Samir Chopra's Blog, page 114

Talking to the Dead in Di Donato’s ‘Christ in Concrete’

In Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, twelve-year old Paul and his recently widowed mother Annunziata go to meet a medium called The Cripple; she will help them speak with his father and her husband. After waiting for four hours, they are granted an audience. The Cripple is ‘short’, has a ‘positive voice’, a ‘wide neck’, a  ’a muscular body and limbs’ that are ‘fatted with the appearance of tough tubular lard’ and draped with a ‘cheap purple silk dress.’ After a preparation that includes sniffing  a rose brought for her by Annunziata, listening to a phonograph playing Indian Love Call, and rubbing Annunziata’s wedding ring, she announces she has made contact with the world beyond: first a woman, who is then pushed aside by a ‘strong’ and ‘anxious’ man trying to ‘break through and embrace you.’

Unsurprisingly, this is Geremio, Paul’s father and Annunziata’s husband. The medium offers up a description of a generic ‘Eyetalyun’, informs his wife and son that he is ‘happy’ in Paradise, that he does not want them to ‘weep’, and though he is not ‘ready for questions’, he has a ‘message’ for them: that he ‘never left you and never will’. Later, when he can take questions, he informs them that he is ‘content’, wants Annunziata to ‘join him someday in Paradise’, that there ‘wasn’t a stitch of pain’ when he died, that Paul’s ‘heart will get better’, and finally, that he is ‘always’ with them and has ‘never left’ them. 

The Cripple charges Annunziata and Paul a dollar for this conversation.

One way to respond to this little episode is to consider the Cripple a heartless exploiter of tragedy, a vulture feeding on the bodies of the living dead, one whose life is sustained by the grieving and their unquestioning, blind, irrational beliefs in a life beyond the grave. And Annunziata and Paul may be considered paradigm examples of the gullible, illiterate poor, their lives destined to be hardscrabble because they do not possess the nous to realize that the hard-earned precious dollar and the time they have given the Cripple would have been far better spent on the eight small children that wait for them back in their small, grimy, tenement home.

Or perhaps, when we read of how Annunziata and Paul ‘rejoice and weep’, how they ‘wiped their tears and smiled’ when told Geremio ‘hoits’ on seeing them cry, how, on hearing that his father did not suffer during his brutal death, immured in the concrete that poured in on him after the building he was working on had collapsed, Paul had the ‘weight of the world’ lifted from him and ‘tears dropped soothingly from his eyes’, so that in the end, he feels himself kiss the Cripple’s hands ‘in his heart’, we might find ourselves just a tad confused about whether our skeptical response is sustainable.

I am a skeptic and my initial reaction on reading this section was one of anger at the Cripple. But it did not seem undiluted. It says something for the power and emotion of Donato’s prose, of the believability of his characters, that it was so powerfully imposed upon by a siren call affirming the value of the life-sustaining myth.

Nice Try NSA-Defenders (Not!)

There are two very bad arguments and one rather illiterate confusion making the rounds in the wake of the NSA surveillance scandal. I’ll consider each of them briefly.

First, we have the ‘it was legal’ argument: the surveillance was sanctioned by the Patriot Act, approved by FISA courts, and Congress was in the loop etc. Now, the elementary distinction between legality and morality, between what the law permits and proscribes and what we might consider the right thing to do is just that: elementary. The undergraduates in my Philosophy of Law classes don’t need to be introduced to the distinction between natural law and positive law or to the assigned readings which inquire into our supposed obligations to the law to understand and know this difference. Their lived lives have given them ample proof of this gap as have the most basic history lessons. (Slavery is everyone’s favorite example but many more can be found rather easily.) Indeed, why would we ever have impassioned debates about ‘bad laws’ that need to be revised if the ‘it’s legal’ argument was such a clincher?

Furthermore, the folks complaining about the NSA surveillance are not just complaining about the legality of this eavesdropping and surveillance: they are suggesting the application of some laws is an onerous imposition on them, one that grants the government too much power. They are suggesting this is a moment when the laws of the land require revisitation. This is especially true of the obnoxious Patriot Act. (In another context, consider the draconian Digital Millenium Copyright Act.) Or consider that FISA courts routinely approve all requests made to them, and that the NSA has seven days in which to mine data before it applies for a warrant. All of this is legal. Is it problematic? We could talk about it so long as we aren’t shut up by the ‘its legal’ argument.

