COMMUNITIES IN ACTION

COMMUNITIES IN ACTION
Struggle for Peace and Sustainability in Asia

Published byInternational House of Japan & Japan Foundation

Date of publication
September 2007
©International House of Japan
5-11-16 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan 106-0032
Tel: 81-3-3470 3211
Fax: 81-3-3470 3170
Email: alfp@i-house.or.jp
URL: www.i-house.or.jp
Cover & illustration
Raphael Ahmed
Layout & design
Lim So-Youn, Jang Ik-Su

Printed in Japan

CONTENTS
Preface
Part 1: Sixty Days’ Chronicle
A Decade of Collaboration
Naoko Shimamura
Profile of 2006 Fellows
Eight Weeks’ Sojourn
Discourse and Dialogue

11
17
21
45

Part 2: Envisioning Community-Building
Unmasking Identity
Maria Hartiningsih
From Revolution to Devolution: How democracy’s “long tail”
can sustain press freedom, development and peace in Asia
Kunda Dixit
Democracy, Development and Diversity
Mohiuddin Ahmad
Building Cultural Sustainability among Young Communities in Asia
Janet Pillai
Toward the Futures which Bring Back Our Wisdoms Within:
Shifting theDirection of Development
Kamata Yoji
NGO Initiatives in Northeast Asia Environmental Cooperation:
Cases of KFEM-Jilin, Kitakyushu-Dalian Cooperation
Seejae Lee
Religion and Corruption: Advocacy for Integrity in Philippine
Church and Society
Albert E. Alejo

139
159

183
209
227

243

263

Part 3: Journey through JapanThe Tokyo Tribunal 2000 and Beyond
Maria Hartiningsih
Discovery of Japan
Mohiuddin Ahmad
Japan Diary
Seejae Lee
Asian Face of the Struggle for Integrity
Albert E. Alejo

287
301
327
339

PREFACE
Throughout our life, we constantly seek knowledge and engage inchanging our environment. We do so because we want to elevateourselves to a higher level in terms of moral standard and material
comfort. We want to reach a greater height. This obviously calls forengagement with the experiences and practices that are available
around us. Interpersonal and intercultural interactions thus help in
our capacity building, as well as enlightenment. The Asia Leadership
Fellow Program (ALFP) is an excellent opportunity in this respect.
ALFP is engaged in building a constituency among public
intellectuals. We are talking about organic intellectuals. This meansthat one needs not only to attain the capacity to envision andarticulate, but also to stimulate action for positive change. ALFP
has been trying to be a gateway for the intensive interaction of people
from diverse social conditions and intellectual backgrounds in Asia
to facilitate development of an Asian perspective, if there could beany.
Although the world is becoming closer, it is still full of unknown
diversity. People in “other cultures” have their own rich traditions,own ways of engagement with nature and the community andcontextual ways of seeking alternatives to existing odds. It is always
inspiring to become acquainted with their notions and struggles that
may immensely benefit us in acquiring a regional and global
perspective on issues that concern all human beings. Through ALFP,
the International House of Japan and the Japan Foundation havebeen trying to facilitate such a process by bringing “public
intellectuals” from diverse backgrounds and from different Asian
countries and providing them with a space to interact among
themselves, as well as with Japanese academia and practitioners invarious fields, to find the meaning of Asianness. This can be
stimulated and accelerated through a process for reorientation, forgetting in touch with other ideas, understandings and applications.
For a considerable part of our professional life, we have been working
with a certain mission. We have been playing the role of an academic,or an animator, or a researcher, or a creative writer, or an artist, oran advocacy activist, or a communicator.

The most common denominator for us is perhaps our engagementin activities intended to change the quality of life of the people
through our respective works. We believe that ‘critical consciousness’
is a missing link between ignorance and enlightenment, between
marginalization and empowerment. We strongly feel that we needto constantly enhance and update ourselves in attaining the required
level of excellence, so that we can stimulate ourselves, as well asothers, to steer the process of development, cohesion and harmony
in society. This has been attempted through ALFP since its
commencement in 1996.
In 2006, ALFP hosted its tenth group of eight participants, one eachfrom Bangladesh, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Nepal, thePhilippines and Vietnam. They were together in Japan from midSeptember to mid-November. ALFP opened a new window to thisgroup of eight and indeed helped familiarize them with contemporary
Japanese society and culture. Though Japan is in Asia, many of us
know very little about Japan.
Our aim has been to enhance our knowledge base. We had highexpectations from ALFP, and ultimately it has been in fact rewarding.
ALFP has been instrumental for achieving a higher level ofcompanionship, understanding and enlightenment. This should help
rebuild our mindset about our neighbors in Asia, stimulate our energy
to work for meaningful interaction with other Fellows, broaden our
horizon and bring greater clarity in the thought process.
As part of the program, we were supposed to prepare and present
one paper centering on a theme. The theme of ALFP 2006 was first
decided as “Unity in Diversity: Envisioning Community-Buildingin Asia and beyond.” Later the Fellows in consultation with thesecretariat staff phrased it for the public symposium as “Communitiesin Action: Struggle for Peace and Sustainability in Asia.”
At the end of the program, it was decided to publish a book on
ALFP 2006. This book has been designed to contain, among others,
activities in which the Fellows participated and their individual
works. It has three parts. Part 1 includes some introductory remarks,
a summary activity report and a detailed report based on transcripts
of selected seminars. Part 2 includes the final papers prepared by
the Fellows. Out of eight, seven Fellows contributed.

It was also felt important to share the feelings, observations andexperiences of the Fellows on Japan, which has been endeavoredthrough essays contributed by four Fellows.
This anthology is the result of a team effort. Ms. Naoko Shimamura,
Ms. Mayuko Sasanuma and Mr. Kimihiro Sonoda of the International
House of Japan were instrumental in making our stay comfortableand facilitating the two-month program in a meaningful andpurposive manner. Ms. Kazumi Yagi and Mr. Toru Oono of the JapanFoundation also deserve acknowledgement in this respect. Ms. Mattie
Reyes has put a lot of hard work into preparing reports based on her
notes and made transcripts out of recorded tapes. Ms. Mayuko
Sasanuma has also made a selection of photographs and put on
captions that would help readers to have a glimpse of the 2006
program. The managements of the I-House and Japan Foundation
have always been supportive in all stages. Prof. Lee Jong Won, Prof.
Masaaki Ohashi and Prof. Chiharu Takenaka, advisers of the ALFP,
were inspiring icons with their counseling and participation. Finally,
it was the Fellows with their unique professional backgrounds,
participation and fellowship under a very expedient and conducive
environment that made the 2006 program a success. All thesecontributions are acknowledged with gratitude.
Mohiuddin Ahmad
EditorA Decade of Collaboration
Naoko Shimamura

I felt both honored and embarrassed when I was asked to contribute a
paper for the ALFP 2006 book. Over the years, I had been cajoling theFellows to write discussion papers and reports for the Program. But
when it came to writing one me, it was another story. I have been heavily
involved in the coordination of this beloved project since its initiation
and what I have received from my experiences have been so immensethat I have no idea how to put them on paper.
ALFP was conceptualized and has evolved during the decade wheneach Asian nation-state, and Asia as a region, was struggling for maturity.
At the same time the acceleration of globalization was transforming
people’s lives and value systems. Therefore, it is not an easy task toreflect on the ALFP experience that mirrors the changing environment
in which Asia and its peoples faced during such an eventful period.
When the program started in 1996, the Fellows came from the ASEAN
countries where state development was still in a transitional stage. In
most cases, the Fellows’ domestic situation made it difficult for themto speak freely in a public setting about the problems of political/social
issues. Talks of regional integration at the governmental level or througheconomic cooperation were beginning to be active around that time;but, on the other hand, it was still rare for Asian public intellectualsfrom various cultural backgrounds to meet at their own initiatives,
especially when their professions or fields of interest were different.
The first three years of the ALFP were spent mainly to sow the seeds—
to inform public intellectuals in various parts of Asia that they could
spend two months in Japan as part of an innovative fellowship program,where they could discuss issues of common concern pertinent to theregion. At the outset, there seemed to have been doubts and anxieties
among the Fellows about the intention of the ALFP—i.e. why is Japan
doing this, or what the participants are expected to do or to produce out12Communities in Actionof the program, etc. But as time went on, the Fellows seemed to discoverthat the discussions they engaged in during formal or informal meetings(sometimes at the renowned I-House breakfast table or at McDonald’s)
were usually of a special quality and that they wouldn’t be able to havethese conversations if they were confined to their daily professional
engagements.
During these years, many large-scale events affecting the lives of many
Asians, such as the economic crisis that shook the whole region andhow the magnitude of the economic crisis heavily hit the weakest
members of Asian societies in particular, took place. Reflecting thosechallenges, discussions focused on questions of identity and more
attention was drawn to local initiatives that were more sensitive to what
was happening at a more micro-level of society.
It was during the 2001 program when the attacks of 9/11 occurred.
Tensions between different ethnicities or religions began to be exposed;
people became less tolerant to each other. It was only natural for thatyear’s Fellows to begin a project focused on the realities of transnationalmigration, which had become one of the crucial phenomena related toeconomic disparity in the global society.
Thus, at the threshold of the new century, the need for creating more
opportunities to have cross-border dialogue and to nurture mutual
understanding grew ever more important, and with such a multicultural
background, the ALFP itself had to evolve as well. While creating moreseminars of alternative and diverse viewpoints, the program began toplace more importance on field trips during which the participants could
mutually learn from the positive/negative experiences of various
movements in the localities.
There must have been numerous events happening to the Fellows
without our knowledge, as it was often said by the Fellows that manyof the more thought-provoking discussions happened in informal settings
rather than in formal seminars or workshops. Field trips were thoserare opportunities for the secretariat to be able to be part of such informalinteraction. Organizing 4-5 days field trips, often considered to be an
important highlight of the two-month program, has been a constantchallenge. But knowing that the impact on Fellows’ intellectual pursuits
would be immense, we tried to take utmost care to cover critical issuesof mutual concern, making the visits educational as well as entertaining.
We began by getting feedback from the Fellows and asking for ideas
from advisory committee members and friends of the ALFP in various

Sixty Days’ Chronicle

13

localities, and we spent several months in preparation. For the organizers
it was often the first time we got to know about the movements oractivities initiated by local communities, and this has been an importantlearning opportunity for everyone involved.
Over the years, I was fortunate enough to go on many field trips with
the ALFP and to have so many rich experiences. In 1999, I went on thefirst field trip I organized. The group visited Rokkasho Village in Aomori
Prefecture, a place symbolic of the nuclear waste and recycling industry
in Japan. We tried to present to the Fellows the multi-layered viewpointof the nuclear story—those of the local administrators (we met a Mayorof the village who later committed suicide due to a bribery case); thecitizen activists who oppose the nuclear-related facilities; and personnelof the Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd., a venture corporation run by the electriccompany and other trading companies, who are responsible indeveloping the energy plant and producing power indispensable for avast energy-consuming country like Japan.
I remember the tense atmosphere of the visit to JNFL’s public relations
pavilion. They knew that some of the local activists were accompanying
our group. Since the actions of those opposing the nuclear facilities
were sometimes extreme, the JNFL staff seemed to be truly worried
that the activists would harm their facilities. I could feel that they wereon alert every time the activists made a move. I regretted organizing
the trip, which seemed too adventurous (at least for an ordinary citizen
like me). But, to my great relief, nothing happened. I later realized that
it was indeed the anxieties arising from prejudice and ignorance of thecounterparts’ intentions or points of view.
Listening to various opinions of the stakeholders were very interesting,but what affected me most during the trip was the conversation I had
with the driver of the bus (the bus had a lounge at the back, seats withunfashionable upholstery, and the engine was so weak that it hardly
had the power to climb up Osore-san Mountain where Itakos practiced
shamanistic prayers). While the Fellows were enjoying drinking andsinging at the back of the bus (this was actually one of the most alcoholdependant, song-loving groups we’ve ever had), I sought out the driver’s
frank opinion about the fate of his hometown. He said that even though
he was little worried about an accident that could occur he was more
grateful for the fact that he could now drive on the road that was nolonger uneven, no longer strewn with pebbles and rocks. He was one ofthe villagers who were appreciative of the more “modern life” that was14

