December 20, 2009
By PAT RYAN
Service at the calm and cozy hideaway Star Bar Ginza, which opened in 2000, is friendly, but don’t be deceived: there are few bars that take their craft more seriously. You might call Hisashi Kishi, the owner (below), the Einstein of bartenders; he is the director of technical research for the Nippon Bartenders Association (he writes recipes for their official cocktail book), a former International Bar Association world champion and the youngest-ever winner of the national Scotch cocktail competition. (A former Star Bar bartender, Hidetsugu Ueno, is the international director of the bartenders association and has opened Bar High Five nearby, at 4F No. 26 Polestar Building, 7-2-14 Ginza.)
Take Mr. Kishi’s signature cocktail, the Sidecar. His method is simple yet scientific: he froths the Cognac and triple sec together to blend and soften the ingredients and elicit the aromas. Next, as Mr. Ueno described it, comes “Kishi’s own style of hard shake,” a series of short, vigorous figure-eight movements. And if you ask for ice in your cocktail, expect one large, perfectly hand-carved ice cube, crystal-clear and glossy; it chills the drink without melting too fast. (At the end of the bar, near a dry-cured leg of ham, is a magazine, published by Junpyo, the Japanese Icemakers Union, which features a photo of Mr. Kishi.)
But Mr. Kishi doesn’t just refine the classics. He will happily concoct an extempore cocktail that fits your mood — a sweet-tart drink built on fresh passion fruit perhaps? Something with a honey pomelo or a mango peach? (When translation is needed, the assistant bartender, Ito Daisuke, is quick to interpret.)
The same divine attention to detail is at the core of the edibles at Star Bar. Snacks vary nightly, but they might include swirled florets of cheese, salmon mousse on featherweight crackers or tiny salted soy nuts. A favored sliced cheese is the cow’s milk brand from Yoshida Farm in Okayama Prefecture.
Star Bar, Sankosha Building B1F, 1-5-13 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo; 81-3-3535-8005; starbar.jp. Open Monday to Friday, 6 p.m. to 2 a.m.; Saturday, 6 p.m. to midnight. Cocktails are around 1,500 yen, or $17 at 88 yen to the dollar; food prices range from around 500 to 2,200 yen; and the cover charge is 1,000 yen a person. No reservations, and the place is seating-only.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Monday, December 21, 2009
Baby Boom of Mixed Children Tests South Korea
November 29, 2009
By MARTIN FACKLER
YEONGGWANG, South Korea — Just a few years ago, the number of pregnant women in this city had declined so much that the sparsely equipped two-room maternity ward at Yeonggwang General Hospital was close to shutting down. But these days it is busy again.
More surprising than the fact of this miniature baby-boom is its composition: children of mixed ethnic backgrounds, the offspring of Korean fathers and mothers from China, Vietnam and other parts of Asia. These families have suddenly become so numerous that the nurses say they have had to learn how to say “push” in four languages.
It is a similar story across South Korea, where hundreds of thousands of foreign women have been immigrating in recent years, often in marriages arranged by brokers. They have been making up for a shortage of eligible Korean women, particularly in underdeveloped rural areas like this one in the nation’s southwest.
Now, these unions are bearing large numbers of mixed children, confronting this proudly homogeneous nation with the difficult challenge of smoothly absorbing them.
South Korea is generally more open to ethnic diversity than other Asian nations with relatively small minority populations, like neighboring Japan. Nevertheless, it is far from welcoming to these children, who are widely known here pejoratively as Kosians, a compound of Korean and Asian.
“We bring these children into the world, but sometimes I worry,” said Kwak Ock-ja, 48, head maternity nurse at Yeonggwang General, where a third of the 132 births so far this year have been of children of mixed background, up from almost none a decade ago. “Prejudice against these families is something society must resolve.”
The surge in births of mixed children is the product of the similarly explosive growth here in marriages to foreigners, as a surplus of bachelors and the movement of eligible women to big cities like Seoul have increasingly driven Korean men in rural areas to seek brides in poorer parts of Asia. In addition, a preference for male babies has helped skew the population so there are fewer native-born women to marry. The Ministry of Public Security says the total number of children from what are called multicultural families in South Korea rose to 107,689 in May of this year from 58,007 last December, though the ministry said it might have slightly undercounted last year.
That is only about 1 percent of the approximately 12 million children in South Korea under the age of 19. But if marriages to foreigners continue to increase at their current rate — they accounted for 11 percent of all marriages here last year — more than one in nine children could be of mixed background by 2020, demographic researchers say.
The trend is even more pronounced in rural areas, where most of these marriages take place. Among farming households, 49 percent of all children will be multicultural by 2020, according to the Agricultural Ministry.
This increase is coming as South Korea’s overall birthrate has fallen to about 1.22 children per woman of child-bearing age, one of the world’s lowest rates. While many Koreans say they hope that the rising number of mixed children will help rejuvenate their rapidly graying society, they also say they fear that a failure to assimilate them could create the sort of poor, alienated underclass of ethnic minorities they see in the United States and Europe.
The increase has also begun to prompt a national soul-searching here about what it means to be Korean. While most of these children have Korean fathers and Korean citizenship, their dual ethnicity still gives them an uncertain status in a society where membership was long seen as being based on blood.
“The hard reality of our low birthrate is forcing us to realize that we can’t be homogeneous anymore,” said Park Hwa-seo, a professor of migration studies at Myongji University in Seoul. “It isn’t easy, but there is no turning back but to embrace these more diverse families.”
The increase of mixed-background children is so recent that relatively few have even reached elementary-school age. Still, signs of strain are already appearing.
According to the Education Ministry, the dropout rate of mixed-background children from elementary school is 15.4 percent, 22 times the national average. Part of the problem, social experts say, is the mothers’ lack of Korean-language skills, which prevents them from filling the expected social role of guiding children through the nation’s high-pressure education system.
Compounding the risk is the fact that most of the foreign women marry older farmers or manual laborers. Some 53 percent of mixed families live on earnings at or below the national minimum hourly wage of 4,000 won, or less than $3.50, according to the Welfare Ministry.
However, social experts say the biggest threat to the mixed children is that they will be ostracized in a society that began grappling with ethnic diversity only when labor shortages forced South Korea to accept foreign workers in the 1990s. The risk has been underscored by recent studies showing that the children of mixed marriages are more likely to be the victims of domestic abuse or bullying in school.
“I’m afraid we are already too late in responding,” said Suh Hae-jung, a researcher on gender equality at the government-financed Gyeonggido Family and Women’s Research Institute in Suwon. “On top of getting slighted for their color, their learning is also falling behind.”
Such concerns are quietly felt by Vicky Merano, 29, who came here from the Philippines six years ago to marry a Korean rice farmer 18 years her elder. Their 5-year-old daughter, Kim Da-som, does well in a local kindergarten, and on a recent evening she proudly showed off her ability to read the Korean language’s script and several Chinese characters.
Her father, Kim Hee-jong, beamed with pride and said that his relatives accepted the girl, including his parents, who share their 80-year-old tile-roofed farmhouse. Ms. Merano agreed but said she worried about what might happen as Da-som advanced beyond elementary school.
“Maybe if they don’t see me, they’ll just think my daughter is Korean,” Ms. Merano said.
The South Korean government says it has tried to respond quickly, opening 119 multicultural family support centers across the country in the past three years to offer help in education and vocational training.
The one in Yeonggwang, a small provincial city of 57,000 residents, opened in January. On a recent afternoon, its four small rooms were filled with Chinese, Thai and Filipino women learning to use computers and sewing machines while staff members watched their young children. Teachers also offered Korean-language classes to the mothers and children.
One woman, Edna Dela Cruz, said she preferred raising a family here because South Korea had better schools and a higher standard of living than the Philippines, where she was born. But she also worries about her 6-year-old son, who wants her to speak to him only in Korean so his classmates will not treat him as a pariah.
