KJ Current Issue

In two short paragraphs, Article 9 of the post-WWII Japanese Constitution articulates the highest ideal in support of world peace — by actually
outlawing war.
textbook graphic

“Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”

Since 1947, and in sharp contrast to its past as a fascist Axis empire-builder, Japan has not committed a single atrocity against the people of another nation, has not re-militarized, has not produced nuclear weapons, nor entered the lucrative arms industry. In part because of Article 9, Japan was able to transform itself into the second largest economy in the world. Moreover, its subsequent ODA expenditures, amounting to 10 to 15 billion dollars (U.S.) each year over the past 18 years — along with the growth of several hundred NGOs active in development, the environment, human rights, and peace — would never have been possible if Japan had remained a militarized nation.

Imagine then the worldwide benefits of taking Article 9 to the global level. The immense financial and human resources unleashed by disarmament could be immediately applied to developing practical solutions to the world’s most pressing problems, focusing on green technologies and green energy, education, solving poverty and health issues, implementing strategies against global warming and desertification, cleaning up toxic waste, converting weapons factories, and the disposal of nuclear weapons.

The seeds for this special issue were planted by the Global Article Nine Conference for Abolishing War, which was held for three days in Chiba in spring 2008, drawing an unprecedented 30,000 participants, including many from overseas. Widely diverse groups recognized common ground, and the positive repercussions that a Global Article 9 would have on their concerns, including nonproliferation and disarmament, expanding nuclear free zones, joint Asian security, reducing poverty, regional conflict resolution, gender equality, peace education, peace-building, human rights and environmental protection.

CONTENTS:

1 POETRY My Pacific War on the Hidaka Plain
Tsumura Yumiko

2 The Power of an Ideal (PDF) – John Einarsen & Jean Miyake Downey
With more than 60 years of hindsight, and the planet’s cultures evolving toward unprecedented levels of interdependence, complexity and integration, both economically and systemically, it is clear that war as a political solution is obsolete. Yet war can still stupidly break out. And as someone once said, “Winning a war is like winning an earthquake.”
*

6 Japan’s Peacemaker, Shidehara Kijuro and the origins of Article 9 (PDF)
An interview with Peace Historian Klaus Schlictmann
by Jean Miyake Downey

After the war, Prime Minister Shidehara conceived the idea of a war-abolishing provision which should be included in the Japanese Constitution, and visited General MacArthur on 24 January 1946 to get his approval. MacArthur was enthusiastic and made sure that it was included, more or less with the wording Shidehara had suggested. Shidehara proposed it, and the Americans put it in. Both deserve praise.

12 Defining the Debate on Constitutional Revision and Peacekeeping, an interview with Prof. Murata Koji (PDF)
by Susan Pavloska and John Einarsen
Substantially, the U.S. Security Treaty has protected Japan’s position in international security, but at the same time, because we have kept the Peace Constitution, Japan didn’t have to expand its military organizations, and did not have to send its troops abroad until the 1990s in a PKO operation. In some sense, the Peace Constitution gave us a kind of moral power for our diplomacy.

15 Collective Insecurities
Paul Scott future

It has been 55 years since Japan came under the defense umbrella of the United States. The initial treaty was signed when the Korean War raged, the Cold War was frozen, Japan was poor, and communist expansion seemed intractable. The world of 2009 is a vastly different matrix.

18 Into the Atomic Sunshine
Post-war art under Japanese Peace Constitution Article 9
Jean Miyake-Downey talks to Watanabe Shinya
I think of modernism itself as negentropy (saving information in an efficient way). This negentropy of modernism appears as the microchip, nuclear power plants, or nuclear weapons. These are examples of the mindset of modernism that reached its zenith in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The nation-state is also a product of modernist thought. www.spikyart.org/atomicsunshine

20 Article 9 and Japan's Future global

(full version as PDF text file here)
Anzai Ikuro and Johan Galtung on cultivating Article 9
There are 7,000 A9 associations throughout Japan. This is unusual. We have had three similar experiences in the post-war history of Japan. The first one was in 1954, after the U.S. hydrogen bomb was tested at Bikini Atoll. The second was during the 1960s. There was a strong anti-Vietnam War movement here in Japan, including the four million union workers who went on strike against that war.www.article-9.org

26 How to Make Article 9 Global (PDF)
Klaus Schlictmann
This is what Article 9 is really about: it is an explicit proposal to limit national sovereignty in favor of “an international peace based on justice and order.” Japanese commentators usually interpret Article 9 as comprising the first step toward a legally binding international order, or even a world federation, where all nations have disarmed, and feel safe under the rule of law.
shared

28 Shared Thoughts on Article 9
Revisiting a landmark peace conference
It is only fair to request Japan maintain Article 9 so that other countries may adopt it. It isn’t fair if only Japan remains disarmed. What about North Korea or China? Their large armies and nuclear weapons only threaten peace. If Japan keeps Article 9, it is only fair for China, North Korea, and South Korea to consider draft¬ing something similar. Then we can convert the money that is now used for buying weapons into education, into helping the poor, and solving economic problems.