Second, we have the vampire ‘if you have nothing to hide, then what do you have to worry about’ argument – it simply refuses to die. No matter how many times it is explained that privacy is not about the hiding of secrets but about the creation of a space within which a certain kind of human flourishing can take place, this hoary nonsequitur is dragged out and flogged for all it is worth. But let me try real quick: we need privacy because without it, very basic forms of life would not be possible. An important example of this is the personal relationship. For these to be built, maintained and enriched, privacy is required. We do not generate and sustain intimacy–emotional and sexual–under observation and analysis; we do so far away from the madding crowd. I am not doing anything illegal or secretive in the maintenance of my personal relationships but I would still like their details to be private. Hopefully, that’s clear. (Who am I kidding?)

Lastly, there is a dangerous conflation between paper records and electronic records. For instance, David Simon, the latest to join the ‘relax, its legal and being done to protect us’ brigade, runs an analogy with the Baltimore wiretaps carried out by the local police and concludes:

Here, too, the Verizon data corresponds to the sheets and sheets of printouts of calls from the Baltimore pay phones, obtainable with a court order and without any demonstration of probable cause against any specific individual.

Except that it doesn’t. Those ‘sheets and sheets’ do not correspond to the billions of digital records obtained from Verizon, which can be stored indefinitely and subjected to data analysis in a way that the hard-copy data cannot.

These arguments will be made again and again in this context; might as well get some brief refutations out there.

I’ve Got Your Brooklynite Hayseed Right Here

George Plunkitt, of Tammany Hall fame, once said:

[A] Brooklynite is a natural-born hayseed, and can never become a real New Yorker. He can’t be trained into it. Consolidation didn’t make him a New Yorker, and nothin’ on earth can. A man born in Germany can settle down and become a good New Yorker. So can an Irishman; in fact, the first word an Irish boy learns in the old country is “New York,” and when he grows up and comes here, he is at home right away. Even a Jap or a Chinaman can become a New Yorker, but a Brooklynite never can.

And why? Because Brooklyn don’t seem to be like any other place on earth. Once let a man grow up amidst Brooklyn’s cobblestones, with the odor of Newton Creek and Gowanus Canal ever in his nostrils, and there’s no place in the world for him except Brooklyn. And even if he don’t grow up there; if he is born there and lives there only in his boyhood and then moves away, he is still beyond redemption. [link added]

I don’t think I’m a hayseed, though I was born in a really, really small town. But I do consider myself a Brooklynite, though I wasn’t born here. Ten years, just completed this past March, should count for something. I don’t quite know what Plunkitt means by being a ‘real New Yorker’ but if it means not being a ‘real’ Manhattanite, then that’s fine by me. Manhattan ain’t what it used to be; have you taken a walk around, say, the Bowery or the Lower East Side recently? And all those tourists? (Most of whom, thankfully, walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, and then turn right around.)

Plunkitt was right in describing Brooklyn as unlike ‘any other place on earth.’ And that’s because despite the relentless efforts by lazy Manhattan journalists to describe Brooklyn as a yuppified, gentrified, hipster haven, and despite the admitted excesses of Park Slope, Williamsburg and Atlantic Yards, Brooklyn still retains much of the ethnic, economic, class and culinary non-hipsterness that made it one of America’s most interesting cities.

There is a little twist in my Brooklyn-ness now, of course. I’m the parent of a native Brooklynite: my daughter, born last year at Long Island College Hospital, off Atlantic Avenue. I spent the first two days of her life, looking out from the maternity ward windows, over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, at New York Harbor, wondering what her life held in store for her. I couldn’t begin to guess at its contours but I felt supremely confident that growing up in Brooklyn meant it would be a very interesting one.

And I hope she can vote for someone else besides City Democrats, besides the product of generic political party machines. Plunkitt might be right; she might not be a ‘real New Yorker.’

From: Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics, ‘Brooklynites Natural Born Hayseeds’, Recorded by William L. Riordon, Signet Classics, 1995.

S.2402 Makes The Thin Blue Line Just A Little Meaner

You might have thought that with laws prohibiting assault already in the books, there would be no need for S.2402, the bill passed by the New York State Senate on June 5th that ‘creates the crime of aggravated harassment of a police or peace officer.’ Sponsored by Senator Joe Griffo, S. 2402 ‘would make it a felony to physically attack a police officer while on duty.’

But you would be mistaken.