“Koreans tell me my child will be insulted because of me,” said Ms. Dela Cruz, 33, who married a local farmer.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
By MARTIN FACKLER
YEONGGWANG, South Korea — Just a few years ago, the number of pregnant women in this city had declined so much that the sparsely equipped two-room maternity ward at Yeonggwang General Hospital was close to shutting down. But these days it is busy again.
More surprising than the fact of this miniature baby-boom is its composition: children of mixed ethnic backgrounds, the offspring of Korean fathers and mothers from China, Vietnam and other parts of Asia. These families have suddenly become so numerous that the nurses say they have had to learn how to say “push” in four languages.
It is a similar story across South Korea, where hundreds of thousands of foreign women have been immigrating in recent years, often in marriages arranged by brokers. They have been making up for a shortage of eligible Korean women, particularly in underdeveloped rural areas like this one in the nation’s southwest.
Now, these unions are bearing large numbers of mixed children, confronting this proudly homogeneous nation with the difficult challenge of smoothly absorbing them.
South Korea is generally more open to ethnic diversity than other Asian nations with relatively small minority populations, like neighboring Japan. Nevertheless, it is far from welcoming to these children, who are widely known here pejoratively as Kosians, a compound of Korean and Asian.
“We bring these children into the world, but sometimes I worry,” said Kwak Ock-ja, 48, head maternity nurse at Yeonggwang General, where a third of the 132 births so far this year have been of children of mixed background, up from almost none a decade ago. “Prejudice against these families is something society must resolve.”
The surge in births of mixed children is the product of the similarly explosive growth here in marriages to foreigners, as a surplus of bachelors and the movement of eligible women to big cities like Seoul have increasingly driven Korean men in rural areas to seek brides in poorer parts of Asia. In addition, a preference for male babies has helped skew the population so there are fewer native-born women to marry. The Ministry of Public Security says the total number of children from what are called multicultural families in South Korea rose to 107,689 in May of this year from 58,007 last December, though the ministry said it might have slightly undercounted last year.
That is only about 1 percent of the approximately 12 million children in South Korea under the age of 19. But if marriages to foreigners continue to increase at their current rate — they accounted for 11 percent of all marriages here last year — more than one in nine children could be of mixed background by 2020, demographic researchers say.
The trend is even more pronounced in rural areas, where most of these marriages take place. Among farming households, 49 percent of all children will be multicultural by 2020, according to the Agricultural Ministry.
This increase is coming as South Korea’s overall birthrate has fallen to about 1.22 children per woman of child-bearing age, one of the world’s lowest rates. While many Koreans say they hope that the rising number of mixed children will help rejuvenate their rapidly graying society, they also say they fear that a failure to assimilate them could create the sort of poor, alienated underclass of ethnic minorities they see in the United States and Europe.
The increase has also begun to prompt a national soul-searching here about what it means to be Korean. While most of these children have Korean fathers and Korean citizenship, their dual ethnicity still gives them an uncertain status in a society where membership was long seen as being based on blood.
“The hard reality of our low birthrate is forcing us to realize that we can’t be homogeneous anymore,” said Park Hwa-seo, a professor of migration studies at Myongji University in Seoul. “It isn’t easy, but there is no turning back but to embrace these more diverse families.”
The increase of mixed-background children is so recent that relatively few have even reached elementary-school age. Still, signs of strain are already appearing.
According to the Education Ministry, the dropout rate of mixed-background children from elementary school is 15.4 percent, 22 times the national average. Part of the problem, social experts say, is the mothers’ lack of Korean-language skills, which prevents them from filling the expected social role of guiding children through the nation’s high-pressure education system.
Compounding the risk is the fact that most of the foreign women marry older farmers or manual laborers. Some 53 percent of mixed families live on earnings at or below the national minimum hourly wage of 4,000 won, or less than $3.50, according to the Welfare Ministry.
However, social experts say the biggest threat to the mixed children is that they will be ostracized in a society that began grappling with ethnic diversity only when labor shortages forced South Korea to accept foreign workers in the 1990s. The risk has been underscored by recent studies showing that the children of mixed marriages are more likely to be the victims of domestic abuse or bullying in school.
“I’m afraid we are already too late in responding,” said Suh Hae-jung, a researcher on gender equality at the government-financed Gyeonggido Family and Women’s Research Institute in Suwon. “On top of getting slighted for their color, their learning is also falling behind.”
Such concerns are quietly felt by Vicky Merano, 29, who came here from the Philippines six years ago to marry a Korean rice farmer 18 years her elder. Their 5-year-old daughter, Kim Da-som, does well in a local kindergarten, and on a recent evening she proudly showed off her ability to read the Korean language’s script and several Chinese characters.
Her father, Kim Hee-jong, beamed with pride and said that his relatives accepted the girl, including his parents, who share their 80-year-old tile-roofed farmhouse. Ms. Merano agreed but said she worried about what might happen as Da-som advanced beyond elementary school.
“Maybe if they don’t see me, they’ll just think my daughter is Korean,” Ms. Merano said.
The South Korean government says it has tried to respond quickly, opening 119 multicultural family support centers across the country in the past three years to offer help in education and vocational training.
The one in Yeonggwang, a small provincial city of 57,000 residents, opened in January. On a recent afternoon, its four small rooms were filled with Chinese, Thai and Filipino women learning to use computers and sewing machines while staff members watched their young children. Teachers also offered Korean-language classes to the mothers and children.
One woman, Edna Dela Cruz, said she preferred raising a family here because South Korea had better schools and a higher standard of living than the Philippines, where she was born. But she also worries about her 6-year-old son, who wants her to speak to him only in Korean so his classmates will not treat him as a pariah.
“Koreans tell me my child will be insulted because of me,” said Ms. Dela Cruz, 33, who married a local farmer.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Doubts Grow in Japan About Premier Amid Money Scandal
December 19, 2009
By MARTIN FACKLER
TOKYO — Japan’s prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, will soon offer written testimony to prosecutors saying that he had no direct role in a campaign finance scandal that has dogged his fledgling government, according to Japanese newspapers. But while he is widely expected to survive the scandal, analysts say it has helped feed doubts among some voters about his leadership.
There is now talk in Tokyo that voters may be showing signs of cooling toward Mr. Hatoyama’s government, which swept into power three months ago with pledges for fundamental change in Japan’s postwar order. While Mr. Hatoyama’s approval ratings remain high, they are starting to slip amid growing questions about his leadership and his ability to manage this long-stagnant nation, analysts said.
“Every day, he seems to say and do something different,” said Minoru Morita, a political commentator who runs an independent research organization in Tokyo. “This is starting to shake the people’s confidence in him.”
Most voters still appeared to be willing to give Mr. Hatoyama and his Democratic Party more time to deliver on their promises to rein in the powerful bureaucracy and build a more consumer-focused economy. But political experts warned that a failure to show results in crucial areas like reviving Japan’s moribund job market could lead to a rapid erosion of support.
At first, voters seemed not to be much bothered by the financial scandal because much of the money came from Mr. Hatoyama or his mother, a wealthy heiress. But now, analysts say, it is precisely that explanation that is starting to cool public opinion of the prime minister. By highlighting the considerable wealth of his family, the scandal is starting to raise doubts about how in touch he is with the worsening economic plight of average Japanese.
According to reports in Japanese newspapers, Mr. Hatoyama will soon deliver a written statement to Tokyo prosecutors in which he will deny knowledge of some $4 million in donations that prosecutors say were improperly reported, sometimes in the names of dead people. The reports say he will also tell prosecutors that he did not know of millions of dollars more that his group received from his mother. Mr. Hatoyama’s office said it had no knowledge of the statement.
The reports said that prosecutors were considering whether to charge one of Mr. Hatoyama’s former political secretaries for misreporting the funds, but that they would not charge the prime minister with a crime.
Still, just the fact that Mr. Hatoyama could get mired in such a campaign finance scandal has already hurt his credibility as a reformer, analysts say.
Polls show that Mr. Hatoyama’s approval ratings are slipping from their highs of more than 70 percent after he took office in September. A poll released Monday by Japan’s national public broadcasting corporation, NHK, found that 56 percent of 1,111 voters questioned by telephone from Dec. 11 to 13 said they approved of him, with 34 percent saying they did not approve. The poll gave no margin of error, as is customary here.