Communities in Action

introduced after the nuclear-power processing facilities came to thevillage. I told the bus driver that I would remember the village and theconversation I had with him every time I turn on the lights in my home.
Only a few weeks later, a terrifying accident at a nuclear-waste recycling
plant in another village (Tokai-mura) frightened not only us but also allof Japan. I remember talking with the Fellows gravely about the fate of
the employees who died from radioactive contamination and theresidents who had to be evacuated from their neighborhood. This brought
to us the complex reality of development and its influence on the local
people?in return for the subsidies from the national government thatbrings affluence to the local community, the residents live right next tothe danger of being exposed to radiation, a question of life or death.
It¡¯s always the marginalized areas and peoples that have to face such
irrational choices. After this experience, I became more attentive to theother side of the stories—that there are always different viewpoints
aside from those expressed by mainstream sources—and I learned of
the importance of conveying alternative messages to those who are illinformed.
A project such as the ALFP usually has a mission for its operation and,in this case, the mission aims to create a network of Asian public
intellectuals that tackles the problems that the region faces, in the hopethat the network will eventually contribute to the building of a true
civil society. But the mission doesn’t stipulate what this true civil society
is and what the task of alleviating regional problems actually demands.
In other words, it is rather vague to where this network of Asian public
intellectuals is leading. Are we trying just to create a loose network, orshould we move further towards collective action? After covering 62
Fellows, what is the point of spending all that time and money if their
two-month experience does not go beyond personal enrichment? That
has been a big question that I’ve been thinking over the years, and I
haven’t yet been able to find an answer. We are constantly exposed tochallenging issues that need to be sorted out. I know we should go
further than nurturing friendships, but I also know there is a limit inwhat a program such as ALFP can do.
Whatever the program’s official mission, my personal stance incoordinating the ALFP was to create an environment for the public
intellectuals from various backgrounds to build trust among them—Sixty Days’ Chronicle15

a sense of confidence even if their ways of thinking or approaches toissues differ greatly. Onaji Kama no meshi wo kuu—eating rice fromone pan (= live under the same roof)—is a key recipe for conducting
such collaborative interactive programs for those who come fromdifferent cultural/social backgrounds; but being together for a shortperiod of time such as a 2-3 day conference is not sufficient. I’ve
observed that the dynamics of the Fellows’ interaction changes after amonth of being together and I believe two months is the right amountof time to get to know one another, intellectually and personally, fairly
well. Even if participation in the program has taken gram an important
collaborative effort. Without the generous funding from the JapanFoundation, this program would not have continued this long, and I
must thank my colleagues at the Japan Foundation for their constantsupport in securing the budget for the program. Appreciation from thepeople involved made us feel that we were doing something meaningful,but we have to go beyond self-satisfaction and convey these experiences
to a wider audience at different levels of the society to which we belong.
That is the challenge place in different years, the Fellows’ sense of
comradeship in having experienced the same course of program at thesame venue—the I-House—can add to the closeness they feel toward
each other. The chemistry of each group has been interesting to observe(in fact it was during 1996 program when I first heard the word
‘chemistry’ used for describing human relationships), and I have always
felt nervous at the beginning of each program: will this year’s
combination of the fellows be successful enough to build long-lasting
relationships?
In recent years, the value of the ongoing projects has been determinedthrough evaluation. More specifically, the results of the evaluation
process will decide if the project is still worth funding. Those who are
involved in the ALFP agree unanimously that it is a worthwhile program,but for outsiders it is not easy to judge the quality. We need to illustrate
more in-depth what the program has been doing, and more specificallywhat it is doing for the betterment of the civil society.
On a personal level, it has been a continuous struggle to keep the program
going, especially when the initial masterminds of the program left mewith a project of this scale. But it was certainly a meaningful struggle,
and an invaluable learning opportunity which could have never been

16

Communities in Action

gained through studying in an ivory tower. There were limitations
in what the organizers could do; but we constantly sought ways tocarry out the programs effectively by placing importance on
providing hands-on experiences according to the needs and interestsof each participant. Each year the program has been different.
Needless to say, I have not been organizing the ALFP all by myself.
I have had the privilege to work with many capable colleagues, andadvice from various contacts through the I-House/Japan Foundation
network, including the ALFP alumni and the advisory committee,
who have been indispensable in making this unique pro for the Asia
Leadership Fellow Program in 2007 and beyond.

Eight Weeks’ Sojourn

The two-months autumn program started with an evening reception
and introduction of the 2006 Fellows on 15 September in the basementof the I-House, and concluded with a wrap-up and evaluation session
on 13 November afternoon. In between, the Fellows had a weekend
retreat workshop at Chiba, a day trip to Ogawamachi, a week-long fieldvisit to Okinawa and a two-day public symposium at the lecture hall in
I-House centering round presentations by the Fellows. In between werealso several seminars given by guest speakers from different universities,
mass media, parliament, as well as individuals with creative
accomplishments. A summery of the activities is presented below.
However, a transcript of selected seminars has been prepared in moredetails and has been presented separately in the following chapter.
1. Weekend Retreat Workshop
The 2006 Fellows spent their first weekend in Japan in a retreat at the
Seimei-no-Mori Resort in Chiba Prefecture. It was an opportunity for
the Fellows to get acquainted with each other and their research interests.
The after-dinner parties were lively, with the Fellows sharing their stories
and jokes in a relaxed and informal environment. The Fellows also had
refreshing walks in the spacious resort gardens and woods. Surroundedby nature’s greenery and fresh air, they had an invigorating two-day
exchange and discussion with the ALFP advisers, consultants andsecretariat staff.
The first session had the theme, “Searching for Unity in Diversity.”
Maria Hartiningsih talked about the current situation in Indonesia,
seemingly heading toward a religious state. She pointed out that religion
had become a source of conflict and oppression rather than that of aconciliation and emancipation. She reflected that religion has becomea mask for the real problems of the Indonesian society.

22

Communities in Action

Although it seems that religion is coming to the surface as the cause ofethnic and socio-economic conflict, it is actually just a cover for thereal issues.
Albert Alejo talked about the inter-relationship between corruption andconflict. He observed that corruption is another form of conflict thatchallenges peace in many post-conflict societies. He also talked about
the role of religion or church in the corruption issue by sharing his own
experience in the movement against corruption in the Philippines.
Janet Pillai presented a concrete case study of her experience in
implementing a creative arts project for children at her hometown
Penang. The project, which has been ongoing for six years, explores
children’s cultural historical identities through creative arts for moreparticipatory and holistic learning.
The second session had the theme “Media and Culture in Building
Communities in Asia.” Kunda Dixit talked about his work andexperience during the April 2006 people power movement in Nepal
that ousted the autocratic regime of the king. He showed how media
creatively expressed its defiance of the censorship that the king imposed.
He pointed out the important role played by media in the people’s
empowerment process in Nepal.
Nguyen Thanh Son shared his own family’s experience in Vietnam
War. He brought attention to the Diaspora that ensued because of the
war and the three million Vietnamese who are now living overseas. He
talked about how media and the arts are bridging divided communities
to heal the scars of war through new literature that caters to Vietnamese
both in Vietnam and overseas.
The second day started with the third session on a theme “Practical
Challenges: Community Initiatives in Realizing Sustainable Society.”
Mohiuddin Ahmad discussed the process of convergence and conflictthat operates in human civilization. He shared his thoughts aboutdevelopment and the issues that the peoples of the world are facing
today. From works in South Asia and Bangladesh, he talked about his
experience in searching for different meanings and ways of looking at
development concepts.
Yoji Kamata began his presentation by bringing to the fore andquestioning the hidden assumptions of conventional development. He
then presented his alternative vision and strategy, which he had
formulated by living with various communities in Asia. He shared how

Envisioning Community-Building23

he is trying to change the damage that the western-capitalist concept ofdevelopment had brought to local communities and ethnic minorities.
Seejae Lee started his presentation with the current environmental
situation, the growing trend for trans-border environmental problems
and the resurgence of nationalism among states. He pointed out thatstates now increasingly focus on their own national interest so that noviable international environmental governance system can be formed
to solve the rising incidence of trans-border environmental problems.
He presented concrete examples from his own experience organizing
joint projects involving governments, business, civil society andacademic institutions to demonstrate that transnational cooperation is
feasible.
2. Field Trip to Ogawamachi
On 25 September 2006, the Fellows made a day-trip to Ogawamachi in
Saitama Prefecture. Ogawamachi has a population of about 35,000.
Surrounded by hills, the town has abundant nature and forest, which
has been a blessing for the residents. Ogawamachi is an agricultural
town which in the old days was known for producing traditional paper,
sliding doors called shoji and silk products.
NPO Foodo was the host of the Fellows. Yuko Takahashi, Vice Presidentof NPO Foodo, gave a briefing about their organization and its activities.
During Japan’s bubble economy, the hills that surround Ogawamachi
were golf courses and dumping sites for garbage from the cities. Facedwith the problem of polluted water sources and growing concern overits ill effects for their health, the local people came together to form
NPO Foodo in order to find ways to do business without harming thenature. The four objectives of NPO Foodo are to promote farming andforestry through active participation in conserving the environment, todevelop the town by utilizing local resources, to nurture local culture
and to disseminate information learned from local culture.
In order to achieve its objectives, NPO Foodo is engaged in various
activities such as lectures and seminars to educate people, especially
young people, about the environment, recycling and organic farming.
One major project of NPO Foodo is the biogas facility which is the
product of collaboration between different community stakeholders:
the local government which wants to reduce the amount of waste thetown generates the farmers who want a stable supply of organic fertilizers
and the residents who want to contribute to the environment.

24

Communities in Action

In conjunction with the biogas facility, a local currency system has
been established to motivate the 100 households who are currently
involved in the project. The cost of disposing of the town’s garbage byincineration is 32 yen per kilo, while processing it in the biogas facility
costs 12 yen. Based on the amount saved by the local government inprocessing the garbage in the biogas facility instead of burning it,
coupons are distributed to the participating households which can beexchanged for farm products during the summer and autumn festivals,
which NPO Foodo organizes with the organic farmers who use the liquid
fertilizers produced with the biogas facility. Meeting the end consumers
during these twice-a-year harvest exchanges encourages the farmers,
while the residents are happy to obtain organic produce and at the sametime protect the environment. In addition, NPO Foodo also collaborates
with the Saitama Farming Research Center to study the effects of theliquid fertilizer produced by the biogas facility on agricultural products.
After the briefing at the Ogawamachi Community Hall, the Fellows
with their hosts toured around the town to observe how a local
community can successfully earn a living by making the best use of
their resources without harming the environment. They visited a tofu
factory where the owner, Mr. Shimizu, described about tofu making.
The Shimizu tofu business is 85 years old and has supported the family
for three generations. They also learned about the precise productionof ‘sake’ and enjoyed a taste over lunch at the brewery restaurant. In
the afternoon, they visited a papermaking mill where they observed
each step of the process from cutting the branches of the kozo trees tocollect the fiber until the final stage of drying the finished paper.
Ogawamachi has a 1200-year tradition of papermaking and is famousfor producing the strong kozo paper used for ledgers and record books.
The Fellows had a tour at the Kaneko farm where Mr. Yoshinori Kaneko
showed them around his farm. Mr. Kaneko is a pioneer organic farmerin Ogawamachi. He decided to study organic farming in the 1970s
because of his failing health resulting from the chemicals used at thefarm. Since then, he has shared his knowledge of organic farming withother farmers both within Japan and abroad. There are 25 organic farms
in Ogawamachi, the highest in any Japanese neighborhood. Ogawamachi
has 3.6 percent of its total farming area devoted to organic farming
while the national average is only 0.1 percent. Using solar panels, thebiogas facility and the bio-fuel for his tractor, Mr. Kaneko showed theFellows how energy self-sufficiency can be achieved while maintaining
his health and contributing to the environment.

Sixty Days’ Chronicle

25

The Fellows ended their Ogawamachi field trip with a visit at the newly
constructed biogas facility.
3. Field Trip to Okinawa
The Fellows had a five-day field trip to the island of Okinawa. It wasan opportunity for the Fellows to look at Japan and the information thatthey had learned during their stay in Tokyo from a different perspective.
The Fellows visited several museums and famous sites during theirstay in Okinawa, such as the Himeyuri Museum, Okinawa Peace
Memorial Museum, University of the Ryukyus, Shuri castle, Tsuboya
pottery district, Yambaru, Cape Hedo and Haebaru Town Museum. The
Fellows also visited the American Consulate General in Naha City andwere briefed on the US government perspective on Okinawa. During
their stay in Okinawa, the Fellows were treated to warm Okinawan
hospitality and relished sumptuous Okinawan cuisine.
3.1 Himeyuri Museum
The Fellows visited Himeyuri Museum in the southern part of Okinawa
Island. The museum is dedicated to the high school girls and teachers
who died while working for the Japanese military hospital during WorldWar II. The high school girls, aged 15 to 17 years, started training towork in the military hospital in December 1944. From February 1945,
the students started their field training at the Army hospital in Haebaru
which was housed in the elementary school buildings. The students
with their teachers worked in the hospital round the clock with very
little sleep. Their duties included carrying messages between the doctors
and taking care of wounded soldiers by bringing food and cleaning
their wounds.
When the US military began their heavy raids, the hospital was moved
to the caves surrounding Haebaru. On 26 May 1945, the hospital wasagain relocated to the caves in the Ihara area which is the current locationof Himeyuri museum. The museum is actually built around the caves
which served as a hospital for the Japanese military. The following day
on 27 May 1945, the students and teachers were divided into a first,
second and third surgery department with each department occupying
one cave. Out of the 96 students and teachers working in one caveduring the war, only five survived the Battle of Okinawa.

26

Communities in Action

Out of 240 students and teachers who worked in the Army hospital, 99
survived the war. Among the survivors, 15 have volunteered in the
Himeyuri museum to share their experience to visitors.
The Fellows listened to the testimony of Masako Arasaki, one of thehigh school girls who survived. She recalled her experiences in school
before the war, working in the caves during the war and searching forfriends and family after the war. She was only 16 at that time when she
worked in the hospital with her best friend. Her best friend and manyother young people including her younger brother died because a soldier
told them that it was better to end their lives rather than be captured by
the enemy. She is now 78 years old and hopes that everyone can live ahealthy life in a peaceful world.
3.2 US Military Bases in Okinawa
Many military bases in Okinawa were installed during the Battle of
Okinawa, when the US military occupied most of the land as they
advanced against the Japanese military. When World War II ended,
Okinawa was placed under US military administration. In 1972,
Okinawa returned back to Japan. However the US military presence
remained in the island. Okinawa has one percent of the Japanese
population and covers 0.6 percent of the territory of Japan. However,
Okinawa and its people support 75 percent of the US military bases inJapan. Such concentration of the bases, according to Prof. Masaaki
Gabe of the University of the Ryukyus, imposes a heavy burden on theland and its people. Although some of the bases have been returned, thereturned land is divided fifty-fifty between the national government
and the local government of Okinawa. The division is a source ofcontention as exemplified by the Naha airport, where the land adjacentto the airport is being used by the Japanese Self-defense Forces.
Prof. Gabe explained the triangular relationship between the US, Japanand Okinawa regarding the base issues. Legally, Japan and the US havebilateral agreement on the base issue. In reality, however, the issue
should be considered in terms of the relationship between the national
government and the US government, the national government andOkinawa, and the US government and Okinawa. He discussed briefly
the major viewpoints that emerge while describing the issue relating
the US government, the national government, the local government
and landowners. For example, according to the statistics of the US
government, Okinawa only has 23 percent of US military facilities inJapan while civic groups say that it would be 75 percent.

