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editor
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 Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2005 1:35 pm Post subject: Japanese Gambles |
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Nippon-koku Japanese Gambles:
The Economist
Magazine Subscription
A very Japanese revolution
How to bring about change by re-electing
the same old party
Sept. 17/05
| Quote: | | No one ever accused Japan of making itself easy to understand. It has just had its most thrilling general election in decades, possibly ever, a poll called courageously by the prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, after a post-office privatisation bill had been rejected in the Diet (parliament) in August. At first, that decision looked suicidal. But the maverick Mr. Koizumi's gamble paid off: he won a huge mandate, seemingly for radical change (see pages 22-24). So here comes a new Japan? Look harder, and the fog starts to form. (First paragraph from Japan's Election, p. 12) |
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editor
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| Posted: Thu Dec 21, 2006 10:57 am Post subject: |
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War Made New
Technology, Warfare, and
the Course of History
1500 to Today
Hardcover
By Max Boot
| Quote: | A somnolent country was finally jarred out of its reverie by a startling message sent at 7:58 a.m., December 7, from Ford Island Naval Air Station: "AIR RAID, PEARL HARBOR -- THIS IS NO DRILL." Amid the hoarse wail of Klaxons, the men aboard the battleship California received an earthier version of the same alert over their public address system: "Everyone get to your battle stations! This is no shit!"
Across the island, soldiers, sailors, and marines, their "adrenaline...pumping about a thousand miles an hour," as one later recalled, broke into locked ammunition lockers, grabbed whatever weapons happened to be available -- ranging from .45 caliber pistols to .50 caliber machine guns -- and craft, especially in the second wave that began to appear around 9:00 a.m., their fighter aircraft were caught on the ground. The only notable success was Welch and Kenneth Taylor, who had been awake when the attack occurred because they had stayed up all night playing poker. Between them, they downed seven Japanese aircraft, mostly slow dive bombers. But most of the raiders reached their targets unimpeded. (From Flattops and Torpedoes at pg. 245). |
| Quote: | | Even with this formidable striking force, the attack was considered a great risk. The Navy General Staff was flatly opposed, as were many of Yamamoto's subordinates, including Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, a torpedo expert who commanded the First Air Fleet despite his lack of familiarity with air power. They pointed out all sorts of reasons why the attack might fail -- bad weather, bad luck, bad intelligence -- and suggested that the consequences -- the loss of sizable portion of the navy's aviation strength -- would be unacceptable. A tabletop simulation at the Naval War College in early September concluded with the loss of two carriers and a third of the Fleet, bluntly told Yamamoto: "You are an amateur naval strategist and your ideas are not good for Japan. This operation is a gamble." Yamamoto wasn't discouraged. "I like games of chance," he replied insouciantly. "You have told me that the operation is a gamble, so I shall carry it out." (-- pgs. 260-261) |
| Quote: | More effective than land-based fighters were those that flew off U.S. and British aircraft carriers that ventured near the coast of Japan in the summer of 1945. They took to bombing and strafing to complement the work of the big bombers. For the most part, however, they were simply making the rubble bounce. By June 1945, the Superforts had razed Japan's major cities so completely that they were able to move on to medium-sized cities, those with populations under 300,000, and destroy them, too. They were so sure of their domination of the skies that, like a pool player calling his shot, they dropped leaflets warning Japanese civilians which cities would be next on their hit list, confident that was nothing the Japanese could do to stop them.
Nor could the Japanese retaliate against the American homeland, since they lacked a long-range bomber of their own. The best they could do was to load thousands of hand-made rice-paper balloons with small incendiary devices and send them wafting across the Pacific. Some actually reached North America but the damage they caused was negligible -- a few minor forest fires in the Pacific Northwest and a total death toll of six people in rural Oregon. Even as these comically ineffectual devices were drifting eastward, a weapon of unimaginable magnitude was coming from the west.
...On August 6, the world learned its secret when a B-29 known as the Enola Gray, piloted by (29-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Paul) Tibbets, dropped an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, leaving a mushroom cloud and utter annihilation in its wake. Three days later, a B-29 named Bock's Car dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki. The former raid killed at least 130,000 people, the latter more than 60,000. (Radiation poisoning would increase the long-term death toll.) The unleashing of this unprecedented firepower finally forced Japan into surrendering. (From The Second Industrial Revolution, Superfortress and Firebombs, at pgs. 292-293) |
Of all that's been said and written about Hiroshima, this is by far the most eloquent:
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Directed by French Nouvelle Vague filmmaker Alain Resnais
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2645#2645
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editor
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| Posted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 12:36 pm Post subject: |
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The Atlantic
Magazine Subscription
Postcards from Tomorrow Square
By James Fallows
December, 2006
| Quote: | The main trigger for renewed Chinese protest against Japan has been the (idiotic) persistence of Junichiro Koizumi, Japan's former prime minister, in paying ceremonial visits to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where fourteen Class-A war criminals from World War II are among the 2.5 million Japanese war dead the shrine honors. Koizumi recently stepped down after five years in office, but his successor, Shinzo Abe, has refused to rule out continuing the visits. When I've asked Chinese students what they want from Japan, they often say an end to the Yasukuni visits and "an apology." Formal apologies have in fact been offered many times by Japanese officials, and even by the current emperor. If the Chinese are looking for something like German-style ongoing contrition, this is not in the cards. Twentieth-century history, as taught in Japan, holds that Japan itself was the ultimate victim of the "Great Pacific War," because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
...So far every student gathering I've been to has included a volunteered reference to the evil Japanese, and none has included a reference to the evils of Chairman Mao (whose picture is still on every denomination of paper money) and his Cultural Revolution. (-- pg. 104) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2678#2678
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 5:14 pm Post subject: |
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Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts:
Seventy Poems by 1996 Nobel Prize winner
Wislawa Szymborska
Translated and Introduced by
Magnus J. Krynski and
Robert A. Macguire
| Quote: | Written in a Hotel
Kyoto has good luck,
luck and palaces,
winged roofs,
steps running up and down the scale.