The credibility of Mr. Hatoyama’s government suffered another blow this week when members of his Democratic Party decided to shelve plans to eliminate an unpopular tax on gasoline. The party said the money was needed to help offset Japan’s soaring national debt.
In recent weeks, major newspapers and magazines have pilloried Mr. Hatoyama for inconsistent comments on whether to renegotiate a 2006 deal to relocate an American air base on Okinawa. Criticisms reached a new pitch after Mr. Hatoyama decided Tuesday to postpone indefinitely a decision on the base.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
By MARTIN FACKLER
TOKYO — Japan’s prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, will soon offer written testimony to prosecutors saying that he had no direct role in a campaign finance scandal that has dogged his fledgling government, according to Japanese newspapers. But while he is widely expected to survive the scandal, analysts say it has helped feed doubts among some voters about his leadership.
There is now talk in Tokyo that voters may be showing signs of cooling toward Mr. Hatoyama’s government, which swept into power three months ago with pledges for fundamental change in Japan’s postwar order. While Mr. Hatoyama’s approval ratings remain high, they are starting to slip amid growing questions about his leadership and his ability to manage this long-stagnant nation, analysts said.
“Every day, he seems to say and do something different,” said Minoru Morita, a political commentator who runs an independent research organization in Tokyo. “This is starting to shake the people’s confidence in him.”
Most voters still appeared to be willing to give Mr. Hatoyama and his Democratic Party more time to deliver on their promises to rein in the powerful bureaucracy and build a more consumer-focused economy. But political experts warned that a failure to show results in crucial areas like reviving Japan’s moribund job market could lead to a rapid erosion of support.
At first, voters seemed not to be much bothered by the financial scandal because much of the money came from Mr. Hatoyama or his mother, a wealthy heiress. But now, analysts say, it is precisely that explanation that is starting to cool public opinion of the prime minister. By highlighting the considerable wealth of his family, the scandal is starting to raise doubts about how in touch he is with the worsening economic plight of average Japanese.
According to reports in Japanese newspapers, Mr. Hatoyama will soon deliver a written statement to Tokyo prosecutors in which he will deny knowledge of some $4 million in donations that prosecutors say were improperly reported, sometimes in the names of dead people. The reports say he will also tell prosecutors that he did not know of millions of dollars more that his group received from his mother. Mr. Hatoyama’s office said it had no knowledge of the statement.
The reports said that prosecutors were considering whether to charge one of Mr. Hatoyama’s former political secretaries for misreporting the funds, but that they would not charge the prime minister with a crime.
Still, just the fact that Mr. Hatoyama could get mired in such a campaign finance scandal has already hurt his credibility as a reformer, analysts say.
Polls show that Mr. Hatoyama’s approval ratings are slipping from their highs of more than 70 percent after he took office in September. A poll released Monday by Japan’s national public broadcasting corporation, NHK, found that 56 percent of 1,111 voters questioned by telephone from Dec. 11 to 13 said they approved of him, with 34 percent saying they did not approve. The poll gave no margin of error, as is customary here.
The credibility of Mr. Hatoyama’s government suffered another blow this week when members of his Democratic Party decided to shelve plans to eliminate an unpopular tax on gasoline. The party said the money was needed to help offset Japan’s soaring national debt.
In recent weeks, major newspapers and magazines have pilloried Mr. Hatoyama for inconsistent comments on whether to renegotiate a 2006 deal to relocate an American air base on Okinawa. Criticisms reached a new pitch after Mr. Hatoyama decided Tuesday to postpone indefinitely a decision on the base.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Japan Delays Decision on Moving U.S. Marine Base
December 16, 2009
By MARTIN FACKLER
TOKYO — Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s postponement of a decision on relocating an American military base on Okinawa may be the product of domestic political considerations as much as deeply held foreign policy principles, analysts here said on Tuesday. But it promises to put new pressures on Japan’s already strained ties with the United States, its closest ally.
The Obama administration had pressed Mr. Hatoyama’s government to make a quick decision on whether to carry out a 2006 agreement between Washington and Tokyo to relocate the base, Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, to a less populated part of Okinawa. On Tuesday, however, he announced that he would put off that decision until sometime next year, saying that members of his governing coalition would set up a working group to discuss the current plan and other possible sites for the base.
On Tuesday evening, Mr. Hatoyama seemed to suggest that he wanted a new site for the base, something that the Obama administration has resisted.
“I want to make a situation where we can search for a place other than Henoko, and if possible select it,” Mr. Hatoyama told reporters, referring to the site of another base on Okinawa, Camp Schwab.
The row over the base has underscored the Obama administration’s difficulties in finding common ground with Mr. Hatoyama’s slightly left-leaning Democratic Party government, which ended a half-century of governing by the pro-American Liberal Democrats when it came to power in September. Mr. Hatoyama has also seemed to pull away from Washington by allowing the Japanese Navy’s mission of refueling American warships in the Indian Ocean to end and telling Asian leaders that Japan has been overly reliant on the United States.
Another challenge for Washington, analysts say, has been a lack of clarity in Mr. Hatoyama’s stance. While he has called for ending Japan’s junior status, he has also stressed that the alliance with Washington remains the cornerstone of Japan’s security. Key members of his cabinet, like Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, are seen as centrists who favor solid ties with the United States.
The inconsistencies to some extent reflect internal political pressures, analysts say, as two small leftist parties in Mr. Hatoyama’s coalition — whose votes he needs to pass bills in Parliament’s upper house — press him to honor campaign promises to move the Futenma base off Okinawa or out of Japan.
In this line of thinking, the postponement was probably meant to buy time as Mr. Hatoyama looks for some middle ground or prepares to make a tough choice between Washington and his domestic allies. But the analysts warned that the delay could further irritate American officials, who have sought a quick decision on the base’s relocation.
Some of that irritation was evident in remarks by Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, who told reporters in Washington on Tuesday that the delay could complicate plans to move the base.
“If that is their decision, then I think it’s unfortunate in terms of what we’re attempting to plan on our end,” General Conway said, according to Reuters.
Policy experts here said the United States had little choice but to put up with the delay. “It is up to the Obama administration now to decide whether it can endure for a few more months,” said Hiroshi Nakanishi, a professor of international relations at Kyoto University. “Otherwise, United States-Japan relations could get to their worst point in the postwar alliance.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Hatoyama did not say when he would make a final decision, but suggested that he wanted to do so as quickly as possible. He also said he wanted to reconvene a bilateral working group to discuss the base relocation issue. Tokyo suspended the discussions last week.
Mr. Hatoyama left open the possibility that Tokyo would still honor the 2006 agreement, which calls for relocating the Futenma air base from its current site in the city of Ginowan to Camp Schwab, a Marine base in the island’s north. Japanese news reports said the government was still including the costs of relocating the base to Camp Schwab in next year’s budget as it considered other locations.
Mr. Nakanishi and other analysts said the delay also risked alienating Japanese voters by raising doubts about Mr. Hatoyama’s leadership, as well as his ability to handle the crucial relationship with the United States. They say Japanese political opinion opposes significant changes in the Washington alliance as Japan faces a rising China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.
Some analysts have warned that the delay will only make a difficult political decision even harder for Mr. Hatoyama. In January, the city of Nago, where Camp Schwab is located, will hold a mayoral election. The leading candidate has vowed to reverse the city’s decision to accept the air base, making it harder to go back to the 2006 agreement.
Mr. Hatoyama has sought to answer calls from Okinawans to lighten the burden of American forces on their island, where many of the 50,000 American military personnel in Japan are based. But the Obama administration has asked that the 2006 deal not be changed, because doing so could fray a larger, more complex agreement to relocate 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam by 2014.
Political analysts say Mr. Hatoyama has few realistic options for locating the base besides Camp Schwab. That has led some analysts to wonder whether he may ultimately agree to the original location, but only after first making a show of resisting Washington.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
By MARTIN FACKLER
TOKYO — Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s postponement of a decision on relocating an American military base on Okinawa may be the product of domestic political considerations as much as deeply held foreign policy principles, analysts here said on Tuesday. But it promises to put new pressures on Japan’s already strained ties with the United States, its closest ally.