36 Transforming Tragic Memories into Peaceful Strength
Syed Sikander Mehdi on Japan’s role in the world
Paul Scott
“Japan should make it a part of their cultural diplomacy to encourage the establishment of a Hiroshima-Nagasaki peace museum in every country of the world because all the people cannot visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A campaign against nuclear weapons is also a campaign for human rights.”

41 The New Peace Museums
Wai Yee
Regrettably, among the nation’s younger generation, the defining wartime image remains that of the atomic bombings. Surprisingly, many Japanese know very little about their county’s own history of aggression and colonialism during that period.

42 POETRY Clarity Compassion Peace
Patricia Donegan
Usually we get the experience of war through a male perspective, but there are some courageous women writers, such as Ishibashi Hideno, who lived through the bombings of Tokyo during World War II and simply documented her experience through haiku.http://books.google.com/books?id=YUH6DV2oWPIC

44 The Sutras of Abu Ghraib
Aidan Delgado abugraib

http://books.google.com/books?id=e_9wsW-K5uIC

46 Becoming a Pacifist in Iraq
An Interview with Aidan Delgado (PDF)
John Einarsen
"It may be crazy, but like Dante’s Inferno, the way to heaven is through hell… through the deepest pit of hell...then you come out the bottom and pass through it. For me, it was impossible to have real compassion living a normal life, because in America it was so easy to “turn off the volume.” I had to go to Iraq and see suffering, real deep suffering, before I could get to that point..".

53 “And So Make Peace...”
Maxine Hong Kingston talks story
Trevor Carolan
"Technically, writing and telling stories is traditional in all cultures: it’s probably built into our DNA that they have rising action that leads to a violent climax. We all love that sense of drama, that frightening climax. Well, I got to thinking ‘can we write a story in which this climax is non-violent and still be exciting?’ That is against everything our culture is teaching us. Television, movies…there’s that violent climax. Can I write counter to this? Will people buy these stories? What will all the critics say?" http://www.vetsofwarvetsofpeace.org/introduction.php

56 Kachin Independence: The AK or the PC? (PDF)

Tim Patterson and Ryan Libre
On the path of the sword, it is possible to buy guns and train soldiers to fight well together in a matter of weeks. On the path of the pen, it can take much longer to forge a group of people who can fight effectively with words and photos.www.idioimagers.org

60 Vegetable Weapons – Ozawa Tsuyoshi

69 POETRY Varanasi – Gail Gutradt

79 POETRY What the Japanese Perhaps Heard
What We Heard About the Japanese
Poems by Rachel Rose

80 Wrestling with Myths wretling

Trevor Carolan
But when the Japanese terror had wiped the floor with every good guy in local Christendom, by default it was up to Kiniski, former terror of the meek, to take on the demon Shibuya and whup him once and for all — preferably in each lower mainland and Vancouver Island wrestling market.

50 IN TRANSLATION
Rainbow over Hell
Mori Tsuneyuki
How then did individual Japanese negotiate the mental terrain that led from glorious self-sacrifice to participating in the future? Mohri Tsuneyuki describes the pivotal moment in Arakaki’s psychological transformation below. The radical disjuncture that he experienced helps explain why so many Japanese think of 1945 as a fundamental turning point for their society yet find it hard to express the precise nature of that change of heart.

62 REALIZATIONS
My Grandfather’s Robe
Aekyong Moore
I was happy that my grandmother also had come to stay at my brother’s house for a while. She was a traditional Korean woman who had held on to both custom and kindness through 36 years of Japanese occupation, a brutal war and a cultural transformation that saw more change in the forty years since the Korean War than in the more than four thousand years that had preceded it.

How I Choose to Give Myself choose

Vinita Ramani Mohan
We have spent the morning considering genocide from the perspective of former low-level perpetrators, though we are increasingly unsure of what “low-level” means when considered within the context of general human brutality.
That is when we run into Roath.
He lives here. He is about 24, or 25 years old. It doesn’t matter. He is in his twenties and he has had enough of all the seriousness associated with Cambodia.

70 JUST DEEDS
Collateral Repair for Collateral Damage: International grassroots network helps displaced Iraqis rebuild their lives, one project at a time
Kimberly Hughes
The situation now facing Iraqis in exile is nothing less than a humanitarian crisis. Amongst the nearly 5 million estimated Iraqis who have been driven from their homes due to war and occupation-fueled violence and instability, an estimated 750,000 are presently in Jordan. Many fled their country with literally nothing other than their accumulated savings and the few possessions they could carry—often after having endured extreme traumas such as kidnapping threats by armed militias, nighttime raids by U.S. soldiers in their homes, and the death of family members from U.S. air aids or militia killings. www.collateralrepairproject.org

74 FICTION The Smell of Sulphur sulphur

Jill Widner
The girl is sitting cross-legged in the grass, holding the glass of lemonade with both hands. If air means water, then what can jeruk mean, when sometimes it can be a kind of tangerine and sometimes a lime. Maybe manis means sweet and nipis means sour. Or maybe nipis means small. Maybe nipis means small and sour with a tight thin skin that is sometimes yellow and sometimes green. Maybe in Indonesian, a single word can mean all of those things...

