stranglehold on things like oil, gas, water, electricity but increasingly on food as well. If you don’t believe ask where you do your grocery shopping. Is it at a Walmart or a Tesco? These Corporations use the money and power they get from their business activities to press our governments to make the business environment good for them. That’s bad news for little people like you and me.

That’s why I’m all for growing stuff at home, making your own energy. It’s not because I’m some kind of hippy wanting to grow flowers in my hair. It’s at least partly because I want to be pressure proof. In a number of countries when you speak out against this or that business interest your name goes on a list of troublemakers that industries bar from employment. If you’re self sufficient they have to get really nasty to shut you up.

It’s even harder for these thugs to silence you these days with the advent of the internet. In Andrew Carnegie’s day all they needed was thugs with baseball bats and bent cops. And in those days the populace fought back by electing police commissioners and police chiefs out of their own number. Citizens have always had more power than they are led to believe. The “I know it’s wrong but what can I do I’m just one person” attitude has always sickened me. As a citizen you have power, both as a consumer and as voter. In both roles you have a lever - one for business, the other for government. Use both at the same time and you can really change things.

Both of these things are really difficult to achieve when people are set apart as individuals, but when you get community enterprises and businesses that interact with each other then it’s a whole new ball game. Choirs are louder and people listen to them.

The government is your government. If you don’t like what it’s doing get some friends together and go and harass them - it’s your duty as a citizen. These businesses rely on your custom. If you don’t like what they’re doing get a petition together or have a rally outside their headquarters. Get a blog together and have your name appear before theirs on a Google word search. Then you’ll see them become much more accommodating. Either way, if you don’t like what’s going down. It’s your fault.

My wife and I have a completely different world view. My wife is pretty tight lipped about these kind of things but today we had a bit of a breakthrough..

My wife feels that all an individual can do in the world these days is to be swept along by the system, catching whatever fleeting lotus blossoms of pleasure you can on the way to being eventually swept out to sea, and that given the strength of the flow the flailing, struggling individuals cannot be held accountable for anything they do just to keep their head above water. My wife sees herself, and other people, as individuals caught in a flash flood. The world for my wife is overwhelming.

I on the other hand come from a family line that seems genetically disposed to be bloody minded.  When I was younger  I would sit next to my dad and watch Question Time on TV with Robin Day. The program was a bit like “Meet the Press”, except it was various politicians and politically minded individuals brought together to answer questions from the public.

When politicians started using the phrases such as ‘in real terms’ my father would explain that this meant they were indeed spending more pounds on schools and hospitals, but that the extra wasn’t keeping pace with inflation so they were actually spending less, not more - since money this year was worth less than last year. He’d then tell me what they included in that additional spending; things like hospitals selling their own property and the like so that contrary to what the politician was saying they were actually spending less, a lot less than before. He told me that’s how politicians speak and you have to be on guard for sophistry of this kind.

That’s where I come from. If something isn’t right I’m damned well going to raise my voice and cause a ruckus if I can. I grew up really believing in phrases like when evil raises its ugly head it is the responsibility of all good men to rise up and beat the bullies back down. If I’m a man caught in flash flood I’m going to try my damnedest to get to a rock and hang on. If I can, I’ll climb up and try to help the other bloody minded climb out of the flood as well.

I would love to meet other bloody minded people like myself.

It was happening again. The news on the BBC internet broadcast was that another president in the dying days of his presidency had made a gesture towards doing something right for a change. It was traditional for Presidents to issue statements and adopt high ground positions on issues that to all intents and purposes would the concern of the next man in the chair. In this case it was global warming.

Robert looked out of the shower and grimaced. Even though it felt better to adopt a posture of willful blindness there were times when the world insisted on peeling back your eyelids as if to say “look”. Robert accounted himself cursed that his eyelids flipped up like those embarrassing window blinds that escape your control and hurtle upwards to smash into their mounting. Sadly, almost anything could set them to hurtling..

“Too late to save face Mr. Not that you ever cared about that…”

Robert ducked back into the shower and placing his hands against the wall, like a man told to assume the position by a hostile world, let the hot water cleanse him and untangle the muscular knots of a singular frustration. He closed his eyes, not in a desire to look away from an ugly reality, because the water was hot and his vision didn’t need to be squiggied clean by his anti dandruff shampoo. The hot shower made him guilty but he eased his guilt by telling himself that at least he didn’t drive a car. The hot water needling down his back like Freddy Kruger the acupuncturist certainly helped.

A short time later and he was ironing his suit pants on his ironing board and getting ready for work. The television lay on its table, inert and powerless, behind him. Robert hadn’t even plugged it in since he first moved into this apartment. Instead his eyes wandered over his bookshelves thinking about the ideas in them. There was Robert Kagan and his dark political vision of a world that was red in tooth and claw, where Europe was building its walls high and relying on Americans with guns. A world of haves and have-nots with its walls and guns and corps run amok.

A decision was building in him. A point had been reached where it wasn’t going to enough just to go with the flow. He could see where it was leading him and he didn’t like it.

Robert eased himself into the lift and pressed the button for the ground floor. The elevator mechanism dropped him smoothly past level after level of identical floors where only the light levels differed. Each was sterile, tiled and looking out across the Tokyo skyline. The elevator arrived at the ground floor and for a moment he felt heavier. He wondered for perhaps the 10^th time that week whether the elevator had a regenerative braking system like the hybrid cars had. He doubted it, but he was damned if he was going to take the stairs in the life-threatening boil and bubble of the Tokyo summer.

He walked out through the high tech security system doorway, which opened as he approached. He didn’t glance at the cameras over the doorway, though he knew they were there. “Fear of crime in a country where all the crime is legitimate and highly controlled” He shook his head in wonder and stepped out into the Boil in the Bag cooking method that Tokyo treats all it’s inhabitants to.

Above him the elevated expressway whooshed and whished engaged in moving people around un-necessarily. It used to be that you lived where you worked, but whatever had happened to that economy of movement it was long gone now. The city was too expensive, too polluted so people moved in and out everyday at considerable expense, creating more pollution. Nomads and pastoralists did the same but they collected something other than road toll tickets. It certainly was a strange world.

A Japanese woman rides towards him, riding on the sidewalk where it’s safe. He doesn’t see the child in the seat over the back wheel until she is almost past him. The little boy is dressed like a tiny sailor of the Kaiser. Japan can make anyone smile. If you look hard enough you can see that humanity endures even in societies that are dehumanizing. The wonder of the human spirit’s ability to say.. “I am the one and only. No, you can’t take that away from me.”