The Obama administration had pressed Mr. Hatoyama’s government to make a quick decision on whether to carry out a 2006 agreement between Washington and Tokyo to relocate the base, Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, to a less populated part of Okinawa. On Tuesday, however, he announced that he would put off that decision until sometime next year, saying that members of his governing coalition would set up a working group to discuss the current plan and other possible sites for the base.
On Tuesday evening, Mr. Hatoyama seemed to suggest that he wanted a new site for the base, something that the Obama administration has resisted.
“I want to make a situation where we can search for a place other than Henoko, and if possible select it,” Mr. Hatoyama told reporters, referring to the site of another base on Okinawa, Camp Schwab.
The row over the base has underscored the Obama administration’s difficulties in finding common ground with Mr. Hatoyama’s slightly left-leaning Democratic Party government, which ended a half-century of governing by the pro-American Liberal Democrats when it came to power in September. Mr. Hatoyama has also seemed to pull away from Washington by allowing the Japanese Navy’s mission of refueling American warships in the Indian Ocean to end and telling Asian leaders that Japan has been overly reliant on the United States.
Another challenge for Washington, analysts say, has been a lack of clarity in Mr. Hatoyama’s stance. While he has called for ending Japan’s junior status, he has also stressed that the alliance with Washington remains the cornerstone of Japan’s security. Key members of his cabinet, like Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, are seen as centrists who favor solid ties with the United States.
The inconsistencies to some extent reflect internal political pressures, analysts say, as two small leftist parties in Mr. Hatoyama’s coalition — whose votes he needs to pass bills in Parliament’s upper house — press him to honor campaign promises to move the Futenma base off Okinawa or out of Japan.
In this line of thinking, the postponement was probably meant to buy time as Mr. Hatoyama looks for some middle ground or prepares to make a tough choice between Washington and his domestic allies. But the analysts warned that the delay could further irritate American officials, who have sought a quick decision on the base’s relocation.
Some of that irritation was evident in remarks by Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, who told reporters in Washington on Tuesday that the delay could complicate plans to move the base.
“If that is their decision, then I think it’s unfortunate in terms of what we’re attempting to plan on our end,” General Conway said, according to Reuters.
Policy experts here said the United States had little choice but to put up with the delay. “It is up to the Obama administration now to decide whether it can endure for a few more months,” said Hiroshi Nakanishi, a professor of international relations at Kyoto University. “Otherwise, United States-Japan relations could get to their worst point in the postwar alliance.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Hatoyama did not say when he would make a final decision, but suggested that he wanted to do so as quickly as possible. He also said he wanted to reconvene a bilateral working group to discuss the base relocation issue. Tokyo suspended the discussions last week.
Mr. Hatoyama left open the possibility that Tokyo would still honor the 2006 agreement, which calls for relocating the Futenma air base from its current site in the city of Ginowan to Camp Schwab, a Marine base in the island’s north. Japanese news reports said the government was still including the costs of relocating the base to Camp Schwab in next year’s budget as it considered other locations.
Mr. Nakanishi and other analysts said the delay also risked alienating Japanese voters by raising doubts about Mr. Hatoyama’s leadership, as well as his ability to handle the crucial relationship with the United States. They say Japanese political opinion opposes significant changes in the Washington alliance as Japan faces a rising China and a nuclear-armed North Korea.
Some analysts have warned that the delay will only make a difficult political decision even harder for Mr. Hatoyama. In January, the city of Nago, where Camp Schwab is located, will hold a mayoral election. The leading candidate has vowed to reverse the city’s decision to accept the air base, making it harder to go back to the 2006 agreement.
Mr. Hatoyama has sought to answer calls from Okinawans to lighten the burden of American forces on their island, where many of the 50,000 American military personnel in Japan are based. But the Obama administration has asked that the 2006 deal not be changed, because doing so could fray a larger, more complex agreement to relocate 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam by 2014.
Political analysts say Mr. Hatoyama has few realistic options for locating the base besides Camp Schwab. That has led some analysts to wonder whether he may ultimately agree to the original location, but only after first making a show of resisting Washington.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
At Japanese Cliffs, a Campaign to Combat Suicide
December 18, 2009
By MARTIN FACKLER
SAKAI, Japan — The towering cliffs of Tojimbo, with their sheer drops into the raging, green Sea of Japan, are a top tourist destination, but Yukio Shige had no interest in the rugged scenery. Instead, he walked along the rocky crags searching for something else: a lone human figure, usually sitting hunched at the edge of the precipice.
That is one of the telltale signs in people drawn here by Tojimbo’s other, less glorious, distinction as one of the best known places to kill oneself in Japan, one of the world’s most suicide-prone nations. Mr. Shige, a 65-year-old former policeman, has spent his five years since retirement on a mission to stop those who come here from jumping.
His efforts have helped draw attention to the grim fact that Japan’s suicide rate is again on the rise. Police figures show that the number of suicides this year could approach the country’s record high of 34,427, reached in 2003, almost 95 suicides a day. The World Health Organization says that people in Japan are now almost three times as likely to kill themselves as are Americans.
Mr. Shige and a group of volunteers he put together have saved 222 people so far, a tally that has made Mr. Shige a national figure in a country that often seems apathetic about its high rate of self-destruction. But he has also met with criticism from a conformist society that can look dimly on people who draw attention by engaging in activism, even of the most humanitarian kind.
“In Japan, we say the nail that sticks up gets hammered down,” said Mr. Shige, who says he started the patrols after he grew angry at inaction by local authorities. “But I’ll keep sticking up. I tell them, hit me if you can!”
In part, public health experts blame Japan’s romanticized image of suicide as an honorable escape, going back to ritual self-disembowelment by medieval samurai, for the high suicide rate. But the main cause, they say, is the nation’s long economic decline. Suicides first surged to their recent high levels in 1998, when traditional lifetime employment guarantees began to vanish, and they have remained high as salaries and job security continued to erode.
The situation has worsened during the recent global financial crisis, which is driving this year’s increase, experts say. While Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, in his first policy speech in October, referred to Japan’s suicide rate in calling for “mutual support” among Japanese, experts say the government’s limited steps to deal with suicide have made little difference.
While preventing suicides is a universally difficult task, it is particularly challenging in Japan. Depression remains a taboo topic here, making it hard for those most at risk to seek the help of family and friends. Many Japanese view suicide as an issue of private choice rather than public health, and there are few efforts to highlight the problem.
“Americans raise awareness with grass-roots action, but Japanese just wait for the government to take care of them,” said Yoshitomo Takahashi, a professor of behavioral science who researches suicide at the National Defense Medical College in Tokorozawa, Japan.
Officials in Sakai, the small city in Fukui Prefecture, where Tojimbo is located, have installed outdoor lighting at the cliffs along with two pay phones and plenty of the 10-yen coins needed to dial up the national suicide hot line.
Nevertheless, city officials call this the grimmest year on record, with the police saying they know of more than 140 people who came here intending to commit suicide, twice the average in recent years. Most of them were stopped by the police or nearby tourists, or decided not to jump for other reasons, the police say.
The police figure does not include the 54 people this year whom Mr. Shige says he and his group have stopped. City officials credit Mr. Shige with helping keep the number of deaths here down to 13 so far this year, about the same as the 15 suicides last year.
Mr. Shige says his approach to stopping suicides is quite simple: when he finds a likely person, he walks up and gently begins a conversation. The person, usually a man, quickly breaks down in tears, happy to find someone to listen to his problems.
“They are just sitting there, alone, hoping someone will talk to them,” Mr. Shige said.
As an officer stationed at Tojimbo at the end of his 42-year career, he said he was appalled by all the bodies he had to pluck out of the sea. He said he once stopped an elderly couple from Tokyo from jumping and turned them over to city officials who he said gave them money and told them to buy a ticket to the next town. Days later he received a letter from the couple, mailed just before they committed suicide in a neighboring prefecture.