Sixty Days’ Chronicle

27

Ms. Suzuyo Takazato, former member of the Naha city assembly andwomen rights leader, talked in detail about the US base issue from theperspective of women rights. She mentioned with much pain and agonythat women working as prostitutes suffered. She realized that thesituation of these women is actually the situation of Okinawa withregards to the presence of the US military. Her decision to run for theassembly and later as Mayor of Naha was kindled by her desire to
make the issue of women rights known to all of Japan and abroad.
Ms. Takazato presented a chronology of the post-war US military crimes
against women in Okinawa. Collection of the data started in 1996; a year
after three US soldiers raped a 12-year old girl. The incident drew hugeattention to the base issue in Okinawa. Recalling the surge of journalists
from the mainland and abroad who came to cover the story, she remembers
being asked whether there have been previous incidents. Realizing thatno comprehensive and systematic study has been done to document thebase issue from women’s perspective, Ms. Takazato and the Okinawa
Women Act against Military Violence, an organization which she helped
to form started the process of gathering information. Their organization
went out for demonstrations to create awareness on military violenceagainst women. In Okinawan belief, butterfly accompanies the soul after
death when it travels. Butterfly symbols were used in banners to represent
the women who were victimized, remembering them as sisters, daughters,
aunts, and mothers.
Ms. Takazato criticized the US government for ignoring the women’sissue, focusing instead on the economic contribution and civic activities
that the military bases have been contributing for the local community.
3.3 Yambaru Tour
Aside from its unique culture and history, Okinawa is also famous for
its pristine beaches and diverse sub-tropical forests unique in Japan.
Okinawa’s economy depends on three Ks: kichi, koukyou jigyo andkankou referring to US military base, public sector investment andtourism. The number of tourist arrivals in Okinawa is increasing every
year. In 2005 alone, there were 5.6 million tourists. With a populationof only 1.2 million, such a large number of tourists have a significant
impact on the economy and the environment. Eco-tourism is an
important aspect of the Okinawan tourism industry.
Yambaru means mountain field in the Okinawan dialect. Kunigami
village is one of the three villages which make up the Yambaru area.

28

Communities in Action

Kunigami village, which is composed of 20 smaller communities, has
a population of about 5,600. The Kunigami Tourism Association was
the host of the Fellows for their tour of Yambaru. Professor Junko Oshimaof the University of the Ryukyus and consultant of the association talked
about the issue of environment and tourism development in Yambaru.
Prof. Oshima’s presentation focused on community-based education
practices in developing the environment and empowerment of the local
people.
Since 2000, Prof. Oshima, in cooperation with the Kunigami Tourism
Association and the local government, has been organizing workshops
for the local people in the Yambaru area. Aimed at empowering thecommunity by transforming the unconscious knowledge of the local
people to conscious themes to enable them to actively participate in theimplementation of government schemes, the workshops have resulted
in many changes in the community. Based on the focus group interview
that Prof. Oshima conducted, the workshops has changed the peoples’
view in looking at problems and finding solutions, improved theirrelationship with the local government, developed the political skills
needed to negotiate with the government and other community members,
and helped them recognize weakness which enabled them to focus on
improving weak areas.
Prof. Oshima also discussed some of the problems both natural andman-made that the Yambaru area faces. She mentioned that the five bigdams constructed in Yambaru to supply water for the cities and theforestry road as major contributors for the destruction of theenvironment. In addition, big typhoons hit Okinawa which cause
landslides and erosion, damaging the coral and marine life. The problems
are compounded as the aging of the population and migration of young
people to work in the cities. Prof. Oshima also talked about the problemof public investments where billions of taxpayer money is wastefully
spent in constructing buildings and roads.
In last six years that she has been working in the Yambaru area, Prof.
Oshima has had the opportunity to share her knowledge and expertisewith the local people, but more than that she learned from the Yambaru
community about their distinct style of sustainable tourism. She
concludes that adult learning is relevant to community development
because it is designed to deliver instruction to the most able agents ofcommunity development.

Sixty Days’ Chronicle

29

Mr. Yasuo Yamakawa, president of the Kunigami Tourism Association,
gave a brief introduction and history of the association. His presentation
focused on various projects and programs that the association has been
implementing. The primary goal of the association is sustainablecommunity development for tourism based on the principle that the
local people must lead in the formation of strategy to protect and develop
their own community and environment. The association has five pillarsof activities: community-based tourism and information for the public,
environmental education and environmental field study, information
to the general public, partnership with the various sectors of humanresource development, and environmental and cultural conservation.
Mr. Masakazu Kudaka, professional photographer and environmentalist,
guided the Fellows in a trek at Mt. Yonaha. The Fellows had theopportunity to see for themselves some of the indigenous animals of
Okinawa. He brought them to see the forest road constructed by the
Okinawa prefecture government to encourage a forestry industry in the
Yanbaru area. Mr. Kudaka however criticized the construction of theroad saying that it has no economic value considering that no forestry
industry exists in the area even after the road was constructed. Although
he acknowledged that a Forestry Association was established, it was
only formed when construction of the forest road began in order to takecare of the trees that were cut during the construction. He warned against
the plan of the prefecture government to bring 11 million tourists to
Okinawa because it can put a strain on the ecology. He admits that ecotourism is a way to protect the natural resources but he emphasizes theneed for control so as not to put undue stress on the environment andfor local people to be involved in the planning because they know wellwhat is best for their community.
3.4 Haebaru Town Museum
On the last day of their field trip to Okinawa, the Fellows visited the
Haebaru Town Museum. The museum is converted from the building
which was used for preparing lunch for students of the junior high school
across the road. The museum has become the center for forging together
the people of Haebaru wherever they may be in appreciating the richcultural heritage of their hometown.
Upon entering the Haebaru Town Museum, visitors are welcomed by atile design on the floor showing a usual map of Japan. The map reflects
an alternative orientation that depicts Okinawa as the center of Asia. In
its history, Okinawa had tried to create harmonious relationship between
Asian countries through trade with China, Vietnam, Cambodia,

30Communities in Action

Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Even though Okinawa is sucha small island, many aspects of Asian culture have found a home on theisland. Today, 600 years later, the Haebaru Town Museum is continuing
the work of creating harmonious relationships between countries andfostering cultural exchange.
The museum presents four themes of the town’s history in its exhibit.
The town’s experience during World War II plays a major part in its
history. During the war many Japanese military personnel were stationed
in Haebaru to protect the military headquarters which was located in
nearby Shuri castle. The Japanese military personnel took over most of
the houses of the residents. Four of these houses where used as comfort
houses with Korean women. The Army hospital was also located in
Haebaru where the famous Himeyuri students’ medical troop was
stationed. A network of about 30 trenches and caves was dug in the
town for the Army hospital. From a population of about 8,000, 3,840
residents died, most of them during the 90-day Battle of Okinawa. Someof the survivors shared their experience of working in the caves andtheir stories were reflected in the museum display.
The caves used as a hospital are located behind the museum building.
The town plans to build a passage from the museum to the actual cavesso that visitors can feel the real atmosphere and conditions inside thecaves. Work to prepare and reinforce the caves for visitors began inAugust 2006 and they are scheduled to open in March 2007. The Fellows
saw one of the caves being prepared. The entrance of the 70-meterdeep cave was burnt black due to the flamethrower that the US forcesused to attack the cave. On the cave floor were medicine vials andbones of the patients.
The second theme of the museum focuses on the people who left Haebaru
to work abroad before the war. Almost 1,800 left Okinawa to find better
prospects in Hawaii, the Philippines, Saipan, Manchuria, the mainland
US, Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Bolivia. The special space allotted by
the museum for the immigrants was to ensure that they are kept in the
town’s memory. Members of the museum staff visited the countries
where the immigrants went to identify their descendants and interview
them. A data book was published by the museum to document theimmigrants’ lives abroad.
Okinawan traditional culture is the focus of the third theme. A diorama
depicting Okinawan life from birth to death is the main exhibit in thispart of the museum. Okinawans believed that children are susceptible

Sixty Days’ Chronicle31

to diseases caused by evil spirits. So when a child is born, a pair ofscissors is placed on the pillow to protect the child. On the first birthday,
three objects are placed on a table: an abacus, money and a book. Whenthe child grabs the money first, the child will be rich. If the child grabs
the book, then the child will become smart. If the child takes the abacus,
he will become president of a company. All children are shaven except
for the hair left at the back of the heads, because Okinawans believedthat this was where the God grabs the children to save them from falling.
It also prevents the spirit from leaving the body because Okinawansbelieve that the human spirit goes in and out from the back. When girls
reach the age of 13 or 14, tattoos are engraved on their heads. One
theory is that this is done for cosmetic purposes. Another theory is that
it was to prevent the girls from being abducted by people from Satsuma,
the present-day Kagoshima prefecture.
The 97th birthday of Okinawans is celebrated with a special ceremony
called the Spinning Wheel to symbolize birth and rebirth. The celebrantwearing white clothes and carrying a banner parades from the house to
the cemetery, which represents a funeral procession. On their returnfrom the cemetery to the house the celebrant carries a wind vane torepresent rebirth as a child. Okinawans believe that the birth year of theperson is a bad year. To release the bad omen, ceremonies are performedon the birth year and every 12 years based on the cycle of the Chinese
horoscope. The 97th year is in the last of the cycle. Unlike the practicein other islands in Japan, Okinawans in the old days did not cremate thebody but instead kept it in the ancestral tomb. When a new person diedin the family, the bones of the previous occupant were taken out, washedin the ocean, placed in a shell and returned in the family grave so that
there would be space for the new occupant. Although at present
Okinawans cremate their dead bodies, some of these ancestral tombs
still exist and can be seen at the foot of mountains and hills facing theocean.
The brighter side of Haebaru town’s history is shown in the fourth
theme. The Fellows started their tour of the museum with depressing
images of the war period; they ended it with peace and Okinawan Arts.
The central display of the exhibit is a scene from an Okinawan playabout the three elements of happiness: a long life, many offsprings, anda good harvest. The personification of Okinawan happiness is a 120year old man leading a festival with his descendants, while at the backwomen pray to the gods by giving offerings of their harvest. Okinawans

32Communities in Action

have one of the longest life expectancies in the world. However, they
believe that there is no meaning to have a long life if one is alone. A
good harvest for Okinawans happens when one rice stalk produces 333
grains.
After the tour around the museum, the Fellows had an outdoor tour to
see the actual caves used as the hospital and cemetery on the side of themountains. While returning to the Haebaru Museum auditorium, they
participated in a seminar by Mr. Ben Takara. Mr. Takara described his
two-faceted life as a scholar of Okinawan history during the day andthen transformed to a poet in the evening. He began his seminar with apresentation about his works and research at the Okinawa Prefecture
Archives. He ended it by hosting a poetry reading session with theFellows, which continued on to an evening party. The party began witheveryone introducing him or herself and sharing their impressions of
Okinawa during the past four days in the island. The Fellows not only
enjoyed watching performances of traditional Okinawan dance andsongs, they also participated as their Haebaru hosts taught them somedance steps. Everyone enjoyed singing, dancing and poetry recitation.
4. Summary of Seminars and Lectures
4.1 Regions and Regionalism in Asia History
Fresh from attending the ceremonies to receive the Fukuoka Award,
Professor Takeshi Hamashita joined the 2006 ALFP retreat at Chiba togive a seminar entitled, “Region and Regionalism in Asian History.”
Through his study of the Asian regional systems, he gives an alternative
perspective. By thinking from outside the box and looking from theperspective of Asia rather than the West, he puts places on the peripherysuch as Okinawa at the center of Asian history and provides explanationfor various types of networks for trade, migration and tributary relations
who would otherwise be considered informal and illegal from theWestern point of view.
According to Prof. Hamashita, in order to understand Japanese modern
history accurately, particularly the Japanese aggression that led to WorldWar II, it is necessary to put the period in a wider context of Asian
history. He looks into the role that Japan played in the Asian regional
system without distinguishing between the pre-modern, modern, war,and postwar periods. Prof. Hamashita argues that the West or Perry’s“black ships” did not trigger Japanese modernization during the Meiji

Sixty Days’ Chronicle

33

restoration. The focus to explain modernization in Asia is the Sinocentric regional system in East Asia. Most historians look into the Asian
regional system from the perspective of the Chinese emperors. On theother hand, Prof. Hamashita presents an alternative view by looking at
the regional system from the fringe.
Asian regionalism is very complex; looking at the maritime region thatshows the common inter-relations within Asia. Prof. Hamashita proposesthat it is better to look at Asia not in terms of continents and landmasses,
but in terms of the chain of seas that are connected with each other. He
argues that cross-sea relations were more important in history before
nation-states divided the seas into land-based territories. Asian
regionalism is not sovereignty-based; rather its foundation is maritime
trade. The key is to look at coastal ports as individual units withoutclassifying them under nation-state boundaries. For example, Nagasaki
merchants and Chinese coastal merchants traded more easily comparedwith inland trade. He also highlights the important intermediary role oftrading ports such as Hong Kong in connecting the East China Sea andSouth China Sea, and Singapore for the South China Sea and the Bayof Bengal. By looking at inter-maritime city relations and examining
the flow of people, commodities and money, he discovers that they
were significant in history as well as in contemporary relations.
4.2 East Asian Community
Yoshihide Soeya, professor of political science and international
relations at Keio University, gave an overview on the current situationof the East Asian Community, particularly at the governmental level.
He argues that community-building efforts need government processes,
as well as initiatives from the grassroots.
Prof. Soeya notes that the formation of regional organizations in Asia
was activated from outside. Economic integration that began with theEuropean Union reached Asia in the 1980s. In North America, regional
processes culminated in the signing of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA). The formation of the EU and NAFTA was a
response to the trend of globalization. The merit of regional integration
processes is rooted in the sense of vulnerability that each country
experiences because of globalization. One country cannot cope with
globalization by itself; so regional organizations are established. In the
Asia-Pacific region, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) was
institutionalized. The regional organizations which took shape in Europe,