Hoary yet coquettish,
made of stone yet living,
of wood,
yet seeming to grow from sky into earth.
Kyoto is a city beautiful
enough to bring the tears.
The real tears
of a certain gentleman,
a connoisseur and lover of antiquities
who at the decisive moment
behind the green-baize table
exclaimed
that after all there were so many inferior cities -
and suddenly burst into tears
in his chair.
Thus was saved Kyoto,
far more beautiful than Hiroshima.
But all that is ancient history.
I can't think forever of that,
or endlessly be asking
what will happen, what will happen.
For everyday purposes I believe in permanence,
in the prospects for history.
I can't go on munching apples
in constant terror.
This and that Prometheus, I hear,
walks around in a fireman's helmet
enjoying his grandchildren.
(Excerpt of the poem originally published in Sto pociech (A Million Laughs, A Bright Hope), 1967, at pg. 89) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2901#2901
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2007 12:34 pm Post subject: |
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From Omens and Lucky Charms:
Women of Mythology
Hardcover
By Kay Retzkoff
| Quote: | At long last, the several gods who had advised the emperor revealed themselves to her (the empress): "We told him of the land to the west," said the first god.
"We revealed to him that it contained gold, silver, and gems that sparkle in the sunlight," said the second god.
"We promised him this country," said the third god.
"But he answered us haughtily," said the first god. "He said, 'There is no land to the west. One only has to climb a mountaintop to see that there is only ocean.'"
"He claimed that were deceivers," said the second god.
"For that sacrilege," said the third god, "we took his life."
"How can I undo the curse upon the land that my husband's sacrilege has brought about?" the empress asked.
"The land to the west is to be ruled by the child in your womb," said the first god.
"What child is in my womb?" asked the empress.
"If you go to seek the land to the west, you must make offerings to all the heavenly deities and all the earthly deities, to all the gods of the mountains, rivers and seas," said the first god.
"You must create a shrine at the top of the ship for us and put wood ashes into a gourd," said the second god.
"You must make many chopsticks and plates and cast them onto the ocean waves," said the third god.
"Then may you cross the waves to the land of the west," said the first god. (From the chapter, The Empress Jingo Kogo Conquers the Western Kingdom, at pgs. 152-153) |
Link to this entry
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editor
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| Posted: Sat Jan 19, 2008 1:37 pm Post subject: |
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Good Time Girls
of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush
Hardcover
By Lael Morgan
| Quote: | Another good time girl, a prostitute known only as "Japanese Mary," prospered when she bet $1,000 on the prowess of Jujiro Wada, a fellow Japanese immigrant, who won a winter marathon on Nome's enclosed track. She invested her winnings in grubstaking prospectors and when one made a rich strike, threw a lavish party at a Nome roadhouse that was talked about for years.
According to one account, Mary used her money to return to her family and respectability, but her good fortune did not last. Back in business in Iditarod's restricted district, she was strangled with a shoelace and a towel. "A gold nugget chain and a cross, which she usually wore around her neck, was missing," reported one newspaper. "She was believed by many to have had a great deal of money but none of it was found in the cabin." And the mystery of her murder was never solved. (footnote omitted) (-- p. 167) |
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editor
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| Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 1:57 pm Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
Memoirs of a Geisha
DVD
Eye candy through a glass darkly
Based on the novel by Arthur Golden
In English but you'll still need the yellow subtitles
| Quote: | Auntie (reading a letter to Chiyo, who has been sold along with her sister to slave for a supposedly high-class brothel until/unless selected to become a high-priced mistress to Japanese moguls seeking amusement beyond the confines of arranged marriages): Dear Satsu and Little Chiyo, As one who was once an orphan child myself, this humble person is sorry to inform you that six weeks after you left for your new life in Miyako the suffering of your honored mother came to its end. And only a few weeks afterward your honored father departed this world as well. This humble person feels confident both your honored parents have found their place in Paradise. But happily at the temple there is a poem called Loss carved into the stone. It has three words. But the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read Loss. Only feel it.
Little Chiyo (to herself): My mother and father had left this life. My sister, I never heard of again. I had dishonored the okiya, so Mother (madam) had other plans for me. I would pay back my debt ... year after year. Not as a geisha. As her slave. |
Memoirs of a Geisha
Papberback
By Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
Stunning soundtrack composed by John Williams
Audio CD
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3762#3762 |
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