“The authorities’ coldness outraged me,” said Mr. Shige, whose cellphone rings to the tune of “Amazing Grace,” though he is not religious. He now has 77 volunteers patrolling the cliffs and providing food, lodging and assistance in finding work to those it helps. He said they tried to patrol two or three times a day.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Shige checked three of the most popular sites for jumpers — all with drops of at least 70 feet. He said the loners were easy to spot because most visitors moved in groups behind flag-waving guides. Speaking through bullhorns, the guides loudly describe the morbid fame of the cliffs, which were named for an evil Buddhist monk who was said to have fallen to his death there.
One of those whom Mr. Shige stopped was Yutaka Yamaoka, 29, a factory worker who tried to commit suicide last year after being laid off. Mr. Yamaoka visited Mr. Shige’s tiny office by the cliffs on a recent day to thank him and tell him that he had found a job.
When Mr. Shige found him last year, Mr. Yamaoka said, he was sitting silently near the cliffs clutching his knees. He said Mr. Shige spoke with him for two hours, then allowed him to stay in an apartment rent free for a month until he felt better.
“I felt saved. I felt I could live,” recalled Mr. Yamaoka, who spoke haltingly in a barely audible voice. “My feelings of panic and unease just built up. I had no one to talk with.”
Mr. Shige’s efforts have stirred local resentment, particularly from a local tourist association that says his activities are bad for business. But Mr. Shige is not easily deterred.
“I will continue until the government finally gets its act together and takes over,” he said. “I can’t let their inaction cost another precious life.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
By MARTIN FACKLER
SAKAI, Japan — The towering cliffs of Tojimbo, with their sheer drops into the raging, green Sea of Japan, are a top tourist destination, but Yukio Shige had no interest in the rugged scenery. Instead, he walked along the rocky crags searching for something else: a lone human figure, usually sitting hunched at the edge of the precipice.
That is one of the telltale signs in people drawn here by Tojimbo’s other, less glorious, distinction as one of the best known places to kill oneself in Japan, one of the world’s most suicide-prone nations. Mr. Shige, a 65-year-old former policeman, has spent his five years since retirement on a mission to stop those who come here from jumping.
His efforts have helped draw attention to the grim fact that Japan’s suicide rate is again on the rise. Police figures show that the number of suicides this year could approach the country’s record high of 34,427, reached in 2003, almost 95 suicides a day. The World Health Organization says that people in Japan are now almost three times as likely to kill themselves as are Americans.
Mr. Shige and a group of volunteers he put together have saved 222 people so far, a tally that has made Mr. Shige a national figure in a country that often seems apathetic about its high rate of self-destruction. But he has also met with criticism from a conformist society that can look dimly on people who draw attention by engaging in activism, even of the most humanitarian kind.
“In Japan, we say the nail that sticks up gets hammered down,” said Mr. Shige, who says he started the patrols after he grew angry at inaction by local authorities. “But I’ll keep sticking up. I tell them, hit me if you can!”
In part, public health experts blame Japan’s romanticized image of suicide as an honorable escape, going back to ritual self-disembowelment by medieval samurai, for the high suicide rate. But the main cause, they say, is the nation’s long economic decline. Suicides first surged to their recent high levels in 1998, when traditional lifetime employment guarantees began to vanish, and they have remained high as salaries and job security continued to erode.
The situation has worsened during the recent global financial crisis, which is driving this year’s increase, experts say. While Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, in his first policy speech in October, referred to Japan’s suicide rate in calling for “mutual support” among Japanese, experts say the government’s limited steps to deal with suicide have made little difference.
While preventing suicides is a universally difficult task, it is particularly challenging in Japan. Depression remains a taboo topic here, making it hard for those most at risk to seek the help of family and friends. Many Japanese view suicide as an issue of private choice rather than public health, and there are few efforts to highlight the problem.
“Americans raise awareness with grass-roots action, but Japanese just wait for the government to take care of them,” said Yoshitomo Takahashi, a professor of behavioral science who researches suicide at the National Defense Medical College in Tokorozawa, Japan.
Officials in Sakai, the small city in Fukui Prefecture, where Tojimbo is located, have installed outdoor lighting at the cliffs along with two pay phones and plenty of the 10-yen coins needed to dial up the national suicide hot line.
Nevertheless, city officials call this the grimmest year on record, with the police saying they know of more than 140 people who came here intending to commit suicide, twice the average in recent years. Most of them were stopped by the police or nearby tourists, or decided not to jump for other reasons, the police say.
The police figure does not include the 54 people this year whom Mr. Shige says he and his group have stopped. City officials credit Mr. Shige with helping keep the number of deaths here down to 13 so far this year, about the same as the 15 suicides last year.
Mr. Shige says his approach to stopping suicides is quite simple: when he finds a likely person, he walks up and gently begins a conversation. The person, usually a man, quickly breaks down in tears, happy to find someone to listen to his problems.
“They are just sitting there, alone, hoping someone will talk to them,” Mr. Shige said.
As an officer stationed at Tojimbo at the end of his 42-year career, he said he was appalled by all the bodies he had to pluck out of the sea. He said he once stopped an elderly couple from Tokyo from jumping and turned them over to city officials who he said gave them money and told them to buy a ticket to the next town. Days later he received a letter from the couple, mailed just before they committed suicide in a neighboring prefecture.
“The authorities’ coldness outraged me,” said Mr. Shige, whose cellphone rings to the tune of “Amazing Grace,” though he is not religious. He now has 77 volunteers patrolling the cliffs and providing food, lodging and assistance in finding work to those it helps. He said they tried to patrol two or three times a day.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Shige checked three of the most popular sites for jumpers — all with drops of at least 70 feet. He said the loners were easy to spot because most visitors moved in groups behind flag-waving guides. Speaking through bullhorns, the guides loudly describe the morbid fame of the cliffs, which were named for an evil Buddhist monk who was said to have fallen to his death there.
One of those whom Mr. Shige stopped was Yutaka Yamaoka, 29, a factory worker who tried to commit suicide last year after being laid off. Mr. Yamaoka visited Mr. Shige’s tiny office by the cliffs on a recent day to thank him and tell him that he had found a job.
When Mr. Shige found him last year, Mr. Yamaoka said, he was sitting silently near the cliffs clutching his knees. He said Mr. Shige spoke with him for two hours, then allowed him to stay in an apartment rent free for a month until he felt better.
“I felt saved. I felt I could live,” recalled Mr. Yamaoka, who spoke haltingly in a barely audible voice. “My feelings of panic and unease just built up. I had no one to talk with.”
Mr. Shige’s efforts have stirred local resentment, particularly from a local tourist association that says his activities are bad for business. But Mr. Shige is not easily deterred.
“I will continue until the government finally gets its act together and takes over,” he said. “I can’t let their inaction cost another precious life.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Chinese Author Pens 'A Good Fall'
December 21, 2009
Guest host Jacki Lyden speaks with author Ha Jin, who writes about the Chinese experience in his new book of short stories A Good Fall. Ha Jin sets his stories in Flushing, New York. The area is home to one of New York's largest Chinese immigrant communities.
TRANSCRIPT
LYDEN: This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Michel Martin is away. I'm Jacki Lyden.
Coming up, renowned poet Nikki Giovanni tells us what music she's been listening to lately in our occasional series In Your Ear.
But first, an author who focuses his attention on the Chinese immigrant experience. Ha Jin knows a few things about immigrating to America. In 1985, he left his native China to attend Brandeis University. As a writer, Ha Jin has kept a literary eye trained on China. He's taken the Chinese experience and rendered it for American readers.
Ha Jin's new book of short stories, "A Good Fall," is set in one of the most American of cities, New York. Flushing, Queens, is home to one of New York's largest Chinese immigrant communities. In painting the portrait of this slice of society, Jin considers many generational perspectives in characters who are trying to discover their place in America. Ha Jin joins us from our member station WBUR in Boston. Thank you so much for being a part of our show today.
Mr. HA JIN (Author, �A Good Fall�): Thank you, very happy to be here.
