The World is Talking About…

Tokyo is Talking About...Neighborhood Preservation

Now, something from my own backyard, as it were. No, I don't hang out here and I've only been there a couple of times -- I usually think of it as a transfer station between Shibuya and Kichijoji on the Keio Inokashira train line that I'm always passing through -- but I keep meaning to drop by some weekend and explore the streets and back-alleys to see what I can see.

For someone else's look at the neighborhood, check out "The cool sounds of 'Shimo'" by Steve McClure of the International Herald Tribune (February 4, 2004). Find out about Pizza of Death Records, and yes, the label's name does make perfect sense once you know the story.

Splitting a Hip Neighborhood, in More Ways Than One

"Until now, nobody cared if we destroyed the culture and environment of Tokyo," says urban planning professor. "People are gradually coming to understand that these things matter, too."

By Martin Fackler, New York Times

Tokyo, Setagaya Ward, Japan - With its vintage clothing stores, live music clubs and cheap noodle shops, Shimokitazawa is Tokyo’s answer to Greenwich Village, an epicenter of youth culture in one of Asia’s trendiest metropolises.

The neighborhood is popular for its cozy residential feel, drawing hordes of students and young office workers, who regularly throng its maze of narrow lanes and alleys.

Its tiny shops, many in converted houses or low-rise apartments, often bear names that recall a counterculture across the Pacific: the Village Vanguard Diner, Haight Ashbury, Mojo Rising.

But a shadow has fallen straight across the heart of this pulsing neighborhood. In four years, city officials plan to start building an 81-foot-wide thoroughfare that will slice Shimokitazawa in two.

The road has set off a rare battle for preservation in a country where big construction projects have long been welcomed as progress and used to grease the wheels of politics.

The fight pits boutique and bar owners, among them the first bearers of hippie culture to the neighborhood three decades ago, against city hall and older residents who resent the relative newcomers.

Read more...

See also:

• "The cool sounds of 'Shimo'" by Steve McClure of the International Herald Tribune (February 4, 2004)

France is Talking About...British Invasions

Tourists Evoke Wartime Memories

Instructions for British Servicemen in France 1944 and Help! The English are Invading Us! are bestsellers in France; Madame Patrice and the English invaders of old and new

By Joanna Robertson, BBC News, From Our Own Correspondent

Paris, France - Saturday lunchtime at Le Dome café on Boulevard Montparnasse, and the regulars are feeling somewhat squeezed.

The usual midweek mix of locals - with the odd table of tourists - swells for 24 noisy weekend hours - from Saturday lunch to Sunday lunch - with British day or weekend trippers fresh off the Eurostar, ordering the Dome's fabled seafood in rather dreadful French or "shouted-so-you-might-understand" English....

At her usual place, shielded from the hubbub by her hat-of-the-day and the fronds of a brass-potted aspidistra, sits Madame Elisabeth Patrice.

Ninety years old, elegant, spry and beautiful, she is behind her daily dose of uplifting effervescence - a single glass of Deutz champagne (as recommended by her cardiologist).

Madame Patrice has a great many hats: "Simply hundreds - I adore them," she confesses. She keeps these hats in two large wardrobes - one here in Paris, and the other at her seaside house near Deauville in Normandy.

In 1944, when the Allies finally arrived, Madame Patrice donned a carefully preserved "confection of a hat", as she called it, and slipped her war-thinned feet into yellow shoes to dance through the streets of her liberated city....

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Managua is Talking About...El Comandante

Ex-Firebrand Ortega on the Comeback Trail

Ronald Reagan’s nemesis returns to political life

By Marc Lacey, New York Times

Managua, Nicaragua - Washington's old Cold War nemesis, Daniel Ortega, is as divisive a figure as he ever was as a 30-something revolutionary who took on Ronald Reagan.

After three failed attempts to return to power in the last 15 years, El Comandante, as Mr. Ortega is widely known, is once again smiling down from campaign billboards across Nicaragua. Now 60 and balding with a slight paunch, he stands his best chance yet of returning to power in elections on November 5th.

Though opinion polls give Mr. Ortega about 30 percent support, he is the front-runner in a race splintered among five candidates. Yet the sentiment against him is broad and the scrambling to head off an Ortega victory is intense, and not just in Nicaragua.