82 REVIEWS:
Maps of Reconciliation – Literature and the Ethical Imagination, ed. Frank Stewart & Barry Lopez, Manoa – Vinita Ramani Mohan
Beyond National Egoism: the Road to a Nation for International Peace and the Environment, Shohei Nomura – Kimberly Hughes
Field of Spears: the Last Mission of the Jordan Crew, Gregory Hadley – Ken Rodgers
An American in Korea: Two Decades of Photography, by Drayton S. Hamilton – Robert J. Fouser
Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution, David R. Loy – David Cozy
Japanese Iraq War Documentaries – Anastasia Fedorova
Tengu, written & directed by Roger Walch – Susan Pavlovska www.rowmuse.com
Japanese Constitution Cinema – Akamoto Mariko
Making Forest of Bliss: Intention, Circumstance and Chance in Nonfiction Film, Robert Gardner & Akos Oster – Christal Whelan

96 RAMBLE
On Contentment
Robert Brady
I've always loved the mystery in that Tao Te Ching phrase that each time I read it shimmers with the gleam of truth that cannot be pinned down, that coruscates in the mind’s eye: "There is no disaster greater than not being content."

KJ Online Special

“We Need to Eliminate War in Our Own Minds” – An interview with Satoko Norimatsu of Vancouver Save Article 9
by Jean Miyake Downey

Vancouver is North America’s epicenter of support for Japan’s Peace Constitution. At the Vancouver Save Article 9 (VSA9) launch in May 2005, Article 9 Association co-founder Shuichi Kato suggested an explanation: "Perhaps it is not a coincidence that an Article 9 group was formed here, because Vancouver is where the West meets the East." A Pacific Rim crossroads, the city is home to people of diverse heritage, many whose lives still resonate with memories of suffering wrought by the Pacific War.

One of these Vancouverites, Japan-born Satoko Norimatsu, was shocked into peace advocacy when she first learned about Japan’s wartime aggression while attending an international high school in Vancouver where she met students from Asian countries who told her about Pacific War history she had not learned about in Japanese history textbooks. A co-founder of VSA9, Norimatsu started the Peace Philosophy Centre to promote peace and sustainability.

...continued

ONLINE FEATURE

"What’s amazing to me is that after a war — with Japan, in Korea, Vietnam — we get all kinds of loving things: we have 'war brides,' we have families adopting Chinese and Vietnamese orphan girls, we have new family situations. First there’s exotic countries, and then we have the war, then we have marriages…I wonder, 'Can’t we just skip the middle part, the war, and get on with the loving family and wonderful new foods and restaurants part?'”

—Maxine Hong Kingston (interview, KJ #72)

My Grandson The Marine: A Homecoming
by Connie Vigil Platt

I was a typical grandmother, but I became a mother for the second time at age fifty after my grandsons were left without a mother. My son’s wife passed away and left him with two boys to raise. This might not be a unique circumstance but it was certainly life-changing for all of us.

When the youngest grandson decided he wanted to join the Marines, I got a lump in my throat I couldn’t swallow...

...continued

An Open Letter to President Obama
"As global citizens who share your deep concern with issues of peace and nuclear proliferation, we believe your visit to Japan this fall offers an unprecedented opportunity to steer our world decisively towards the abolition of nuclear weapons..."

...see full text

An Op-Ed in the Japan Times
Hiroshoma Beckons Obama

By John Einarsen

For the past sixty-four years, the name ‘"Hiroshima" has conjured a nightmare vision for all humanity: the unthinkable specter of instantaneous atomic annihilation. Only by personally visiting Hiroshima or Nagasaki, the two cities that have experienced atomic bombing, can one begin to grasp the threat posed by the world's present arsenal of nuclear weapons.

...see full text

A Minute and 100 Metres Down the Road
by David Maney

Urumqi, Xinjiang, Sept. 3, 2009. The soldier outside the station had one hand on the barrel and the other on the butt of his shotgun. There were two military trucks by the bus stop and two soldiers in the back-right seats of every bus leaving Urumqi station.

Welcome to west China.

I arrived via long-haul train, 40 hours and just under 4000km in a hard-seat, from Beijing, where rumours were circulating about the extent of the military presence, needle attacks, Uighur and Han street gangs, and the validity of the reports coming out of Xinjiang. After four days I left with more doubts about why ethnic tensions in Urumqi arose and how they could be resolved.

...continued