LYDEN: You know, I have been your fan for years, and I spoke with you a couple of years ago about your book, "A Free Life." And this was a novel about a young man who flees communist China in the 1980s, and he comes to the United States to study political science. And Nan Wu(ph), the protagonist of this book, has been dreaming of this freedom. He reads poems, and it was lovely to learn that these were poems that you actually wrote in this really lengthy, over-600-page book. So might I just go back to a lesson, to that classic immigrant dream of freedom that these poems embody?
Mr. JIN: (Reading) You must go to a country without borders, where you can build your home out of garlands of words, where broad leaves shade familiar faces that no longer change in wind and the rain. There's no morning or evening, no cries of joy or pain. Every canyon is drenched in the light of serenity. You must go there quietly, leave behind what you still cherish.
LYDEN: So what I love about this is the whole notion of building your home out of gallons of words. And that's kind of what you have tried to do for these characters because there's so much tension between cultures in this collection of stories, between each other, between their dreams and expectations, between the desire to assimilate and the really hard task of forgoing heritage, which is in a way impossible, isn't it?
Mr. JIN: Yes, big struggle for everyone. I think, in essence, main character in this book is in the struggle of looking for home, the first generation of immigrants. That's why it's very hard for them to feel at home. So that is very difficult. Even if they have a place to stay, but they don't have the feeling of being home.
LYDEN: Right, and of course, the way that the new world collides with the old can be as slight and yet somehow tethered as the Internet. The collection begins with a story that takes place between two sisters over the Internet and then goes into what happens when people really move in to the immigrant's home. Tell me about the characters in �The Crossfire.�
Mr. JIN: Oh, sure. The mother in that story can be somebody, a messenger from the native land. So the values are different and so, in that case, I think the clashes between the two places, the old land and the new place, become intensified. There was no way to reconcile.
LYDEN: This is the story in which the character - am I pronouncing it right, Tian Tzu(ph)?
Mr. JIN: Yes.
LYDEN: His mother has decided to come for an extended stay from China, and has decided that his wife, Connie, is completely wrong for him because she won't cook.
Mr. JIN: Yeah. It's an old story. I think I have a lot of Jewish friends that will say the same thing and the mother-in-law will say no woman is good enough for her son. That's an old story. But in this situation like this, it becomes more manifested.
LYDEN: This all comes to a head in this family at this really tense dinner. The husband, the moment he got home he went into the kitchen. He was going to cook a spinach soup, steam the eggplant and fry the flounder. As he was gouging out the gill of the fish, his mother stepped in. Could you pick it up from there?
Mr. JIN: Let me give you a hand, she said. I can manage. This is easy, he smiled, cutting the fish's fins and tail with a large scissor. You never cook back home. She starred at him, her eyes glinting. What's the good of standing six feet tall if you can't handle a small woman like Connie, she often said. In fact, he was 5 foot 10.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. JIN: He nudge each side of (unintelligible) with his knuckle. Mom, the American husband and wife both cook, whoever has the time. Connie is swamped with school work these days, so I do more household chores. This is natural. No, it's not. You were never like this before. Why did you marry her in the first place if she wouldn't take care of you?
LYDEN: You know, who wouldn't just love having a relative visit like that?
Mr. JIN: That I think, again is a normal - a lot of the details, in fact, I read them in newspapers, Internet. And most of them, the complaints always came from women. I never heard a man speak about these things, that's why I got idea of what if the story was told by a man?
LYDEN: And he becomes desperate to restore tranquility in the house. And without completely giving it away, can you talk about the measures to which he's willing to go.
Mr. JIN: He has to surprise or shock his mother with wrong piece of information that he have no job anymore. So as the result, she believe that he was totally bankrupt. So I think that's, again, there is based upon misconception, a misunderstanding because most people in the native lands would believe that the new immigrants could pick up cash right and left, and everybody would be rich, and it was nothing like that at all.
LYDEN: What is it about Flushing, Queens that made it the natural setting for this collection of stories?
Mr. JIN: Flushing is the second biggest Chinatown in New York City. It also is inhabited by most recent arrivals. Not only Chinese, they are lot of Koreans and European immigrants as well, so it is a vibrant place. And, in fact, in the beginning of 2005, I was invited to a conference out in the center of Flushing. I was very touched by the scenes on the streets, so that's why I decided to set all the stories in that place.
LYDEN: If you're just joining us, I'm Jacki Lyden and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm talking with the author Ha Jin about his new short story collection "A Good Fall."
Mr. Ha Jin, I'd liked to ask, I have read very lengthy books of yours that cover a lot of geography...
Mr. JIN: Mm-hmm.
LYDEN: �War Trash,� of course, �Waiting� and �A Free Life.� This is a compressed piece. This is like, instead of a big canvas painting, a really compressed small mosaic. Why did you decide you wanted to do short stories?
Mr. JIN: I do feel that in fact I'm a better short story writer.
LYDEN: You feel that way?
Mr. JIN: Yeah, I feel that way. Before this, I'd written three volumes of short stories. Each book was set in one place, basically. They are all, not linked stories but they are unified stories for a book. So this book, in a way, follow the same thing I had been doing. Short stories are closer to poetry, so very often one has to compress the stories in order to make it more concise and more poetic in that sense.
LYDEN: It's always fun to - when one reads your work to wonder how much of, in your case I do this perhaps more than with other authors, how much of your own biographical experience is in it. I mean, you set a lot of these stories in the 1980s. You wrote your first novel or short story in English I believe in the mid-1980s, right?
Mr. JIN: Yes.
LYDEN: And then there was the story that we have in here which you call "Shame," again, the generational divide between the old and young. A young man is working in between terms - young Chinese man, just getting some money in Manhattan. He's going to school out in Wisconsin and a professor from China, his old professor comes to visit and asks him, how much money are you making?
Mr. JIN: Mm-hmm.
LYDEN: And he's so impressed. This guy's just a garment industry worker.
Mr. JIN: Yes. That again, a common story. But it was not autobiographical. I never worked in New York at all. Really it was different. But again, lot of the details were factual. That was also common when two people met, one of them from the native land would ask how much you make. That was very common. One thing in that episode, in that story was very true, a teacher of mine went to -came to visit the United States and stayed in the Chinese consulate. I went to visit him. I was not allowed to enter the consulate.
LYDEN: Really?
Mr. JIN: I was - yes, that was true. From there on I had never set my foot in that building again.
LYDEN: Oh, you haven't? Have they invited you back at all?
Mr. JIN: They invited me but I haven't. I haven't gone to that place.
LYDEN: Why did they tell you that you weren't welcome the last time you tried to go there?
Mr. JIN: Not because of me, all the visitors.
LYDEN: Okay.
Mr. JIN: All the Chinese visitors were just denied access to that building.
LYDEN: In this short story, the professor believes, you know, we're just trying to get at some of how difficult it is to make your way in a new world and bring what you think is important. And there's just one little moment that sort of talks about the divide, in this case not between old and new generations of Chinese people, but the visiting scholar and his American counterpart. The American professor gives the Chinese professor this beautiful book and collection she's written.
Mr. JIN: Yes.
LYDEN: And he gives her something kind of a little I would say, mass-produced?
Mr. JIN: Mah Jong(ph). Yes.
LYDEN: The Mah Jong box.
Mr. JIN: Yeah. Yeah. In fact, that's a shameful moment for the student but the professor couldn't see it.
LYDEN: But the final shame, I think we can say it here in this one, is that the professor doesn't go home. He defects, stays in this guy's apartment and leaves behind him work that was his best work on Hemingway. He was going to call it "Hemingway in China."
Mr. JIN: Yeah. It's a secret project the professor aspired to do. But again, but it was another bigger shame in a way, yes.
LYDEN: Because it really was shoddy.
Mr. JIN: Yes. Again, that was based on a fact. I know of people who did the similar thing. Not exact the same but similar thing.
LYDEN: When people emigrate or come to America, whether they decide to just go to school here and try and stay on or possibly just choose not to return home, what is the hardest jump? Is it letting go of the past or not being able to understand the present?