Senator Griffo’s justification says it all:

At a time when shocking incidents of disrespect and outright confrontation are at an all-time high, the men and women who patrol the streets of our cities deserve every possible protection we can offer them….My bill would make it a crime to take any type of physical action to try to intimidate a police officer. This is a necessary action because we can see from the rise in incidents that too many people in our society have lost the respect they need to have for a police officer. We need to make it very clear that when a police officer is performing his duty, every citizen needs to comply and that refusal to comply carries a penalty. [emphasis added]

I was going to write something about how this bill would, in effect, make it impossible to ever, ever argue with police officers, to ask them to explain their actions, that this bill endangers all those who come into contact with police officers, who routinely arrest and harass anyone that dares question their right to search, question and arrest. But I thought it might be better to just reproduce a comment on S.402 by someone who frequently encounters the police:

As an attorney and as a resident of Crown Heights Brooklyn I do not support Bill (S.2402), which would make it a felony to harass, annoy, or threaten a police officer while on duty.

During arrests the police routinely add on unfounded charges of Obstruction of Government Administration (OGA), Disorderly Conduct (Dis-Con), and Resisting Arrest.

With this Bill if an individual objected to a policeman’s actions that could annoy the police officer or be considered harassment or even a threat. For example one Friday evening on the way home from synagogue, when walking by a parked police car an officer in the passenger side said hi to my 9 year old son. I told my son to go back to the car and say hi to the police officer. However, when my son approached the car the driver told my son “get away from the car kid” whereupon my son returned to me in tears. I went to talk with the driver of the vehicle about the situation. However, rather than answering me (which he refused) he became visibly annoyed that I had questioned his rude behavior. He then menacingly got out of the vehicle and began yelling at me to stand back and accusing me of threatening him because I was standing near his vehicle. Under this proposed statute I could have been arrested for an E felony.

If an officer is not competent enough to handle the streets then they should get another career. Statutes regarding attempted assault, Dis-Con, (OGA) among other laws already protect police officers from non-violent offenders. The mere appearance of a potential threat and words should not be turned into felonies and a tool of impatient law enforcement officers to further burden the public and our court systems.

The writer of that comment is apparently a middle-aged Jewish gentleman. Those of younger and darker persuasions might express themselves rather more pungently.

The NSA Needs Better Apologists than Charles Shanor

Professor Charles Shanor of Emory university thinks that ‘liberals and civil libertarians’ are making a mountain out of a digital molehill. Apparently, we should be reassured by the fact that the NSA‘s data collection was legal under the terms of the Patriot Act (you know, that civil liberties disaster), that FISA judges approved it, that select members of Congress–not all of whom were comfortable with it–were briefed about it. And as all three branches of government appear to be involved, Professor Shanor is at peace. Checks and balances are working.

But all is not well.

First,

We cannot rule out the possibility that the voluminous records obtained by the government might, some day, be illegally misused. But there is no evidence so far that that has occurred.

Perhaps we’ll have to wait for the next Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden to tell us if that happens, eh, Professor Shanor?

Second, Shanor seems mysteriously comforted by the fact that the government did not monitor call contents, that ‘only’ metadata was collected. Perhaps he should educate himself about the value of metadata, which ‘is frequently more valuable to security officials than the content of the messages.’ In particular:

For some communications, metadata matters more than content. “A call to a suicide hot line, Alcoholics Anonymous, or a gay sex chat room at 2 a.m. are all more sensitive” than the actual message, said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. “You can text political donations. The metadata shows your political leanings, the content just shows the amount you gave. Calling a cell tower away from my house in the middle of the night indicates I’m not sleeping at home.”

 But nothing quite shows Shanor’s cluelessness–technical, legal and political–like the following:

But shouldn’t I be concerned that F.B.I. agents are trampling my rights, just like the I.R.S. might have trampled the rights of certain organizations seeking tax-exempt status? As it turns out, the answer is no. The raw “metadata” requested will not be directly seen by any F.B.I. agent.

Rather, a computer will sort through the millions of calls and isolate a very small number for further scrutiny. Perhaps one of the numbers was called by one of the Tsarnaev brothers before the Boston Marathon bombings. Or perhaps a call was placed by a Verizon customer to a known operative of Al Qaeda. The Supreme Court long ago authorized law enforcement agencies to obtain call logs — albeit on paper rather than from a computer database — without full probable cause to believe a crime had been committed.