34

Communities in Action

North America and the Asia-Pacific started at the level of economics,
eventually moving into the domain of politics and then security.
The end of the cold war had a huge impact everywhere in the world.
Seen as a mega structure affecting the entire world which emanatedfrom the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States,
every country had no choice but to respond. However, the Asian response
was unique in the sense that China acted as a third pole in what wasotherwise a bi-polar structure. Refusing to take sides and insisting upon
its independence, China was an important consideration for most Asian
countries with regards to their response to US-Soviet Union competition.
The emergence of China as a central factor in the region at the end of
the cold war has prompted a divided Asian response. Some countries
are willing to accept and accommodate China while others are morecautious. Common to everyone though is a sense of worry at the rise of
China.
The third dimension is culture, particularly the impact of popular culturein the region. Citing examples of Japanese anime, Korean drama, Hong
Kong films and Taiwanese idols, Prof. Soeya points out that the spreadof Asian popular culture has resulted in similar lifestyles of city-dwellers
in the region. He observes that the cultural base has been very open inpromoting a sense of community among Asian countries. In thischanging environment, Asian countries formed various regionalorganizations such as the Asian Regional Forum, ASEAN+3,
ASEAN+3+3 and East Asian summit; using their unique Asian approachto regionalism by including the involvement of China, Japan, the US,
and the EU. There are skeptics of the Asian way who are criticizingthat it is not useful, is difficult and cannot solve issues. But Prof. Soeya
believes that the merit of creating these organizations is to have a forum
for dialogue and increasing transparency.
4.3 Power and Terror
John Junkerman is a filmmaker who has produced several films about
Japan. His interest in Japan began in high school when he came as an
exchange student. He has been living in Japan for seven years.
It was nighttime in Japan at the time of the 9/11, and he recalls staying
up all night watching the television news. Like many in the world, he
was shocked by the attack, but he was even more shocked by the
response of the US that immediately separated the US from the rest of
the world. He watched with great distress as the US launched its attack

Sixty Days’ Chronicle

35

on Afghanistan. While many people in Japan and the world had very
serious doubts about the US response after 9/11, in the US 98 percentof Americans supported the way their government was responding.
Noam Chomsky began to do interviews and published a book entitled“9/11” four weeks after the attack. It immediately became a best sellerin the US. Translated into Japanese and released in Japan in December,the book also became a best seller in Japan. The president of Siglo, an
independent film company, read the book and was very impressed. He
thought it was important to have another perspective, a non-George
Bush perspective, to be presented in Japan so preparation began to makethe film with Chomsky. They first contacted Chomsky about 3 months
after the attack. Noam Chomsky was very busy with lecture requests
all over the US and all over the world in the aftermath of 9/11. Heagreed to one interview for 90 minutes. Chomsky also allowed them tofilm the public talks he gave. They filmed about five of the public talks
and put together the film which was simply a documentary on Noam
Chomsky talking. The purpose of the film was to present Noam
Chomsky’s ideas about the 9/11 attack and about the whole structure ofAmerican dominance.
The film had its first screening in Japan on the first anniversary of 9/11.
It was released in Japanese theaters for four months. It was shown in
New York for five weeks and in 35 other cities in the US. It has beentranslated into about 10 languages and shown around the world.
Although the film was put together quickly with limited resources, it
had impact and is still being watched.
After narrating the background of producing “Power Terror,” andwatching the film with the Fellows, director John Junkerman had alively discussion with the Fellows.
4.4 Self-Autonomy
Seiji Ohsaka is a former mayor of the town of Niseko in Hokkaido. He
became famous throughout Japan because of his advocacy for local
autonomy. In 2005, he ran for a congressional position and is currently
a member of the Diet.
Mr. Ohsaka gave a seminar on Japanese politics. Focusing on theJapanese self-autonomy, he talked about the major changes that took
place in Japan since the Meiji era. The first reform was the dramatic
militarization and wealth accumulation in the beginning of the Meiji
period which was triggered by the arrival of Commodore Matthew

36Communities in Action

Perry’s huge steam ships at the port of Uraga. The reforms resulted
to drastic change in Japanese culture and opened up Japan’s close
society by infusing models from Germany and other European
countries. The second reforms took place after the defeat in WorldWar II which aimed at restoring the nation’s economy and establishingpeople’s infrastructures.
In 1985, the Plaza Accord was concluded between the industrializedcountries. The agreement appreciated the Japanese currency from 240
yen to 120 yen a dollar, resulting in dramatic change in Japanese
economy. Export and manufacturing companies which depended on
raw materials from abroad suffered setbacks, forcing them to transfer
their production base abroad. The Plaza Accord contributed to the decline
and bursting of the Japanese bubble resulting to long years of recession,
erosion of the family and community as demonstrated by high incidenceof family-related crimes and collapse of local community. These
problems which Japan is now facing have been compounded bydeclining birth rate, food security issues which is lowest amongindustrialized countries and social burden with more than one million
dependents on welfare. Mr. Ohsaka maintains that the third wave ofreforms that Japan is currently undergoing is the response to the changes
that were brought about by the Plaza Accord. Comparing the threereforms, Mr. Ohsaka points out that the events that triggered the latest
wave of reforms were not clear and transparent to the people unlike theprevious two reforms.
Mr. Ohsaka recommends that Japan needs to be a true democratic nation
to change its current situation and to solve the problems that the country
is facing. He concedes that Japan had been democratized after the war,
but it is a dependent democracy. The people left everything to thegovernment and policymakers. Dependent democracy is only effective
during a period of economic growth, where people share common goals
and government power is centralized. But with the many different
challenges today, Japan needs to shed its dependent democracy. True
democracy begins with diverse values and aspirations. What is importantis sharing the process of going forward together; for the people to express
their opinions and become stakeholders in policymaking andimplementation. He concludes that autonomy is a requisite fordemocracy. The key to self-autonomy for the people is to have ownershipby learning and understanding the public sphere that relates them. The
starting point for self-autonomy for the people is to be informed aboutSixty Days’ Chronicle

37

their town. If there is no information, there is no self-autonomy; therefore
no democracy can develop.
4.5 Japanese Politics
Professor Naoyuki Agawa of Keio University gave a seminar entitled,“Peace and Security in East Asia: Japan’s role Past, Present and Future”.
Outlining the historical perspective of Japan’s role in Asia, Prof. Agawa
maintained that the location of Japan determined the character of its
relation with Asia. Being detached from mainland Asia and at the sametime near China has enabled the Japanese archipelago to be isolated sothat it was able to individually develop without interference but still it
is close enough to be actively involved in Asia when it chooses.
According to Prof. Agawa the unique geopolitical position of Japan
has resulted to the Japanese identity crises. In the history of its
relationship with Asia, Japan has demonstrated the ambiguous characterof its position vis-à-vis Asia wherein it would go in to the extreme
character of perceiving itself as part of Asia or as separate and isolated
from Asia. In addition, Japan’s entry and defeat in World War II has
major impacts on its policy towards East Asia that continued on until
the present. Through history Japan has shown shifting engagement with
Asia. Today, Japan tries to be a part of the East Asian community in ahealthier and more constructive way.
Analyzing the speeches of Foreign Minister Aso, Prof. Agawa
enumerated three apparent trends in Japan’s foreign policy with regards
to Asia. First, Japanese foreign policy focused on the increasing
importance of China and devoted new emphasis on India because of
their huge population. Second, priority is given on securing oil from
the Middle East, the same concern shared by China and Korea. Third,
Japan aims for a new strategic security role through the military inproviding humanitarian missions and aid as indicated by the dispatchof the Japanese Navy in the Indian Ocean. Prof. Agawa agreed with
Prime Minister Abe that Japan had gone into extreme after its defeat in
World War II with article 9 of the constitution but now it is beginningto change. Due to the changes in its foreign policy orientation, theemerging theme of Japanese foreign policy has also shifted into
increasing communication with Asia through trade, elevating Japan’s
principal position in the world as a “thought” leader and promoting
Japanese culture as Asia cool.

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38

4.6 Okinawan Identity
Prof. Katsunori Yamazato traced back the history of the University of
the Ryukyu in his presentation at the Center for American Studies in
the University, Okinawa. This university was established in 1950, thefirst university in the history of Okinawa. It was established by theAmerican Military government. In 1972, it became a national university
when Okinawa was reverted to Japan. This is the American Studies
Center. The center was established in 2002. Although the center is still
new, there are many people who are engaged in American studies
because of Okinawa’s post-war history. He introduced Mr. Oshiro
Tatsuhiro’s works, particularly his famous story “The Cocktail Party.”He also referred to a book written by Prof. Eiji Oguma of Keio
University entitled, “The Boundaries of the Japanese” that includes along chapter on Okinawa. The book points out Ryukyu or Okinawanrole in determining the Japanese sense of identity. Historically andculturally, the Ryukyu has occupied a marginalized position in Japan.
It has been marginalized for a long time that Okinawan writers often
focus on their own sense of identity. Oshiro Tatsuhiro, the author of“The Cocktail Party” was the first winner from Okinawa of the
Akutagawa prize in 1967, the most coveted award for fiction amongaspiring writers in Japan.
Okinawa was occupied by US from 1945 and was returned to Japan in
May 1972. The reversion to Japan in 1972 was another signal that thesouthern islands sent to the northern islands. People here are used to theterm “mainland” but Prof. Yamazato decided not to use it. He rather uses
geographical term, that way it is neutral.
Prof. Yamazato narrated how under the US administration, which lasted
for 27 years beginning in 1945, Okinawan writers wrote on their own
sense of identity and they meditated on what it meant to be an Okinawan
during the years under US administration. Separated from the northern
islands culturally and politically, and deprived of human rights under the
US Military Administration, this semi-colonial period ironically provided
Okinawans with an excellent opportunity to shape and sharpen theiridentity. The US emphasized that Okinawans are not Japanese. Unlike
the Japanese government who discouraged Okinawans from promoting
their own culture from annexation towards the end of the 19th century,
the US Military Government of the Ryukyus tried to separate Okinawa
from Japan after 1945 and promoted Ryukyuan culture such as traditional
performing arts. The US established the first university in Okinawa andthey preferred the ancient name, Ryukyu to modern name Okinawa.

Sixty Days’ Chronicle

39

Early modern Okinawan fiction shows that Okinawan writers tried to
use Okinawan or Ryukyuan dialect and provide translations in standard
Japanese immediately after the passage. They had to write in standard
Japanese but they could not forget their own language so what they did
was insert indigenous words, vocabularies or sometimes the wholesentence and then put translations in standard Japanese. This practice isstill being done and Prof. Yamazato hopes that it will persist even in the
21st century.
4.7 Media, Culture and Globalization
Professor Koichi Iwabuchi of Waseda University explained thedevelopment of East Asian media culture connection by discussing its
positive and negative impacts in the region. For about 10 years, Prof.
Iwabuchi had been studying media culture globalization by focusing
on power structure in the context of cultural globalization.
Cultural imperialism theory which assumes a US-centered dominationof the periphery of non-western countries has dominated the study of
media culture transnationalization for some time. By the late 1980s
however, the theory was criticized primarily for its assumption of apassive audience; American culture may be everywhere but it does notnecessarily mean that everyone is Americanized. Prof. Iwabuchi citedas example the East Asian cultural market where the most popular media
culture is produced locally instead of coming from the US. AlthoughProf. Iwabuchi conceded the continued existence of uneven culturalconnection, he proposed the need to go beyond the cultural imperialism
theory to understand the complex process of the expansion of capitalist
culture by looking into the contradicting directions of media culture
globalization. Professor Iwabuchi identified the three pairs of opposing
and contradicting forces working simultaneously in media culture
globalization; homogenization-heterogenization, decenteringrecentering and nationalizing-transnationalizing.
In recent years globally shared cultural format that were initiallydeveloped in the US have spread to express differences in culture. For
example the spread of hiphop which was originally from the US had
created various expressions of hiphop in Japan, Korea, Indonesia andIndia which shared the same style but still different. Prof. Iwabuchi
warned however that the dynamic expression of differences cannot be
naively celebrated as the uneven structure still exists. The phenomenon
demonstrated that the global spread of US-centered cultural format
through contemporary commercialized media and popular culture has

40Communities in Action

not erased cultural difference or diversity in the world; rather it
reproduced more cultural diversity and differences. The expressions ofdifferences orchestrated by the forces of global homogenization haveresulted to standardization through diversification and diversification
through standardization. Prof. Iwabuchi recommended scrutinizing theprocess in which globally dominated cultural format become localized
or hybridized to understand the dynamics of restructuring cultural
diversity or similarity based on the logic of capitalism.
In the late 1980s there has been a rise of non-western players in thefield of media popular culture and intensified regional media culture
connection. These changes testified to the decentering of US-centered
media structure and reflected the shifting nature of US-centered power
structure. Prof. Iwabuchi disclosed that the relative decline of the
popularity of American popular culture does not mean that US-centeredglobal power has disappeared. It indicated that closer ties and intensified
collaboration among cultural industry among various mega-cities havedeveloped. In East Asia, the development and spread of cultural
production has exhibited various kinds of trajectory in which one cultural
product travels in different parts of Asia then back to its original source
through systematized mutual promotion of popular culture by media
industries. Prof. Iwabuchi stressed the importance of understanding theuneven media culture growth especially because the connection of media
companies that produced the cultural product is not based oninternational relationship. Cultural imperialism emphasized international
relationship and domination but actually the closer tie between media
cultural industries is responsible for media culture globalization.
Intensified media flows and connectivity beyond the national boundaries
of media culture globalization has resulted to cosmopolitan
consciousness. Prof. Iwabushi noted that media culture globalization
has enhanced cultural dialogue and mutual understanding, different fromclassic cultural exchange of traditional culture or international political
relations. It has produced a new kind of understanding and perception
common modernity in the East Asian context. On the other hand
however, national feeling has not been erased; in fact the national
sentiment of imagined communities has been strengthened. In theJapanese context, transnational reality is comprehended as aninternational framework; the nation has become a brand which thecitizens patronize in many global gathering or competitions.