The prospect has stirred deep anxiety in the Bush administration, which envisions him as a new ally for President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela in challenging United States policy. Mr. Chávez has lent his support to Mr. Ortega, while Washington has sent word in no uncertain terms that aid will be re-evaluated if Mr. Ortega is elected.

The latest in a string of visitors to Managua was Representative Dan Burton of Indiana, chairman of the House subcommittee on Western Hemisphere affairs. While insisting that he was not telling Nicaraguans how to vote, he made it clear to local reporters that he opposed Mr. Ortega and that relations between Nicaragua and the United States would suffer should he win.

But Mr. Ortega's fiercest opposition is homegrown. He is not just a candidate. He is the main issue in the race.

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La Paz is Talking About...The Sea

Note: Having actually been to Bolivia and Lake Titicaca (though we set out onto the lake from the Peruvian side), this story really caught my eye...

Bolivia Reaches for a Slice of the Coast That Got Away

Land-locked navy wants access to the sea, lost since 1879 war; navy bases at 12,000 feet

By Simon Rovero, New York Times

La Paz, Bolivia - From his penthouse office in a tightly guarded nine-story building here, where architects designed the watchtowers to look like small lighthouses, Vice Admiral José Alba Arnez oversees a military force with more than 5,000 sailors, cadets and officers.

His waiting room has oil paintings depicting men-of-war in choppy waters, an old wooden ship’s wheel made by John Hastie & Company of Scotland and waiters clad in bow ties who serve coca tea on fine china.

All that is lacking for Admiral Alba, the commander general of the Bolivian Navy, is a sea...

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Enoosaen is Talking About...Mutual Aid

A Kenyan Town’s Offer of Aid Pays Dividends for Its Youth

“We did what we knew best,” said an elder, Mzee ole Yiamboi. “The handkerchief we give to people to wipe their tears with is a cow.”

By Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times

Enoosaen, Rift Valley Province, Kenya - When Masai tribesmen marry, they give cows. When a son wants to earn the respect of his father, he gives cows. When there is a friend in need or a condolence call to make, more cows.

So it was, in this one-cow-fits-all spirit, that the elders of Enoosaen four years ago donated 14 prized bulls and heifers to the people of the United States to help ease the pain of the Sept. 11 attacks.

But there was one little problem: the cattle — and how to get them from here to there.

Instead, they will be blessed, and their offspring will be used to pay for education for the children of Enoosaen. To get the cow trust fund going, the Americans are donating 14 high school scholarships.

“What you did to help us will not be forgotten,” said the new American ambassador to Kenya,  Michael E. Ranneberger.

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Paris is Talking About...A Holocaust Symbol

In a Holocaust Suitcase, a Question of Memories

Historical baggage, in more than one sense

By Alan Riding, International Herald Tribune

Paris - Old suitcases gathering dust in the homes of many second- or third-generation immigrants around the world are mementoes of journeys that changed the lives of parents or grandparents. No longer used or even usable, perhaps with yellowing stickers recalling the names of long-deceased forebears, they survive as family relics.

Yet still more powerful symbols, not least for European Jews, are suitcases separated from their owners.

Jews rounded up in France during World War II, for instance, were frequently encouraged to pack a suitcase, presumably to deceive them into believing they were heading for internment or labor camps, not death.

The French artist Christian Boltanski once evoked the one-way journeys of these deportees in a touching installation of battered and antiquated suitcases. With the suitcases displayed at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland, though, there is no ambiguity: All once belonged to Holocaust victims

This is the story of one such suitcase - and the memory it still carries...

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Myanmar (Burma) is Talking About...Temple Preservation

From Ruins to Ruined

Bagan in danger of becoming temple theme park

By Richard C. Paddock, Los Angeles Times

Bagan, Myanmar  (formerly Burma) - The bricklayers are paid $1.35 a day to rebuild the ancient ruin: a small, 13th century temple reduced by time to little more than its foundation.

But they have no training in repairing aged monuments, and their work has nothing to do with actually restoring one of the world's most important Buddhist sites. Instead, using modern red bricks and mortar, they are building a new temple on top of the old.

They work from a single page of drawings supplied by the government. Three simple sketches provide the design for a generic brick structure and a fanciful archway. No one knows, or seems to care, what the original temple looked like. Nearby are two piles of 700-year-old bricks that were pulled from the ruin. The bricklayers use them to fill holes in the temple.