There we have it, folks: the Google-GMail defense. Don’t worry about a thing, because human eyes don’t read your emails, computers do. You know, those stupid machines that just happen to handle all our civilization’s data and which possess tremendous executive capacity. Shanor also notes a Supreme Court ruling authorizing the collection of call logs and cursorily notes that it applied to paper logs as opposed to those in a computer database. The latter, as is apparent to anyone who knows anything about digital communication, can be stored indefinitely and can be processed in much more sophisticated fashion.

Nice try, Professor Shanor. Next time, try renting a clue first.

Winners and Losers, All Together

On Thursday night, after a brief foray into New Jersey, I returned to New York City by train, arriving a little after midnight at Penn Station. I walked upstairs into the arrival hall, turned toward the Seventh Avenue exit, and emerged  in front of Madison Square Garden before walking east on 33rd Street toward the subway station from where I would take the Q train downtown into Brooklyn. As I walked down 33rd Street, still wet and glistening from the rain earlier that evening, still lashed by the leftover winds from that downpour, I noticed the homeless: on the sidewalk, pushed up against the buildings, laying on cardboard sheets made from boxes, their belongings–sometimes in bags, sometimes lying around loose–stuffed into corners, sometimes doubling as pillows. Some talked to each other, yet others had already turned in for the night, curled up tightly and efficiently into bodyheat-conserving positions. They formed a somber and ragged guard for my walk to the train that would take me back home, a grim reminder of the co-existence of their desperate situation with the wealth and power of this great city.

Earlier that evening, I had driven my good friend’s borrowed Mercedes back to his  suburban home in Central New Jersey. I had driven it over the magnificent Verrazano Narrows Bridge, its engineering marvels the perfect stage to showcase the powerful, ready-to-supply-oodles-of-horsepower precision-engineered engine of my vehicle. I drove on broad, multi-lane highways, equipped with scanning devices that read off electronic charges for tolls from a card attached to the windshield of my car, past other expensive vehicles–Audis, BMWs, Lexuses–carrying well-heeled professionals back to their undoubtedly comfortable residences. I was guided unerringly to my destination by a global positioning device that had efficiently and quickly calculated the shortest and fastest route and pointed me along it with a combination of crystal clear graphics and peremptory commands (‘Turn left on Newman Springs Road!’). I arrived in time for dinner, drank several glasses of a smooth Pinot Noir and a bold Cabernet Sauvignon, all the while chatting with my friend’s teenaged children while they did their homeworks suitably complemented with occasional consultation of their iPads. After our sumptuous meal with the wine flowing throughout, I was driven to the station to catch my train back to New York City. On the way back, I leisurely stretched out on the large seats in my air-conditioned coach and read several articles from an old issue of the New York Review of Books to while away the seventy-minute ride over and through track and tunnel into the subterranean depths of Manhattan.

It was an evening where I was surrounded by technological accomplishment and power, by personal success and comfort, by the trappings of the good and leisurely life, by the ingenious accomplishments of our civilization. My arrival in New York City filled out the picture: it brought me face to face with the sharp contrasts in fortune that lie uneasily alongside each other, a reminder of this world’s sweepstakes, conducted daily with their winners and losers.

Glenn Greenwald is Not the Story; The Surveillance Is

The New York Times has an article on Glenn Greenwald, who has broken two stories on the NSA surveillance programs that now occupy most thinking people’s attention, which is titled thus: ‘Activist Blogger Is At The Center Of A Debate‘ on its front page. (The article’s title reads ‘ Blogger, With Focus on Surveillance, Is at Center of a Debate’). That headline, and the content of the story, tells us a great deal about what is wrong with modern journalism  and why civil liberties outrages aren’t so outrageous any more.

Greenwald is most emphatically not at the ‘center’ of any debate. He is not the story; the surveillance program is. But surely, some background on the reporter who broke the story would let readers evaluate his credibility? I’m afraid this claim does not withstand closer scrutiny even though it smacks of a pleasing epistemic rectitude: ‘all we are doing is investigating the source of this story’. To focus on him  is a a straightforward misdirection of journalistic effort. The New York Times should be concentrating on uncovering more details about the surveillance programs in the Greenwald articles, but not about Greenwald himself.

(Incidentally, just for good measure, the New York Times article includes a couple of ad-hominem slams against Greenwald:

Gabriel Schoenfeld, a national security expert and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who is often on the opposite ends of issues from Mr. Greenwald, called him, “a highly professional apologist for any kind of anti-Americanism no matter how extreme.”