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41

For the Japanese audience the immerging sense of living in the samekind of temporality among Asian audiences is particularly significant.
Japan colonized most part of East Asia and Southeast Asian countries
which had constituted a kind of arrogance in the Japanese social
imagination placing Japan in Asia but at the same time above Asia. The
Japanese audiences that consume popular culture from South Korea
whom Prof. Iwabuchi has interviewed have discovered that theirperception of other East Asia culture is outdated. They realized that therelationship between Japan and other parts of Asia cannot becomprehended in terms of developmental lag where Japan is always on
top. They have begun to appreciate a similar but different kind ofmodernity expressed through popular culture in other parts of Asia
resulting to critical re-thinking of their own society and cultural history.
Market-oriented connectivity which targeted urban audiences ignored
the unprofitable voices of citizens thereby excluding many othercultures. Prof. Iwabuch noted that what is circulating as popular culture
is actually the dominant culture in each country. The popular culture
within the country is able to cross the border because of the system thatexport and import such cultural products. In market oriented media
culture globalization, a hierarchy among the cities exists which excludes
many parts of the region. East Asian media connections have created aperception of living in the same temporality but have also reproduced aperception of time-lag; a nostalgic view of other Asian culture. For
example, Japanese audiences comparing Japan 20 years ago with thepresent situation of Korea which according to Prof. Iwabuchi softly
reproduced the orientalist perception of other Asian countries.
In Japan, there is a strong expectation that cultural diplomacy would
soften anti-Japanese sentiments in Asia and overcome historical issues.
Prof. Iwabuchi suggested that Japan show sincere engagement withhistory along with its policy of promoting cultural diplomacy using
popular culture. Cultural diplomacy or “Soft Power” is easily used as aresource to promote national interest. Prof. Iwabuchi criticized that thecultural diplomacy promoted by the state and media industry is adialogue among the dominant which is inattentive to the shared social
issues brought about by the process of globalization and disregard
marginalized groups. Prof. Iwabuchi asserted the importance of cultural
exchange but when it is mostly understood in terms of international
relations, it tends to miss issues that are below the international level.
Prof. Iwabuchi emphasized that the role of government is not just to42

Communities in Action

support market development but also to enhance the suppressed voicesof the public.
Culture has expanded into the political and economic sphere throughthe promotion of the government in alliance with industry. The dangerof this kind of cultural policy is the subjugation of political discourse
on culture and its pragmatic uses for the sake of national interest. Prof.
Iwabuchi ended his discussion of media culture globalization with an
appeal to the 2006 ALFP Fellows for their involvement in extending
the discourse of cultural issues by being critical and pragmatic with the
public good in mind. He espouses enhancing the dialogic capacity of
media culture to eradicate the many kinds of borders that society has
drawn.
4.8 Japanese Popular Culture
Roland Kelts, author of the book “Japanamerica” had discussion andsharing of ideas with the Fellows about globalization, perception andimpact of the spread of Asian popular culture in the US. He shared his
observation as he traveled around the US particularly on how Americans
view Asia after 9/11.
Showing the Chinese character for crisis, he pointed out the diverge
perceptions of globalization between the US and Asia. The US perceived
the danger of globalization while Asia mostly perceives theopportunities. Globalization for the US means the Americanization of
the world where borders would breakdown and everyone would embrace
the American way of life. Clearly it is not happening. What is happening
instead is a concomitant rise of nationalist sentiments as a response to
globalization. There is a great deal of anxiety in the US about the Asian
region which is partly caused by ignorance. There is a huge imbalanceof information where Asians know more about the US than what
Americans know about Asia. The US feels a connection and unity with
Asia, especially with regards to popular culture which have incorporated
a lot of American influences in its identity.
Identifying some metaphors of globalization, Kelts talked about howeach metaphor embodies the meaning of the concept. Globalization isa quilt rather than a melting pot where cultures are touching but are notquite keen on blending with each other. Next is the Internet where people
are aware of each other but they are nevertheless independent. People
are communicating with each other across borders but are not keen to
believe into one another. Finally, he talked about the long tail effectSixty Days’ Chronicle

43

particularly with regards to cultural goods. Before, producers searched forthe big hit in selling products, today however, looking at the sales graph;
the trend is the long tail for niche ideas and niche products.
5. Public Symposium
At the end of the program, a two-day public symposium was organizedunder ALFP on 9 and 10 November at the Lecture Hall of the I-House,
which was attended by about sixty people from academic institutions,NGOs, media and other spheres of social life. The symposium was tiled
Communities in Action: Struggle for Peace and Sustainability in Asia.
Fellows, based on their research works and experiences, made their final
presentations in the symposium, which was followed by a question-answer
session. Prof. Lee Jong Won, member of the advisory committee for ALFP,
was the moderator.
6. Evaluation
The program was rounded off by an evaluation session on 13 November
participated by all Fellows together with I-House and Japan Foundation
secretariat staff. Fellows shared their expectations and to what extent those
had been fulfilled. It was a moment of happiness with some outburst ofemotions and grief, as the curtain would drop in a few minutes.

Discourse and Dialogue

Seminar Room
26 September 2006

Memory of Wars
and the Asian Region
Kiichi Fujiwara
Professor, Graduate School of Law and Politics
University of Tokyo

Today a new prime minister by the name of Shinzo Abe has come tooffice. Abe is a known member of Nippon Kaigi, one of the mostreactionary local associations in Japan, which has been pushing theagenda to make Japan a “normal” country. According to Nippon Kaigi,
Japan is an “abnormal” nation. Japan is in a state of moral anarchy
because many Japanese have lost the sense of “Japaneseness”. If you
listen to conservative like Abe and other Nippon Kaigi members, they
will tell you that the Japanese remember World War II in the wrong
way. They want to straighten out the issue so that the Japanese willremember the war in the right way.
What does the war mean to conservatives in Japan? The war means thatthose who did not support the war, including the liberal intellectuals,
especially those people who teach in universities, took over politicalpower in postwar Japan. It is time, they say, to take political power
away from these liberals and give it back to the nationalists who believe
in national unity. If this were only about Nippon Kaigi or conservative
politicians in Japan, this could be easy to understand. What is surprising
is that nobody seems to care about Abe assuming political power.
Looking at major newspapers, we learn that there is an expectation in
Kasumigaseki, the quarter of Tokyo where government offices areconcentrated, that Japan’s relationship with China is going to be muchbetter under Abe. Japan being the largest economic power in Asia, it
simply does not make sense for China to continue its broken relations
with Japan, because that does not work for China itself. On the contrary,
the perception of South Korea is that Seoul will be more resistant to thenew prime minister. But that does not really matter, we hear, because
Korea is internationally isolated at the moment.

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What I want to do is discuss war memories in Japan. How has WorldWar II been remembered in Japan? How has the memory changed?
Where does Japan stand right now, and what are the political implicationsin the region?
I want to talk about how the Japanese are thinking and how diverse
their thoughts are on the issue.
Japanese war memories are a highly politically charged issue, which
has led to many tensions among the actual war memories in Japan.
Outside Japan, many people, especially Chinese and Koreans andincluding Singaporeans, Indonesians, and Filipinos, would argue that
the Japanese simply have failed to remember the war. Japan has not
paid any attention to what happened during World War II. As they see
it, the problem is not about war memory but about amnesia, the disregardof war memories. On the other hand, in Japan right now, many
conservatives argue that Japanese politicians have been kowtowing,
giving in to the demands of Beijing or Seoul or Washington, in relation
to what happened during the war. The Americans, the Chinese, and the
Koreans have imposed upon Japan a very revolting view of Japan’s
aggression in Asia in World War II, the conservatives assert, and it istime for Japan to get rid of it.
War memory in virtually all nations is about the memory of their own
people. In Japan, memory of World War II is about the experiences ofJapanese. One of the first countries that took war commemoration
seriously was Great Britain. British war memories are strictly about
British sufferings. In Singapore, symbols were built for all the
Singaporeans, Indian, Chinese, and Malays who fought and suffered in
World War II, but not in Britain.
Chinese war memory, similarly, has also been about the Chinese.
Moreover, attention is only given to mainland Chinese suffering. It isonly quite recently that mainland China started paying attention to theatrocities by the Japanese to overseas Chinese. A case in point is theJapanese killings in Singapore, which China recognized only two years
ago. Nanjing initially was almost totally forgotten, because at the time
it was under Kuomintang rule. Not until the 1980s did the Nanjing
Massacre really become a national issue in China.
War memory is not really a memory in the sense that it is historicallyaccurate. It is a memory that caters to political identity; it is a memorythat works for the sense of “us” versus “the others.” Remembering the
war easily becomes part of nationalistic discourse. A book I wrote titledSixty Days’ Chronicle

49

Remembering the War discussed the very different kinds of memories
that emerged about the war in the US, Japan, and Singapore. I chose
Singapore partly because I am a Southeast Asian specialist and also
because in Japan it is so easy to dismiss Chinese memory as Communist
Party propaganda. I chose Singapore to show a case in which there issizable Chinese public opinion as well as government policy that has
been running against the Japanese war memories.
Each nation having its own particular political memory of the war wasquite natural in the old days, but this is no longer the case today. If
there is one actor who believes that the prevalent view of World War II
does not fit into the actor’s own memories, then the issue becomes adanger not only in historical memory but in reality now. Therefore, theway the Japanese remember the war has become an international issue.
Although it might be natural for a society to base its war memory on its
own particular suffering, the memory could conflict with the universallyheld war memory, which could lead the nation into a very dangerous
situation.
Japanese war memories are based on Japanese discourse, though thecontent of the Japanese suffering discussed has changed. Looking into
Japanese textbooks on social studies, we find that there is quite a lot of
discussion about the war. Most of the textbooks discuss the Asia-Pacifictheater of World War II as an act of Japanese invasion. Most observers
only check to see whether the word invasion is used in the textbooks orwhether the language used tends to justify the war. A Ministry of
Education directive makes it mandatory to have discussion about the
war along with discussion about the war-renouncing Article 9 of theConstitution. In every textbook there are at least two pages of discussion
on this. The second part is a discussion of the war, which is always
about Japanese civilians. The feature that is totally lacking in the pictureis that there are no Chinese, no Koreans, no Filipinos, and no
Indonesians, in short, no non-Japanese. There are also no Japanesesoldiers. What the Japanese soldiers did, how they killed people, andhow they suffered do not appear in Japanese textbooks at all.
Before World War II, there was no real demarcation line between thestate and the nation. The Japanese state was organically united toJapanese society with the idea of a nation of the Japanese spirit, or
Nihon seishin. This spirit connected the terrain, the state, and the nation
into one world. An individual meant nothing if the individual was notpart of the spirit. Each person had to learn to be a member of the Japanese50

Communities in Action

nation, and only then could the person enjoy glory. This is typical organic
nationalism, the kind that you can see in pre–World War I Germany.
There, instead of a liberal confrontation between the state and society,there was a unification of the state and society.
I do not mean to be cynical when I say that the Japanese public strongly
endorsed the idea of the Japanese nation as long as Japan kept on
winning. The majority of the people obviously supported the war. In
World War I, Japan managed to become one of the winners withouteven fighting, and so the war was a grand bonanza. Certainly everybody
supported that war. World War II was the first war that brought hugecasualties among Japanese citizens. It became an experience It became
an experience showing people that the government did not deliver
victory but instead made the Japanese into victims. Naturally it brought
about a strong sense of distrust in the government.
It is an interesting historical moment when the seeds of politicalliberalism emerged in Japan.
Liberalism in the beginning was essentially a matter for the intellectuals.
It was certainly present in the University of Tokyo, but you could not
find it elsewhere, for few people would even pay attention to it. Japan
did have a limited democracy before World War II. Compared withmost nations in Europe, the Japanese electoral system and the party
system were quite democratic, although no woman could vote in thosedays. Nevertheless, the idea of liberty and of the state versus society
never really took root. Japan’s defeat in World War II was the historicalmoment when the contentious relationship between the state and society
was digested and supported by the Japanese public for the first time inour history. It was a glorious period for intellectual liberals, who tried
to construct a liberal postwar Japan instead of an organic state thatunited the government as well as the people. It was an opportunity toconstruct a government by the people and to install legal restraints
against government actions, so that the government would behave inline with liberal principles. All these liberal ideas came into play afterWorld War II, and they are ideas which former Prime Minister Jun’ichiro
Koizumi, current Prime Minister Abe, and the Nippon Kaigi have reacted
very strongly against. It was a period when we could find public
intellectuals who had been virtually silent during the war suddenly
started to speak out.
The Asahi Shimbun and the monthly journal Sekai were part of theliberal establishment media, which were used in everybody’s education.