Known as Monument No. 751, the structure is one of hundreds of new temples that have popped up all over the ancient city of Bagan, which ranks with Cambodia's Angkor temple complex as one of Asia's most remarkable religious sites. Once the scene of an international rescue effort, Bagan is now in danger of becoming a temple theme park.

The late Myanmar historian Than Tun called the restoration "blitzkrieg archeology."

"They are carrying out reconstruction based on complete fantasy," said an American archeologist who asked not to be identified for fear of being banned from the country. "It completely obliterates any historical record of what was there."

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A personal note, on knowing and not knowing

Five Years On

I believe in the power of information.

I live in Tokyo, across the international dateline, so five years ago today at 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, it was nearly 10 o'clock at night, local time.

I was asleep and sometime around 11:30 my mobile phone rang. I roused myself and grabbed it, and still groggy muttered, "Hello".

It was Sonja, a fellow American I've known for years, even before I came to Japan. "Did I wake you?" she asked. "I can call back later."

"No no no, it's fine, I'm already up. What is it?"

(Years later, I still marvel at this, that she said she could CALL BACK LATER? Even she can't believe she said that, that her impulse for politeness momentarily overrode the urgency.)

Sonja told what had happened, what she was witnessing on the Japanese TV news. At first, I didn't understand what she was saying, and when my mind cleared and I understood her, I -- and I mean this quite literally -- didn't believe her.

"What? I'm sorry, but that's impossible. Collapsed? Both of them? No, that's wrong. Impossible. No." NO, I'm serious, it's horrible, it's on all the TV channels.

Ear glued to the mobile phone, I tried switching it on my old, rarely used TV set, but it didn't work no matter how frantically I fiddled with it. I couldn't access the Internet access, because the government phone monopoly's overpriced landline-pricing structure (installing a line cost several hundred dollars, and all calls, even local, were metered) rendered the cost of dial-up internet prohibitive, so I didn't have a landline. My fancy new mobile phone was supposed to offer news through the mobile-web menu, but access instructions were opaque and what I could find told me nothing.

I flipped on the radio to the local American Forces Network station, based out of nearby Yokota Air Base, which broadcasts NPR news programs, but a few months before some dummy of program director had, apparently, decided that it was aesthetically unpleasing or too confusing to broadcast NPR's Morning Edition live, since it was still night here, choosing to broadcast NPR's All Things Considered -- tape-delayed at least 12 hours -- instead in that time slot. And since it appeared no one was actually at the station, a 12-hour-old broadcast of All Things Considered was what was still playing, the calm voice of the host discussing whatever now-unimportant issue was going on the previous day.* I finally had to resort to pounding on my next-door neighbor's door, damn the hour, to frantically ask if I use his TV: it was already on, and we both watched the TV news footage in horrid fascination, confirming for me the horrible truth that Sonja had told me. 

Until that moment, from the time Sonja told me what had happened and the moment I confirmed it through the news, I don't think I've ever felt so out of touch in my life. Horrible, world-shattering events were taking place, far away but still connected to me as an American, and I was completely unable to find out what was going on or even to confirm that the events were real. I had to know.

I felt helpless, which I recognize is objectively irrational, since my knowing or not knowing had no -- nor could it have any -- real-world impact. Nonetheless, knowing what happened, finding all I could, was a necessity for me, a way of connect myself to the larger world in a way that's important to me even if I can't articulate why.

I suppose it's why I re-started this blog the way I have, something that didn't occur to me, really, until I started typing these words: those little stories I used to read in the San Francisco Chronicle, in their own oblique and off-center ways, help illuminate the larger world that eye-glazing thumbsucker analysis pieces or bang-bang-here's-the-latest-war bulletins never did. They connected me to Hong Kong and Beijing and Hanoi and Lima and Rio and Palermo and Moscow and Paris and Teheran and New Delhi and all the other little places on the human level. If these stories I find help connect some people -- however few who actually read these words -- then I've done a good thing.

*Eventually, at midnight, someone apparently woke up, and the radio station cut to the live CNN feed -- a decision I thought almost as stupid, since broadcasting over the radio a television soundtrack instead of actual radio news told me that whoever was running the radio station didn't really understand radio.