Mr. JIN: You know, all those are hard. The hardest things are really to face your own life and be able to take that road. That's the hardest part because it's a lonely road very often. Freedom also means uncertainty and a lot of people who grew up in a different kind of a social environment very often can be frightened, intimidated by freedom.
LYDEN: Ha Jin, it has been a real pleasure having you with us.
Mr. JIN: Thank you.
LYDEN: Ha Jin is the author of the new short story collection, "A Good Fall." He joined us from member station WBUR in Boston.
Copyright ©2009 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved.
Guest host Jacki Lyden speaks with author Ha Jin, who writes about the Chinese experience in his new book of short stories A Good Fall. Ha Jin sets his stories in Flushing, New York. The area is home to one of New York's largest Chinese immigrant communities.
TRANSCRIPT
LYDEN: This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Michel Martin is away. I'm Jacki Lyden.
Coming up, renowned poet Nikki Giovanni tells us what music she's been listening to lately in our occasional series In Your Ear.
But first, an author who focuses his attention on the Chinese immigrant experience. Ha Jin knows a few things about immigrating to America. In 1985, he left his native China to attend Brandeis University. As a writer, Ha Jin has kept a literary eye trained on China. He's taken the Chinese experience and rendered it for American readers.
Ha Jin's new book of short stories, "A Good Fall," is set in one of the most American of cities, New York. Flushing, Queens, is home to one of New York's largest Chinese immigrant communities. In painting the portrait of this slice of society, Jin considers many generational perspectives in characters who are trying to discover their place in America. Ha Jin joins us from our member station WBUR in Boston. Thank you so much for being a part of our show today.
Mr. HA JIN (Author, �A Good Fall�): Thank you, very happy to be here.
LYDEN: You know, I have been your fan for years, and I spoke with you a couple of years ago about your book, "A Free Life." And this was a novel about a young man who flees communist China in the 1980s, and he comes to the United States to study political science. And Nan Wu(ph), the protagonist of this book, has been dreaming of this freedom. He reads poems, and it was lovely to learn that these were poems that you actually wrote in this really lengthy, over-600-page book. So might I just go back to a lesson, to that classic immigrant dream of freedom that these poems embody?
Mr. JIN: (Reading) You must go to a country without borders, where you can build your home out of garlands of words, where broad leaves shade familiar faces that no longer change in wind and the rain. There's no morning or evening, no cries of joy or pain. Every canyon is drenched in the light of serenity. You must go there quietly, leave behind what you still cherish.
LYDEN: So what I love about this is the whole notion of building your home out of gallons of words. And that's kind of what you have tried to do for these characters because there's so much tension between cultures in this collection of stories, between each other, between their dreams and expectations, between the desire to assimilate and the really hard task of forgoing heritage, which is in a way impossible, isn't it?
Mr. JIN: Yes, big struggle for everyone. I think, in essence, main character in this book is in the struggle of looking for home, the first generation of immigrants. That's why it's very hard for them to feel at home. So that is very difficult. Even if they have a place to stay, but they don't have the feeling of being home.
LYDEN: Right, and of course, the way that the new world collides with the old can be as slight and yet somehow tethered as the Internet. The collection begins with a story that takes place between two sisters over the Internet and then goes into what happens when people really move in to the immigrant's home. Tell me about the characters in �The Crossfire.�
Mr. JIN: Oh, sure. The mother in that story can be somebody, a messenger from the native land. So the values are different and so, in that case, I think the clashes between the two places, the old land and the new place, become intensified. There was no way to reconcile.
LYDEN: This is the story in which the character - am I pronouncing it right, Tian Tzu(ph)?
Mr. JIN: Yes.
LYDEN: His mother has decided to come for an extended stay from China, and has decided that his wife, Connie, is completely wrong for him because she won't cook.
Mr. JIN: Yeah. It's an old story. I think I have a lot of Jewish friends that will say the same thing and the mother-in-law will say no woman is good enough for her son. That's an old story. But in this situation like this, it becomes more manifested.
LYDEN: This all comes to a head in this family at this really tense dinner. The husband, the moment he got home he went into the kitchen. He was going to cook a spinach soup, steam the eggplant and fry the flounder. As he was gouging out the gill of the fish, his mother stepped in. Could you pick it up from there?
Mr. JIN: Let me give you a hand, she said. I can manage. This is easy, he smiled, cutting the fish's fins and tail with a large scissor. You never cook back home. She starred at him, her eyes glinting. What's the good of standing six feet tall if you can't handle a small woman like Connie, she often said. In fact, he was 5 foot 10.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. JIN: He nudge each side of (unintelligible) with his knuckle. Mom, the American husband and wife both cook, whoever has the time. Connie is swamped with school work these days, so I do more household chores. This is natural. No, it's not. You were never like this before. Why did you marry her in the first place if she wouldn't take care of you?
LYDEN: You know, who wouldn't just love having a relative visit like that?
Mr. JIN: That I think, again is a normal - a lot of the details, in fact, I read them in newspapers, Internet. And most of them, the complaints always came from women. I never heard a man speak about these things, that's why I got idea of what if the story was told by a man?
LYDEN: And he becomes desperate to restore tranquility in the house. And without completely giving it away, can you talk about the measures to which he's willing to go.
Mr. JIN: He has to surprise or shock his mother with wrong piece of information that he have no job anymore. So as the result, she believe that he was totally bankrupt. So I think that's, again, there is based upon misconception, a misunderstanding because most people in the native lands would believe that the new immigrants could pick up cash right and left, and everybody would be rich, and it was nothing like that at all.
LYDEN: What is it about Flushing, Queens that made it the natural setting for this collection of stories?
Mr. JIN: Flushing is the second biggest Chinatown in New York City. It also is inhabited by most recent arrivals. Not only Chinese, they are lot of Koreans and European immigrants as well, so it is a vibrant place. And, in fact, in the beginning of 2005, I was invited to a conference out in the center of Flushing. I was very touched by the scenes on the streets, so that's why I decided to set all the stories in that place.
LYDEN: If you're just joining us, I'm Jacki Lyden and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm talking with the author Ha Jin about his new short story collection "A Good Fall."
Mr. Ha Jin, I'd liked to ask, I have read very lengthy books of yours that cover a lot of geography...
Mr. JIN: Mm-hmm.
LYDEN: �War Trash,� of course, �Waiting� and �A Free Life.� This is a compressed piece. This is like, instead of a big canvas painting, a really compressed small mosaic. Why did you decide you wanted to do short stories?
Mr. JIN: I do feel that in fact I'm a better short story writer.
LYDEN: You feel that way?
Mr. JIN: Yeah, I feel that way. Before this, I'd written three volumes of short stories. Each book was set in one place, basically. They are all, not linked stories but they are unified stories for a book. So this book, in a way, follow the same thing I had been doing. Short stories are closer to poetry, so very often one has to compress the stories in order to make it more concise and more poetic in that sense.
LYDEN: It's always fun to - when one reads your work to wonder how much of, in your case I do this perhaps more than with other authors, how much of your own biographical experience is in it. I mean, you set a lot of these stories in the 1980s. You wrote your first novel or short story in English I believe in the mid-1980s, right?
Mr. JIN: Yes.
LYDEN: And then there was the story that we have in here which you call "Shame," again, the generational divide between the old and young. A young man is working in between terms - young Chinese man, just getting some money in Manhattan. He's going to school out in Wisconsin and a professor from China, his old professor comes to visit and asks him, how much money are you making?
Mr. JIN: Mm-hmm.
LYDEN: And he's so impressed. This guy's just a garment industry worker.
Mr. JIN: Yes. That again, a common story. But it was not autobiographical. I never worked in New York at all. Really it was different. But again, lot of the details were factual. That was also common when two people met, one of them from the native land would ask how much you make. That was very common. One thing in that episode, in that story was very true, a teacher of mine went to -came to visit the United States and stayed in the Chinese consulate. I went to visit him. I was not allowed to enter the consulate.
LYDEN: Really?
Mr. JIN: I was - yes, that was true. From there on I had never set my foot in that building again.
LYDEN: Oh, you haven't? Have they invited you back at all?