Sixty Days’ Chronicle51

In school, the Japanese were taught to respect Article 9; Japan should
be a pacifistic nation renouncing warfare. Japan should not have any
military, which meant that the nation’s Self-Defense Forces wereunconstitutional. The power holders did not talk about political ideas.
The conservatives relied not on political ideology but on sentiments
favoring material secular prosperity as well as security for legitimacy.
Beginning from the late 1960s, there emerged a counter ideology against
the liberal establishment in Japan. It criticized the liberal establishment
for being soaked with wishful thinking toward China and the Soviet
Union, and it proposed that it was high time for the Japanese nation toreassert itself. Conservatives blamed the US occupation of Japan fortaking away the Japanese spirit.
The second point is about the Nanjing Massacre. It surfaced as a Japanese
textbook issue that was fought between the left and the right in Japan.
In Japan there was an idealistic and Stalinist teachers’ union following
the tradition of the Soviet Union, but there also was a traditional,
conservative Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Education neverreally liked the view of the teachers, and so a domestic civil war about
history textbooks broke out. The textbook issue did not really become
an international issue until the 1980s. At that point the Nanjing Massacre
developed into a huge issue, because the Stalinist teachers’ union was
losing. The only way the union could regain the upper hand was tomake this an international issue. Anticipating Chinese anger, they started
a campaign asserting that the war had been distorted in textbooks. It isinteresting that the teachers’ union did not pay much attention to nonJapanese victims until the 1970s.
The absence in the textbook accounts of the Nanjing Massacre that
300,000 people had died, which is the figure the Chinese government
supports, drew an angry reaction from the Chinese side. Chinese scholars
have unofficially acknowledged that the 300,000 figure may be an
exaggeration, but they are not likely to say so publicly unless Japanesescholars publicly accept the view that a monstrous atrocity did indeed
occur in Nanjing.
If the 300,000 figure is incorrect, some Japanese assert, maybe the wholeatrocity itself is a fake. In the same way, the execution after the Tokyo
war crimes trial of Prime Minister Koki Hirota, who actually had
opposed the war, was used to support the claim that the wholeInternational Military Tribunal for the Far East was a bogus affair. The
300,000 number became a symbol used by conservatives to indicate

52

Communities in Actionthat the Nanjing Massacre did not take place at all. In the case of Hirota,
the reason he was executed was because as a prime minister he was ina position to stop the nation from proceeding down the path to war.
Hirota was one of the very few class-A war criminals who did not object
to his sentence. He did not object because he felt guilty about not having
been able to stop the war. There were also a number of other people
whose war responsibility is not that clear. These discrepancies andweaknesses of the Tokyo trial became cases used by conservatives tobuild up their arguments that the whole trial was a sham, and this viewis one element of the revision of historiography in Japan.
War memory in Japan has changed over time and is still changing.
Remembrance of Hiroshima was not really that popular right after WorldWar II, partly because of censorship, and more emphasis was placed on
the aerial bombardment of Tokyo and Osaka. But because of nuclear
tests, fear of nuclear war suddenly resurfaced in Japan, making
Hiroshima a symbol of Japanese war memories. Most of the people
who died in Hiroshima were civilians.
Another element, which could be more important when talking about
Japanese politics, is the absence of the Japanese communists. I would
argue that many Japanese soldiers went to war against their own will.
They were conscripted; they did not go to war because they wanted to.
Most people really did not want to fight the war, not because they thought
the war was wrong but because they did not want to get killed. They
wanted to be with their families. This aspect of the war has never been
seriously discussed in Japan. Soldiers were essentially left out of the
postwar discourse; they were never really openly talked about, althoughtalking about civilians was fine. The discourse about soldiers being
ambiguous, it turned into the Yasukuni issue.
Yasukuni Shrine is dedicated to remembering war, to the war memory
not of civilians but of soldiers, who otherwise have been totally
dismissed in public war memories. Yasukuni’s position is an issue inJapanese political dynamics. Most relatives of the soldiers argue thatJapan should honor Yasukuni and that the prime minister should pay
visits to it so as to pay respects to the souls of their husbands or fathersor brothers who died during wartime. Yasukuni touches a soft spot evenin the hearts of the soldiers who went to war against their will, whohave the right to be remembered. The problem is that Yasukuni is ashrine that not merely remembers but even commemorates and glorifies
the war.

Sixty Days’ Chronicle

53

Koizumi used this issue by arguing that he would keep on visiting
Yasukuni to show that he would never be pushed around by China.
People who may object to Yasukuni nonetheless went along with
Koizumi’s argument. After all, nobody wants to be pushed around byforeign powers. Koizumi projected the issue as one in which China andKorea had taken his Yasukuni visits hostage, which produced a strange
sense of victimhood among the Japanese. They felt that they were being
pushed around by the Chinese and Koreans and that it was high time
for Japan to stand up and stop the pushing. When it comes to the younger
generation of Japanese, I believe that war memory is definitely perceived
as Japan’s being traumatized and victimized by Chinese and Koreansaggressiveness. But this perception is totally unacceptable to many
Chinese and Koreans, especially youths, because from their point ofview it is the Japanese who have victimized them, not only during the
war but also in the present era.

Dialogue
LEE SEEJAE Why did Koizumi keep on going to the shrine despite
the protests and negative implications, especially to Japanese businessinterests in China?
KIICHI FUJIWARA I can see why you ask that, but I also think that
this may be related to the different experiences your country had. You
see, Japan was important for Korea because many Korean-Japanese
were fighting against the dictatorship in South Korea.
Your contacts in Japan were university professors, teachers, and students.
If you go to my campus, you will find that Koizumi and Abe are notwidely supported. The point I am trying to make is even when you
come here as a student, in many ways you will probably be isolated in
the sense that what you experience is different from the reality in therest of Japan. You grow up, you come back to Japan as a professor, but
this time you will not be talking to university intellectuals. You starttalking to other persons, many kinds of Japanese, and suddenly you
find out that the university is a lonely place in Japan.
JANET PILLAI The picture you painted is as if the Japanese people,
except for the progressives, are polarized or have always been hiding
under the influence of the state. I mean that in terms of the power of theintelligentsia to move the mindset of the public in a particular direction,
the impact of the intelligentsia is very small in terms of the general
lifestyle of the public, although ideologically they might have impact

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Communities in Action

on the public. I am curious to know, if that is the case, why there is any
need for the state to come up with measures, since presumably it hascontrol over the public in Japan? My second question is, do people’s
movements have a chance of survival?
FUJIWARA I do not think there is a state ideology to speak of in theJapanese system. We have a government that does not clearly endorse
any particular ideology except for delivery of welfare. That is exactly
the point, because those people who are in the government areconservatives.
The conservative agenda, when brought in the open, is confronted by
the public. The public mind is still under heavy influence from liberal
ideas, so the only way the agenda can survive is to base it on material
politics and not ideology. During the heyday of the faction of former
Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, which for quite a while was the leading
faction within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, the government’s
leaders did not really care about political ideology. I do not think Tanaka
was an ideologue. This was a period where the ruling party had been
ruling the political system but not ruling the minds of the people. This
was a source of frustration among many LDP party members, especiallythose who belong to the Seiwakai, which is a rival of the Tanaka faction
and which has served as a power base of Prime Ministers Yoshiro Mori,
Jun’ichiro Koizumi, and now Shinzo Abe. This faction tends to be more
ideological than the Tanaka faction, and it is critical of the government’s
not speaking about the Japanese spirit.
Regarding people’s movements, they are even more active right now
than in the 1970s, which is surprising. Popular movements nowadays
have become less politically engaged. If you compare nongovernmentalorganizations in Korea and Japan, there is a remarkable difference.
NGOs in Korea are almost a political entity; they are like a politicalparty that declares it is not a political party and that works against
political parties. They have a clear political agenda. A number of theJapanese popular movements right now are very apolitical NGOs withno particular political issues. They would certainly not confront the
government like the ones that you can see in South Korea. Popular
movements are no longer ones that are related to an alternative politicalregime. They are essentially close to cause-oriented groups that canhave great say in environmental protection, for example, but have little
effect in changing regimes. The largest one would be the international
aid movement.

Sixty Days’ Chronicle

55

MARIA HARTININGSIH I was here in 2000, in the Women’s
International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery.
I was really disturbed with the national identity issue. If national identity
arises from war in which violence is used, and if freedom and justicecan be achieved only through conflict, then war becomes simply
inevitable for those who would achieve nationalism. I have a question
about memory, because memory is like a paradox for me. We havesuppressed memory, false memory. If memory is like that, my questionis, who can be right?
FUJIWARA I totally agree with your point. We cannot really talk about
real or true memory. I never support the postmemory syndrome
argument. I also do not support the idea that a traumatic past has been
repressed in all cases. When it comes to collective memory, I would
argue straight forward that this is an ideology in its own way. Collective
memory is not really a memory. For groups do not remember, groups
learn, and they learn by several ways. What we call collective memoryis actually a social institution that is supported by education andgovernment policies, as well as by one’s personal decision to tell one’s
story to another generation.
The best discussion on memory is that by Maurice Halbwachs, whouses the metaphor of the seashore where waves come over the sands
and leave again, but there would be some puddles of water remaining.
Puddles remain because there were some pebbles, and if you change
the arrangement of the pebbles, you see a different puddle. If the ocean
is the total of human experience and if those puddles or ponds are what
we have as collective memories, you can see that those pebbles or stones
would be social institutions. By altering the particular arrangement ofpebbles or social institutions, the kind of memory that would become
collective would change. Japanese war memory has been changing
because war memory is a source of nationalism; but then war memory
is changed by the given political circumstances and institutions, so it isa two-way road.
As a scholar, I would have to argue that it is very difficult to dissociatenationalism from war memory. Many nationalists try to rely on a revivalof traditional symbols. The sense of nationalism is easily stimulated by
the shared or presumed-to-be-shared experiences of war. The task that
rests upon us is to construct a collective identity that does not rely on
wartime experience. I say constructing a collective identity and not
destroying it. One of the major mistakes of postwar intellectuals is that

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they tried to deconstruct nationalism; they tried to deconstruct political
identity. A typical case would be Masao Maruyama, who spoke strongly
against nationalism, for nationalism is a chauvinistic idea that runs
against a sane intellectual mind. The trouble is if an intellectual starts
to go along that line, it is easy to become isolated from the policymakers.
Liberty, after all, is meaningful only when you are constructing a liberal
government, a project that began in the postwar days but is still to beachieved in Japan.
HARTININGSIH The tribunal was organized by women journalists
from Japan and Korea, and then Indonesia, China, and the Philippines.
FUJIWARA NHK tried to cover it and make it into a program for eTV, channel 3. When it became known that the program was being
produced, a number of legislators in the National Diet exerted strongpressure to stop the program. First it was revised and then it wascancelled. This was a well-known story, but nobody really has hard
evidence of its truth. The people placed under pressure did not meet
directly with such figures as Prime Minister Abe or Shoichi Nakagawa.
But an Asahi reporter named Masakazu Honda wrote a front-page article
saying that politicians pushed NHK to cancel the program. This iscensorship.
HARTININGSIH What do you think about the tribunal?
FUJIWARA It was not a tribunal. It does not count as a tribunal.
HARTININGSIH Yes, it was not a tribunal. It was a moral tribunal.
FUJIWARA It was not a tribunal, and I also do not think it paid muchattention to what actually happened. I am sorry to say that. It was a
movement. A movement is not a scholarly work; but as a scholar, I
have to pay attention to so many things. If you wanted to make thetribunal credible, you would need a defense.
NGUYEN THANH SON We went to a symposium on Yasukuni theother day, and there was an interesting comment that actually theJapanese did not fight only one war. They fought several wars during
the Pacific war: the war in Asia, which they regret; the war with theUnited States, which they never regret; and the war with Russia. Does
each have different war memories?
FUJIWARA I do not think there was one World War II. I think theEuropean theater and the Asia-Pacific theater should be strictly divided.

Sixty Days’ Chronicle

57

These were different wars. The European theater was actually acontinuation of World War I. The Asia-Pacific theater was closer toWorld War I in many ways. It started with an invasion into a territorythat was not occupied by a major power. It did not start from a majorpower war. It started from the China theater, and then the China theater
became a ground on which major powers started to contend against
each other. The two wars were not only geographically different but
also different in character.
The war in the Asia-Pacific should not be divided, though, as all thetheaters were related. The Japan-US war was a direct consequence ofJapanese aggression in China.
MOHIUDDIN AHMAD I come from Bangladesh, a country where
war memory has changed in my generation. The way I felt when I wasfighting, the way I have changed today, time is a very big factor. What
I see is that the perception of the postwar generation in Bangladesh iscompletely different. I have talked to many young people in Pakistan;
their attitude toward Bangladesh is completely different from that of
the leaders who fought the war. When you mention the young generationof Japan and their perception of Chinese and Koreans, I ascribe theirperceptions to a new view of reality. In Bangladesh the young generation
does not understand this nationalism. These young Japanese today, how
do they perceive Japanese nationalism? Are they scared of China andKorea because of competition in the economic sphere or something
else?
FUJIWARA The starting point is a bit different. In Bangladesh you
start from a war that made you independent, so you start fromnationalism. In Japan you start from a lack of nationalism, from a statethat delivers but does not preach, and now it is becoming a state thatpreaches. I still do not think that this is a sign that the majority of theJapanese have become nationalistic. Nationalism, after all, is always
an ideology that is promoted by a sizable minority. Take a look at thebulletin boards in the Internet; if you take a look at the current bestsellers,Shinzo Abe’s book is a current bestseller. Such bestsellers talk about
the morals of the state and the particular virtues of the Japanese that weshould support. It is a very difficult situation to analyze. I do not see asignificant change in public opinion. But there is definitely a sizablegroup, large enough to make a bestseller that appeals to the longdisregarded morals and ideals of the nation.