Mr. Sullivan wrote in an e-mail: “I think he has little grip on what it actually means to govern a country or run a war. He’s a purist in a way that, in my view, constrains the sophistication of his work.”

There is praise for Greenwald too, but all of this is really besides the point.)

The correct thing for New York Times journalists to do at this point is to get to work on verifying the authenticity of the documents that Greenwald’s source has made public and to explain to their readers:  what their legal and political implications are; how these programs fit into the context of the surveillance that the previous administration kicked off; what the relevant sections of the Patriot Act are; whether the defenses made by administration officials stand up to scrutiny or not; and so on. The New York Times has done some of these things, but my point is that at this moment, those  ought to be its exclusive focus. There is a chance here for a serious journalist to expose the workings of a provably out-of-control government; anything else is a distraction at this stage.

This kind of missing-the-point is not restricted to the focus on Greenwald. Consider for instance, the stories on the Bradley Manning trial. As Matt Taibbi points out, most media outlets are obsessed by his personal background and are rather spectacularly missing the forest for the trees:

The CNN headline read as follows: “Hero or Traitor? Bradley Manning’s Trial to Start Monday.” NBC went with ”Contrasting Portraits of Bradley Manning as Court-Martial Opens.”

Unsurprisingly, the citizenry marches on, its attention diverted.

The Spying Will Continue Until Morale Improves

The New York Times, picking up on a Guardian story by Glenn Greenwald, reports that:

The Obama administration is secretly carrying out a domestic surveillance program under which it is collecting business communications records involving Americans under a hotly debated section of the Patriot Act, according to a highly classified court order disclosed on Wednesday night.

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April, directs aVerizon Communications subsidiary, Verizon Business Network Services, to turn over “on an ongoing daily basis” to the National Security Agency all call logs “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

This policy is a straightforward continuance of the Bush administration’s massive surveillance effort, similarly directed by the NSA in co-operation with telecommunications companies. The scope of the order indicates the data collection is indiscriminate: it is not directed, targeted or narrowly focused. (The court order does limit the data collection by time.) Rather, it is a broad sweep, a trawl to net the NSA’s desired catch. This is not surveillance to confirm a hypothesis; this is surveillance to try to frame one. This is not surveillance as an aid to detective work; this is surveillance as an integral component of that work. As Greenwald notes:

FISA court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.

Especially interesting, I think, is the reaction to the story. By that I do not mean the reactions of politicians, journalists, and privacy advocates. Rather, if one is allowed to believe that comments on the New York Times story are at all reflective of the ‘word on the street’, then a couple of apologetic samples are depressingly interesting.

For instance, ‘pjd’ from Westford writes:

I’m surprised that no one has noted the dates in the order. The order was signed on 4/25/2013 which is ten days after the Boston Marathon bombing.

This response is emblematic of the ‘it’s justified because of the terrorists.’ Never mind that nothing about the Boston bombers seems to indicate any kind of widespread conspiracy that would justify such a massive surveillance effort.

And ‘Kurt’ from NY writes:

Ordinarily, this kind of data collection could be interpreted as overly broad and a threat to civil liberties….But, again, given just how disturbing it seems on its face, if a judge is willing to make such an order and Congress is aware of it, it would seem to suggest that there is legitimate need in response to specific threat. Which would also say that, given the security classification it has been given, for this matter to be public knowledge as it now is is possibly injurious to national security.

Here we have the standard ‘the government must have a reason even if they aren’t telling us, and that’s fine by me.’ The trust displayed here in a judicial and executive branch that have done nothing to justify it is touching.

And this statement by the Obama Administration is equally risible:

The information acquired does not include the content of any communications or the name of any subscriber.  It relates exclusively to metadata, such as a telephone number or the length of a call.

Why is this not even remotely comforting?

Dispatches from the Daddy Front – I

My first two days of full-time, stay-at-home fatherhood have been interesting. My wife headed back to work on Monday, her maternity leave over, and I took over, armed with a page of notes–written by my wife–detailing what my daughter’s schedule was to look like; its most important components were, obviously, her nap and feeding times. (The exact times vary from day-to-day; it’s the intervals that are crucial.)