Mr. JIN: They invited me but I haven't. I haven't gone to that place.
LYDEN: Why did they tell you that you weren't welcome the last time you tried to go there?
Mr. JIN: Not because of me, all the visitors.
LYDEN: Okay.
Mr. JIN: All the Chinese visitors were just denied access to that building.
LYDEN: In this short story, the professor believes, you know, we're just trying to get at some of how difficult it is to make your way in a new world and bring what you think is important. And there's just one little moment that sort of talks about the divide, in this case not between old and new generations of Chinese people, but the visiting scholar and his American counterpart. The American professor gives the Chinese professor this beautiful book and collection she's written.
Mr. JIN: Yes.
LYDEN: And he gives her something kind of a little I would say, mass-produced?
Mr. JIN: Mah Jong(ph). Yes.
LYDEN: The Mah Jong box.
Mr. JIN: Yeah. Yeah. In fact, that's a shameful moment for the student but the professor couldn't see it.
LYDEN: But the final shame, I think we can say it here in this one, is that the professor doesn't go home. He defects, stays in this guy's apartment and leaves behind him work that was his best work on Hemingway. He was going to call it "Hemingway in China."
Mr. JIN: Yeah. It's a secret project the professor aspired to do. But again, but it was another bigger shame in a way, yes.
LYDEN: Because it really was shoddy.
Mr. JIN: Yes. Again, that was based on a fact. I know of people who did the similar thing. Not exact the same but similar thing.
LYDEN: When people emigrate or come to America, whether they decide to just go to school here and try and stay on or possibly just choose not to return home, what is the hardest jump? Is it letting go of the past or not being able to understand the present?
Mr. JIN: You know, all those are hard. The hardest things are really to face your own life and be able to take that road. That's the hardest part because it's a lonely road very often. Freedom also means uncertainty and a lot of people who grew up in a different kind of a social environment very often can be frightened, intimidated by freedom.
LYDEN: Ha Jin, it has been a real pleasure having you with us.
Mr. JIN: Thank you.
LYDEN: Ha Jin is the author of the new short story collection, "A Good Fall." He joined us from member station WBUR in Boston.
Copyright ©2009 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved.
WTO Says China Unfairly Restricting U.S. Music, Films
December 21, 2009
by The Associated Press
The World Trade Organization's top arbitrators upheld a ruling that China is illegally restricting imports of U.S. music, films and books, and Washington pushed forward with a new case accusing China of manipulating the prices for key ingredients in steel and aluminum production.
Monday's verdict by the WTO's appellate body knocked down China's objections to an August decision that came down decisively against Beijing's policy of forcing American media producers to route their business through state-owned companies.
If China fails over the next year to bring its practices in line with international trade law, the U.S. can ask the WTO to authorize commercial sanctions against Chinese goods.
"Today America got a big win," U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said in a statement. "U.S. companies and workers are at the cutting edge of these industries, and they deserve a full chance to compete under agreed WTO rules. We expect China to respond promptly to these findings and bring its measures into compliance."
The Asian country's import restrictions have been a key gripe of Western exporters, who complain that China's rapid rise as a trade juggernaut has been aided by unfair policies that boost sales of Chinese goods abroad while limiting the amount of foreign products entering the Chinese market.
The probe initiated Monday by the WTO — at the request of the U.S., Mexico and the 27-nation European Union — focuses on the other half of the equation by examining China's treatment of domestic and foreign manufacturers with regards to its vast wealth of raw materials.
Washington and Brussels claim that China unfairly favors domestic industry by setting export quotas on materials such as coke, bauxite, magnesium and silicon metal. Export quotas are contentious under trade rules because they can cause a glut on the domestic market, driving down prices for local producers, while leading to scarcity and higher prices for competitors abroad.
Beijing, however, claims that the curbs are an effort to protect the environment, and says they comply with WTO rules. For its part, China is challenging U.S. trade rules on a number of issues such as poultry, and asked the WTO at the dispute body meeting Monday for a new investigation into American import taxes on Chinese tires.
Washington delayed the tire probe for another month, but the global trade referee will likely rule in all these disputes over the course of the next year.
Analysts and observers believe these Sino-American trade fights are only the beginning as President Barack Obama's administration will likely file more cases against China. Obama made campaign pledges to take a tougher approach with U.S. trading partners in the face of soaring job losses and the longest U.S. recession since World War II.
Last week, the two countries settled a dispute initiated by the Bush administration in December over subsidies that China allegedly provides to exporters of famous Chinese merchandise. Beijing agreed out-of-court to eliminate the subsidies, according to the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which will boost the prospects of U.S. exporters of household appliances, textiles, chemicals, medicines and food products.
The media dispute with China focused on a number of complaints raised by the trade associations representing record labels such as EMI and Sony Music Entertainment; publishers including McGraw Hill and Simon & Schuster; and, to a lesser extent, the major Hollywood studios of Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount, Universal and 20th Century Fox.
The WTO made no finding that implies it is illegal for Beijing to review foreign goods for objectionable content. But it said China cannot limit the distribution of U.S. goods to Chinese state-owned companies, and said the Asian country's burdensome restrictions were not "necessary" to protect public morals.
by The Associated Press
The World Trade Organization's top arbitrators upheld a ruling that China is illegally restricting imports of U.S. music, films and books, and Washington pushed forward with a new case accusing China of manipulating the prices for key ingredients in steel and aluminum production.
Monday's verdict by the WTO's appellate body knocked down China's objections to an August decision that came down decisively against Beijing's policy of forcing American media producers to route their business through state-owned companies.
If China fails over the next year to bring its practices in line with international trade law, the U.S. can ask the WTO to authorize commercial sanctions against Chinese goods.
"Today America got a big win," U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said in a statement. "U.S. companies and workers are at the cutting edge of these industries, and they deserve a full chance to compete under agreed WTO rules. We expect China to respond promptly to these findings and bring its measures into compliance."
The Asian country's import restrictions have been a key gripe of Western exporters, who complain that China's rapid rise as a trade juggernaut has been aided by unfair policies that boost sales of Chinese goods abroad while limiting the amount of foreign products entering the Chinese market.
The probe initiated Monday by the WTO — at the request of the U.S., Mexico and the 27-nation European Union — focuses on the other half of the equation by examining China's treatment of domestic and foreign manufacturers with regards to its vast wealth of raw materials.
Washington and Brussels claim that China unfairly favors domestic industry by setting export quotas on materials such as coke, bauxite, magnesium and silicon metal. Export quotas are contentious under trade rules because they can cause a glut on the domestic market, driving down prices for local producers, while leading to scarcity and higher prices for competitors abroad.
Beijing, however, claims that the curbs are an effort to protect the environment, and says they comply with WTO rules. For its part, China is challenging U.S. trade rules on a number of issues such as poultry, and asked the WTO at the dispute body meeting Monday for a new investigation into American import taxes on Chinese tires.
Washington delayed the tire probe for another month, but the global trade referee will likely rule in all these disputes over the course of the next year.
Analysts and observers believe these Sino-American trade fights are only the beginning as President Barack Obama's administration will likely file more cases against China. Obama made campaign pledges to take a tougher approach with U.S. trading partners in the face of soaring job losses and the longest U.S. recession since World War II.
Last week, the two countries settled a dispute initiated by the Bush administration in December over subsidies that China allegedly provides to exporters of famous Chinese merchandise. Beijing agreed out-of-court to eliminate the subsidies, according to the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which will boost the prospects of U.S. exporters of household appliances, textiles, chemicals, medicines and food products.
The media dispute with China focused on a number of complaints raised by the trade associations representing record labels such as EMI and Sony Music Entertainment; publishers including McGraw Hill and Simon & Schuster; and, to a lesser extent, the major Hollywood studios of Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount, Universal and 20th Century Fox.
The WTO made no finding that implies it is illegal for Beijing to review foreign goods for objectionable content. But it said China cannot limit the distribution of U.S. goods to Chinese state-owned companies, and said the Asian country's burdensome restrictions were not "necessary" to protect public morals.
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