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KUNDA DIXIT They say that history is written by the victim. But as
you mentioned, even the victims only remember the victims, those who
were on their side. I was wondering in that context about Burma. Was
Japan just exploiting the weakness of the British at that time, or was
there really an intention to go into India and beyond?
FUJIWARA So long we are talking about actual strategy, I do notthink there was any plan to go into India in the minds of the chief ofstaff. There was no genuine interest in Indian independence. The point
was to make it as difficult as possible for the British. There were anumber of arguable dissents within in the military about the belief that
we were fighting this war for Asian independence. It might sound crazy,
but that is true. I always find it difficult to understand why they would
believe so. Burma was an important case; some Japanese launched anationalist movement, and there was some strong influence fromJapanese troops. They were politically inspired, based on the idea thatJapan should bring liberation from the foreign powers. So there is adifference between what was being thought in the command centers
and what was being thought in the field. The Burmese campaign was
terrible in every way; the British casualties were heavy, but the Japanesecasualties were even heavier. The campaign also destroyed the traderoute that connected Thailand all the way to Bengal.
ALBERT ALEJO I would like to pursue the discussion on memoryand go to the other side of it. I was also in the Yasukuni symposium,and beside me was an official of the Chinese embassy. While thediscussion was going on, there seemed to be an absence of a Japanesememory of other Asian countries like Vietnam, the Philippines,
Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore; it seemed like the chess war wasjust among the big names, and the small pawns were forgotten. The
woman from China asked me, “What about the Philippines, what do
the Filipinos say about Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni?” Well, I don’tknow, I have never heard it discussed, and probably the Filipinos would
not mind. I think maybe the Vietnamese also would not care. I said, it
looks like in the Philippines, the Japanese are forgiven, Filipinos haveforgotten; only very few would dig into the atrocities, except probably
for the experience of the comfort women. Recently, I learned that itwas not just Indonesian women and Filipino women who werevictimized by the Japanese, that Japanese women were also victimized.
The Chinese official said, “You mean the Filipinos have forgiven theJapanese? What a pity.”Sixty Days’ Chronicle

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FUJIWARA I think we need to discuss the issue of forgetting on thepart of the victor. The atrocities as well as the sufferings of the enemies
and victims are forgotten by those who were beaten and victimized,
because they just want to get along with Japan as an economic partner.
Forgetting is also a different kind of abstraction. What I am worried
about is the forgetting that is imposed by the suppression of memory or
the suppression of voices. In that sense, forgetting and forgiving could
be a technology of silence.
NGUYEN It was very difficult to understand why the Vietnamese areso forgiving. I was a translator for a group of US legislators who came
to Saigon and met the director of Saigon Tourism, a prisoner of the USled forces for a couple of years until he was rescued in 1975. The
Americans asked him why he did not hate them. He said, “Hatred is sobitter for us that we cannot move forward. We want to move forward.”
FUJIWARA That is totally true. In fact war memory in China became
more important in the later years than in the years immediately after
the war. Survival was more important than talking about the atrocitiesof the past. But another reason is that the Chinese government wasafraid of a possible war with the US. So talking about the war in the
future was more important than talking about the war in the past. It was
only after the Chinese government became more stable and stopped
worrying about a potential war with the US that it started to talk about
the war in the past.
AHMAD I read today’s Japan Times. Abe said he would not repeat thesame thing as Koizumi did but that he would pay a visit in a private
manner.
FUJIWARA You see the government position is that it is high time for
China and Korea to grow up and understand that whatever happens,
our prime minister is going to visit Yasukuni and there is nothing they
can do about it. This is not a progressive movement. Conservatives arepeople who say that unless we put a stop to it, more extreme voices in
China and Korea will come out, and the issue will never be solved.
I am not taking sides here. Although I do not think visits of the prime
minister to Yasukuni are right, that does not mean I agree with some of
the Korean or Chinese arguments. I do think that some of the argumentsthat have been made are in themselves a distortion of history. But thenthere is the concept that is forming in Japan, which is that if Japan does
not stop doing this, the worst of both sides will keep on coming out.

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DIXIT Then we start not remembering history at all, it is all about
geopolitics. Geopolitical rivalry is being played out involving Korea,
China, and Japan by evoking memories.
FUJIWARA Not only do I know what you mean, I deplore the easewith which geopolitics is being used. The People’s Liberation Army,
which is a totally dysfunctional, overgrown body with its own ambitions,only thrives on geopolitical crisis. If there is no threat of China being
contained, they have a need for Japan. I am very sure that they want theJapanese prime minister to visit Yasukuni to show that there is a realenemy out there. I mention the Chinese side, but there are ridiculous
people on the Japanese side, as well. A ridiculous conservative argument
would be that we need the Chinese threat to keep American forces inJapan. If there is no major threat, the US forces will leave, and Japan
will be in a precarious position. A radical argument would be, well,
Americans will eventually leave anyway, and so this is a good time totake the military path and start working on war preparations. These
kinds of arguments are not only unsupported by the public but also
being disregarded by strategists, because they are counterproductive.
But these arguments can still catch the popular imagination. The trouble
is that Abe’s advisers are not scholars, but they give talks in academic
meetings. The most marginalized, meaningless scholars have become
the most meaningful voices in the cabinet.
LEE If Abe does not go to Yasukuni, have they calculated the possible
political losses?
FUJIWARA I do not think it would be that significant. It would mean,of course, the loss of the votes of the Nippon Izokukai, the soldiers’
families association, which is one of the largest voting blocs in Japan. I
personally believe that the reason Koizumi visited Yasukuni was forthis purpose. Koizumi is not an ideologue. Nevertheless, he visited
Yasukuni because he wanted votes.

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I-House Seminar Room
29 September 2006

The Recent Movement toward“Community Solutions” in Japanese Society
Ikuyo Kaneko
Professor, Graduate School of Media and Governance
Keio University

There has been enormous structural change in Japanese society in thepast decade, partly due to Prime Minister Jun’ichiro Koizumi’s reform
policies. There are some good things; there are also some bad things.
The orientation toward deregulation and the market mechanism is very
evident in most of the reforms including those in the fields of elderly
care, nursery schools, and education, as well as business. I would liketo focus my discussion on the emergence of nonprofit organizations
and social entrepreneurship in Japan recently, along with deregulationand the reforms.
I obtained a Ph.D. at Stanford University in the 1970s in appliedmathematics. I taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for nine
years in the computer science department. The event that led me tochange my interest was the Kobe earthquake in 1995, in which 6,000
people lost their lives. That was during the time when the Internet wasused only among researchers and large businesses. Most network users
were using proprietary networks. In the process of trying to help thequake victims, I found that network communication was enormously
useful. More than 1 million volunteers rushed to Kobe to help out thevictims. It was a disaster, but it was a good opportunity for Japanesepeople to gain satisfaction from helping each other voluntarily. At thattime, Japanese people thought that Japan did not have a volunteer spirit;
but it turned out that the volunteers did a very good job. And the use ofelectronic networks was very much useful for connecting volunteers
and quake victims. Local government was shattered; the central
government did not have much to do in the direct assistance, at least for
the first few weeks.

62Communities in Action

The volunteerism so emerged as a result of the 1995 Kobe earthquake
changed my view. A few years later in 1998, legislation for theincorporation of NPOs was enacted. Since then, a lot of NPOs havebeen born in Japanese society. Many citizens in Japan now depend on
NPO services on a daily basis: elderly care, nursery schools, getting
information, child-care, technical services, helping out with thecomputer.
NPOs are now an integral part of Japanese society. There are over 20,000 incorporated NPOs in Japan, but still they are very small in sizeand financially weak. Fifty percent of Japanese NPOs’ annual income
is less than $9,000, and 30% of their staff members serve without pay.
The staff members who do get payment are paid only to the extent of
30% of the pay for their counterparts in for-profit companies. Many
NPOs have only 1 or 2 full-time persons attending the office, and mostof them are acting voluntarily, with small revenues coming frommembership fees and personal donations.
The total economic size of Japanese NPOs is a mere 0.08% of grossdomestic product, excluding the quasi-NPOs virtually controlled bygovernment agencies. Comparable figures are 8.3% in the US, 9.3% in
the UK, and 18.8% in the Netherlands. I do not have the exact figures,
but NPOs or NGOs are very strong in many Asian countries. Grameen
Bank, for example, has literally changed the world, and its impact isvery strong in Asia.
Briefly speaking, NPOs in Japan are beginning to have a substantialsocial importance, but economically they have a very limited impact.
On the other hand, there may have been some changes coming in thelast several years, at least in some particular areas. In these areas, NPOs
are engaged in nonprofit business, earning revenue from selling services
to general citizens in competition with for-profit companies andgovernment agencies. The total economic size of Japanese NPOs’
nonprofit business is about $2.4 billion, representing 38% of theJapanese NPO market. The most salient area in which NPOs’ presence
is substantial and in which NPOs are competing with for-profit
companies is care for the elderly. There was a large structural change
in the elderly care area in Japan in 2000, when the national nursingcare insurance system was created. Before that, people had no choice
but to go to a senior citizens’ house run by a local government. There
was a long queue for being admitted, there was no choice, and there
was only a fixed service menu. In 2000 and thereafter, a market wasSixty Days’ Chronicle

63

created, and elders are now able to choose services and service providers.
So, now there are choices. And more importantly, the market has beencreated for NPOs to enter the nonprofit business. The market size for
elderly care service was as high as $35 billion in 2000. At present, it isabout $66 billion. It is quite a large market, although the NPO share islimited, amounting to only 3.8% in terms of the number of service
providers.
The area in which NPOs’ presence is particularly large is group homes
for elders. The market share of NPOs is about 8% in terms of the numberof service providers. Nursery schools also underwent substantial
structural deregulation in 1998, which allowed for-profit companies
and NPOs to build and manage nursery schools. Prior to the deregulation,
only local governments could open nursery schools. In 2000, the market
size was about $24 billion. It is thought to be a bit larger now, although
the NPO presence is less than 1%. The third area is certified evaluation
services. I do not know the situation elsewhere in Asia. But in the US,
Europe, and Japan, a series of laws was passed by governments fororganic food certification around 2000. In Japan, the change was realized
in the form of the JAS label. For farmers to be able to get a JAS label
for organic food, they have to have the produce certified by accredited
bodies. The accrediting body can be NPOs or for-profit companies.
More than 40% (in terms of the number of service providers) ofcertifying bodies for organic food in Japan are NPOs, because they
have a two-decade history of working with farmers and consumers inorganic food production. The total economic size is small comparedwith that of welfare services, and is about $5.5 million.
These three areas, elderly care, nursery schools, and certified evaluation
services, are examples of what we call the “mix market” in which NPOs
and regular for-profit companies are competing with one another, undera certain set of government regulations. We have to note the fact thattwo of the areas mentioned above were created by the national
government through deregulation. So NPOs did not get the share bythemselves, so to speak. It was given them by the government. Reformsof the national health insurance system and the deregulation which
followed made it possible for NPOs and as well as for companies toenter the market. As a matter of fact, the deregulation scheme set theplayers on an equal footing; so there is no preferred treatment of NPOs.
A survey shows that for-profit companies are actually given more
benefits than NPOs because they are able to obtain the authority for theaccreditation and certification system given by the government. In any

64Communities in Action

case, at least in these areas, NPOs have been activated in the nonprofit
business in the last five years or so; but we have to note, on the other
hand, that these businesses were created by government policies. It is a
conflicting situation based on the fact that these nonprofit businesses
were established as a reflection of major structural changes inderegulation and market orientation in Japanese society. NPOs now
have to compete with for-profit companies on an equal basis. Today,
NPOs in Japan are not just a group of volunteers helping each other orthe socially weak on a small scale; in fact, there are several very large
NPOs engaging in economic activities, although the areas are limited.
And these areas were created by the government.
There has been a small but very strong trend among the members of theyounger generations, who are becoming interested in what is now inJapan called social entrepreneurship. The word itself is not exactly new.
It means somebody who is engaged in solving social problems, not as
an NPO per se, but as an enterprise. Whether it is an NPO or a company
is not so important. There are many well-known social entrepreneurship
activities carried out by taking the form of a for-profit company. These
young people who are the so-called new generation entrepreneurs areinterested not just in volunteering or in setting up NPOs but also intrying to solve social problems by their own innovative thinking and abusinesslike mind.
I will cite a typical new generation social entrepreneur as an example.
In Japan, there is a rule that a nursery school will not admit a childwhen the child is sick with a fever over a certain degree. When the
body temperature of a child goes over the limit, then the school willcall up the child’s parents, and the parents will have to come and pickup the child. In most cases, the mother would be the one to go and pickup the child; as a result, mothers lose their jobs in some cases. Only 5%of all nursery schools in Japan have the capacity to take care of sickchildren. This is a typical example of a serious social problem thatcannot be solved easily, because caring for sick children would require
medical doctors, and so the solution could be very costly. Local
governments are not willing to bear the cost. For-profit companies would
not enter the market because it would not be profitable. A large
proportion of young couples tend to be working. So it does pose aserious social problem. This is a difficult situation for NPOs, because
they cannot charge too much, and yet they need help from doctors.
They have a very low profit structure. So nobody was doing anythingSixty Days’ Chronicle

65

until last year when a young person came up with a very interestingidea.
A man by the name of Komasaki organized a group of experienced
mothers who wanted to work part-time and also to contribute to thesociety. The NPO is called Florence, named after Florence Nightingale.
Komasaki is one of the graduates of Keio University Shonan Fujisawa
Campus where I teach, and he was a famous figure even when he was auniversity student. When he was a junior, he set up an informationtechnology venture with his friends. He was earning a lot of moneyfrom the IT business. But after two years he quit the company. He
thought that just earning money was not enough and that he would liketo contribute to the society. And he wanted to earn enough money tolive and to continue his social venture. The business model for his
nonprofit business to help out sick children and their parents was formed
with help from his mother, who was a working mother when she wasraising him. His business model basically uses a network of people
instead of a facility. He makes good use of community power by putting
together a network of experienced mothers in a community, community
doctors, and a group of doctors giving advice to Florence staff members
when needed. When a mother or father with a sick child calls Florence,an experienced person is sent to pick up the baby and have the baby
examined by a local doctor. If the doctor approves, the baby is taken
home with the Florence staff person until the parents finish work to
pick up their baby. A 24-hour telephone service using doctors is available
to answer questions on the phone. In this way Komasaki came up witha community-based model with a low-cost structure that still is
profitable. The business is based on community power rather than market
power. Komasaki is now a well-known figure as a successful social
entrepreneur.
I have observed that in Japan successful nonprofit businesses and social
ventures like the one started by Komasaki make good use of community
power. This idea sounds Asian. Japanese NPOs and social ventures
tend to limit their activities to a relatively small area, and their missions
are not global. They are not engaged in, for example, fighting against
all the injustice in the whole world. One reason is that there is very
little money contributed to large-scale social activities. Komasaki’ssocial venture is, however, an exception. He started it in a small area