Monday was not a good first day. I was slightly hungover from a Sunday birthday party in New Jersey; my daughter’s nap schedule had been disturbed by our attendance at the party; her sleep on Sunday night was interrupted by our late return by car; the day was hot and humid. So, nothing quite went to plan on Monday. My daughter did not sleep well during the day; her naps were shorter than usual, and she woke up with no sign of her customary wakeful cheeriness. As I dealt with the sticky heat, my grumbling head and stomach, a cluttered, messy apartment, and an unhappy, fussy baby that did not take kindly to being set down for even short periods, I felt myself slowly unravel. I had planned to clean our apartment and do laundry, but nothing got done. Music, blogging, feed times, and a couple of episodes of Arrested Development provided momentary succour but full-scale relief was only forthcoming in the evening, when I handed our baby back to her mother, and went to work out.

Tuesday went much better for my daughter woke up cheerful, inquisitive and engaged after a long first nap.  I realized after she had taken her second nap that I was not utilizing these nap times properly; I should have done some reading or writing, but instead spent most of the time aimlessly grazing on the ‘Net. Later in the afternoon things turned for the worse. My daughter became progressively fussier–an eventuality I had been warned about by my wife–and needed increasing amounts of attention as the evening drew near. She did take a third nap, a short one, which provided both her and myself some relief before her mother returned from work.  Later, my wife and I went out for dinner with some good friends; our kind neighbor and friend downstairs agreed to carry out some high-tech babysitting i.e., via wireless video monitor.  It was our first ‘date’ since last year.

Unsurprisingly, these two days have resulted in my gaining added respect for my wife’s babycare skills: even though I was on paternity leave over the past few months, she was still the primary caretaker all that time. I’ve also realized, rather quickly, that if I want to get any reading and writing done, I’m going to have to be extraordinarily efficient during her nap periods. Even that won’t be enough for serious writing so daycare looms, an expensive and unsatisfying option, but one that seems unavoidable.

Parenting was never going to be a bowl of cherries.

Note: In case you were wondering, I’m writing this post during my daughter’s first nap today; blogging will be easier than academic writing when it comes to writing in these compressed segments of time.

Murakami on Japan’s ‘Years of Trial’

Like most ‘Western’ students of the world wars, my reading has largely been confined to American and English sources; this is revelatory of both provincialism and laziness on my part. In the case of the Second World War, I’ve read a few German sources but very few Russian or Japanese ones. Thus it was with great interest that I read Hyõe Murakami’s Japan: The Years of Trial 1919-1952, a little book that provides a highly compressed history of that turbulent period. (Murakami served in the Japanese Army in WWII before going on to become a novelist and critic.)

As might be expected, there are interesting shifts in perspective on: the Paris Peace Conference, the Sino-Japanese conflict in Manchuria, Japan’s motivation for the declaration of war, the conduct of wartime operations, and the US occupation of post-war Japan.

Some of these shifts are startling. For instance, the invasion and sack of Nanking is described thus:

Nanking fell to the Japanese army in December of that year (1937).

That’s it.

Others, however, are far more interesting. Consider, for instance, Murakami’s debunking of several aspects of the ‘Japanese soldiers never surrender but would rather commit suicide’ legend:

The fact that Japanese soldiers surrendered to the enemy is often attributed to the traditions of the samurai era, but this is not correct. Most military men throughout the world feel the same: surrendering is dishonorable. Yet in fact the Japanese samurai of old surrendered quite frequently, nor was there any traditional feeling of shame involved. Even during the Russo-Japanese war, Japanese soldiers became POWs–there were not many, it is true–expected quite naturally to be treated according to international conventions . It was only in the Shõwa era (1926- ), when the spirit of nationalism began to be fostered, that the belief that it was shameful to be taken alive really sank into the nation’s mind. During the Shanghai incident in 1932, Major Kuga Noboru was seriously injured and, while unconscious, was taken prisoner by the Chinese army. Treated well in the hospital, he was subsequently repatriated, but was so ashamed of having been a captive that he went back to the former battlefield and committed suicide there. The event received overwhelming news coverage and created a new standard of the ‘model soldier’. As the war with China dragged on, this spirit was encouraged still more until it permeated the entire population.

Once taken prisoner, a Japanese could no longer return to his old home; no one but his father and mother would be happy that he had returned alive, and sometimes even the parents and family, swayed by the other villager’s scorn, would start wondering why he had not died a ‘glorious death’. It was not necessarily ‘for the Emperor’ that the Japanese soldier fought to the last, but, rather, because of such rules of the community. What he wished most of all was to avoid shame for the family; the Emperor’s name was no more than a convenient symbol used for that purpose.

Murakami’s book is far too slight for the serious historian of that period, but it still works as a very good introduction for anyone else.