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but is extending the business model so that the Florence service will
cover the entire Metropolitan Tokyo area. Still, Florence does makeuse of community power to solve an eminent problem nobody had beensuccessful in solving so far. We call it the “community solution” ascompared to the market solution.
Dialogue
MARIA HARTININGSIH I can sense some division of labor inJapanese society; women have multiple burdens as a wife, mother,caretaker, and worker. I think even with the presence of NPOs, thestructure in Japan does not really support women.
IKUYO KANEKO Florence is filling the slack of the society. The
current social system is that most women have to work for pay, do thehousework, and raise children. A lot of women do want to work; butwhat are they to do if their child gets sick? Before Florence, there wasno social institution to support that situation.
YOJI KAMATA I am interested in the trend of promoting localization
instead of promoting economic globalization. I am also interested in
the concept of the community solution. I would like to know more
about community tools and your involvement, both on the policy leveland on the ground level.
KANEKO Many of the social services in Japan have been monopolized
by local and central governments. Some of them are now open to NPOs
and companies due to the wave of deregulation I mentioned in myspeech. This has some good effect on promoting community solutionsin Japanese society in the social service area. But it is far from adequate.
The child-care market has been deregulated partially, but the system is
not made for promoting entrepreneurial activities. In fact, Florence is
not enjoying any benefits from deregulation.
The Japanese public school system is still part of a very big bureaucraticsystem. There have been some moves to create a way by which a
community solution method can be applied to the system. I have been
involved in a movement to promote what is called the community school
system. Six years ago, I proposed a community school for which agroup of citizens, parents, and local people, along with teachers and theschoolmaster, would form a council or educational board. The board
would decide on what to do with the school, including selecting teachers.

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In Japanese public schools, prefecture-level educational boards hire
and allocate teachers to all elementary and middle schools in theprefecture, and schools and local communities have nothing to do withhiring and choosing teachers. I worked on the proposal for several years.
Two years ago, the Ministry of Education came up with legislation to
make it possible to start community schools. My observation has beenthat good schools exist in good communities, and that a community’seffort to create a good school will make the community a good one. I
believe that community schools will be a good framework for thecommunity solution to occur in many localities in Japan.
JANET PILLAI Do you mean that national-type schools wereconverted to community schools, or are they private schools?
KANEKO A community school is a part of the public school system inwhich a city education board can decide to convert a regular publicschool to become a community school.
KUNDA DIXIT Is home education allowed in Japan?
KANEKO Generally no. Japan has what we call special zones forderegulation. There has been a system in which local people propose
special zones where a part of the existing regulations are exempted.
Home education or similar education can be done when such a special
zone is created.
DIXIT Regarding the long-tail phenomenon, the new trend is thatinstead of building virtual communities that are cohesive, they are
actually a fragmented society. Instead of building bridges, the virtual
community has actually led to where people who believe in a particular
type of ideology would gravitate toward sites they agree with; so it
becomes a group of like-minded people, supporting each other’s beliefs.
Is there such a trend in Japan?
KANEKO That is exactly the reason why I am not so much interested
in social networking services. The younger generation in Japan tends
to be more closed; they are more shy and reluctant to speak up. The
younger generation tends to gravitate toward very small groups, andsuch a tendency makes SNS very popular. I am a little worried thatpeople are comfortable in very small groups without breaking the divide.
PILLAI I am curious about the dramatic rise of NPOs. Is it a peopleled movement or an elite-movement where the educated-elite leads thepeople and organizes them? What is the reaction of the people on the68Communities in Action

ground? Are they just falling into a reaction led by concerned citizens,or are they waking up themselves?
KANEKO Partly yes for your question. In many areas, including
environmental protection and human rights at the small community
level, they have volunteers, but many of them are of my age, 40–60
years old. A lot of younger people give a much lighter commitment tosociety. The rise of NPOs is in general voluntary and bottom up, butmany of them are very small and financially unstable. These smallscale NPOs tend to be interested in things around them and not interested
in what is happening in the world in such places as Africa and Asia. At
the same time, the emergence of many, varied NPOs do reflect the factthat Japanese people are interested in a lot of things.
PILLAI I am asking more on the structure within the NPOs. Whether
the leaders are themselves educated-elite.
KANEKO Not necessarily. They are ordinary people. Not elite or highly
educated. By the way, Japanese professors tend to be inactive. I am an
exception.
MOHIUDDIN AHMAD Ordinary people in Japan and ordinary people
in Bangladesh are different. We have many NPOs and NGOs, morethan 30,000. Some are very big, even one with 35,000 full-time staff isalso an NPO.
KANEKO What is the reputation of Grameen Bank? I heard a lot ofgood things about it. What do Bangladesh people think about it?
AHMAD Different people think differently. I think it has alreadyreached its stage of saturation. Servicing millions of small shopkeepers
but not being able to transcend beyond. It is just recycling debt.
KANEKO I see; so just going into a particular group and not breaking
through to the others.
AHMAD Yes, not actually breaking the barrier. Recent thinking actuallyfavors small and medium-sized enterprises.
KANEKO What is the area of the large NPOs?
AHMAD BRAC is the biggest NGO in the world. They have 35,000
full-time staff and another probably 50,000 part-time staff. NPO or
NGO in Bangladesh are defined as nonprofit, but they do make a profit
and it is reinvested in the program. They have no shareholders, so they
do not give out dividends. Grameen Bank is a nonprofit company. But

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it runs many enterprises, although these are not nonprofit, such as
Grameen Phone. It has a different structure and a lot of investments, sothat it is involved in many businesses that are separate from the structureof NPOs. Maybe the same person is chairman of all these, but he has
different identities.
KANEKO Is it a common practice in Bangladesh? Are a lot of NPOs
doing that or is it just Grameen Bank? Is it similar in other countries in
Asia? In Japan, people are starting to do that but are not necessarily
successful.
AHMAD Yes, a lot. There are many such organizations. For example,
BRAC has outlets for their craft products, and it makes a lot of moneyout of it. It has good quality control, but runs on a nonprofit basis; thewhole proceeds are invested in other programs. Now they are also
running a bank and a private university that is like a company.
KANEKO So it is a conglomerate. People think it is a business? Orjust a charity or NPO? What is the reaction to that?
AHMAD It has a mixed reaction. When the bank was opened, there
were a lot of criticisms from members of the intelligentsia and otherbanks saying that because they are NPOs, they enjoy a sort of tax relief.
Others are demanding that there must be a level playing field. Charity
works in Bangladesh are from individual donations and are mostly not
tax-free. There is a ceiling; if you give outside the capital city for certain
programs, then you can enjoy tax relief, otherwise not.
LEE SEEJAE I want to ask you to clarify some points. When you say
community resources, what is the content? It seems to me it justmobilizes the labor market. When you say deregulation, what are thecontents? How did deregulation enable them to make social enterprises?
KANEKO To answer the first question, the definition of a community
could be very ambiguous. I am supposing two kinds of community.
One is a local one, a group of people living in the same vicinity. Florence
makes use of a local community resource. Staff members working for
Florence are, for example, 50 or so experienced mothers living in a
relatively small area. They are interested in contributing to society while
getting some income. On the other hand, there are “theme communities”
where people interested in the same theme get together to form acommunity. Net communities are such examples. Deregulation can be
designed so that it creates a market allowing a variety of service

70Communities in Action

providers to enter the market. A community school is not to open up themarket for business, but it opens up the management system to citizens.
PILLAI I am interested in the deregulation. Is it possible that thepressure for deregulation actually came from the corporate and businessside because they wanted to take a part in elderly care, and the NPOs
are just taking advantage of that?
KANEKO I do not know if they are successfully taking advantage ofit, but the fact is that many NPOs have entered the market. The
motivation is more economic as well as social.
AHMAD Do Japanese NPOs get any overseas funds?
KANEKO Very few do. I have not heard of any Japanese NPO getting
money from the Rockefeller Foundation. Japanese NGOs are notglobally oriented. They are doing a good job in small businesses, but
this does not have an impact in changing the whole world.
PILLAI Do you think that is the trend, that kind of commercial
investment?
KANEKO There is a small group of people in finance who have ideas
along that line. But business is so powerful and active, and all active
people go into the moneymaking business, which I do not blame. Thereis little room for NGOs and NPOs in Japan to be a major player insociety, as in Bangladesh.
NGUYEN THANH SON It looks like we face a big problem on theInternet. An Asian person is not like a Japanese person. We see theneed of conversion of modern communication with tradition. What isyour view on that kind of conversion? In the virtual community, a newwave of charity and activism gathers. There is an invasion of the virtual
community, because they have money and resources; so they can go
into the community. But there is no connection and participation between
the communities. How can we make that happen?
KANEKO Similar things are happening in Japan. Cellular phones arevery popular. Users of cellular phones tend to have communications in
a limited group. PC users tend to be communicating with a larger group
including strangers. A large proportion of people using the Internet in
Japan are using the Net through cellular phones. They do access someof the convenient information on the Internet or the cellular phone web;
but this does not mean that they are creating new information. They areSixty Days’ Chronicle

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getting active in a small and familiar world; the vast majority of peopleusing cellular phones communicate with people they already know.
SNS is supposedly changing it, but very superficially. Koreans tend tohave a wider Internet base, while Japanese people are more clustered.
LEE There is a world of difference between the Korean Internet and
the Japanese Internet.
KANEKO I know that Japanese games are more personal and Korea
has more Internet-interactive-type games.
ALBERT ALEJO I was looking at the implications of what we arelearning on community solutions. One implication is for social analysis,
and the other one is for education. They are connected. I notice that in
the Philippines many social interventions and social analyses start fromand probably focus too much on the community, but hardly anything is
mentioned about community efforts. I think the approach to community
solutions is identifying needs, but it also is not jumping ahead into
finding the solution elsewhere. Instead, it is reflectively coming backinto the community and checking the assets and solutions for community
problems or needs using community resources. I recounted this problem
in the way intervention agencies look at communities. The typicalapproach is for funding agencies to see the need and offer solutions to
NGOs.
KANEKO Japanese NGOs and NPOs are not active in trying to getmoney from worldwide foundations. There are some active groups ofpeople taking outside money. But the majority of Japanese NPOs tend
to be self-funding and doing what they can do with the money they canget. One of the points of my talk today is the emergence of NPOs withindependent thinking and activities, which are trying to solve problemson their own without depending on the government or the market.
LEE Your lecture is about who can change Japan. NGOs do not have
many resources, but they can mobilize; they cannot produce services,
but they can reorient society and politics so that they become agentsfor information in the society. In Japan, who is the agent?
KANEKO I want to say that NPO people are major agents; but thecurrent situation does not allow me to say so. There is a group of brightand socially oriented young bureaucrats. They work for the government
for some years and then branch out to universities and NPOs and social
ventures. As I said, half jokingly, university professors in Japan tend to72

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be inactive. But more people are using their professorship as a base forsocial activities. At the local municipal level, there are citizens who are
redirecting the course of local politics.
LEE I researched the situation in Kawasaki City. There were somepolitical reforms in the 1990s facilitating the employment of foreigners.
Of course there is movement from outside, but finally it is the local
level government official who holds the key to change.
KANEKO I agree with you. On the local level, we find many groupsof ordinary people who are very active in the daily life situation, andthen they talk to active-minded city officials who are interested in thesethings. Then they form a coalition and do change local policies at a
day-to-day level. These things are happening all over Japan. It is agood sign. But as I have said, they do not broaden out on a large scale.
LEE That means you cannot expect the NGOs to initiate change.
KANEKO We have to look very hard to find positive signs in that
direction.
PILLAI Did these movements have an impact on the government?
Did the citizen’s initiatives at the local level and the elite initiatives
have some contact with the bureaucracy?
KANEKO Oh yes, the community school has been adopted into theformal legal system, for one. Five or six years ago, the Education
Ministry was very much against my idea, because the idea of thecommunity school is opposite to central educational control. But forsome reason, they changed their priority and went along with my plan.
A good part of the reason is that there was a lot of pressure from thecabinet to try to localize education.
PILLAI Could you elaborate a bit about the process on how an elite
research group pushes something into the groove of politics?
KANEKO I have to do a lot more research to be able to say anything
clear. But I think the good output of the Koizumi government is thatsome of the reform-minded bureaucrats were given opportunities to be
active. One representative idea was the “special zone” system to exempt
regulations in a certain area. The idea was formalized by a group ofactive bureaucrats. They are close to the elites some of you have been
mentioning. In general, however, Japanese social changes are driven
not by elites but by ordinary people.

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DIXIT I would like some elaboration on the demographic crisis of theaging population. From your research, I found it quite astounding thatthe cost for care of the elderly doubled in four years and yet the NPOs
have only 1.3%. Given the fact that the pension fund is in crisis, there
seems to be a real need and opportunity. Could you elaborate on that?
KANEKO There is a chance, but NPO workers are not in general welltrained. They are very active in specific things. If something starts,
they are very good. I may be wrong, but my impression is that they do
not have the power to grab that opportunity.
DIXIT What would catalyze it? What would be the spark?
KANEKO Many of the younger students are now interested in looking
at what’s happening elsewhere in Asia, including the microfinance ideain Bangladesh, and they are trying to learn what to do with it. I would
like to see if something would move along that line.
DIXIT What would they expect the government to do?
KANEKO They do not have much expectation toward the government.
Japanese citizens are in general well to do. They do not have to worry
about their basic needs; so maybe they are satisfied with the status quo.
They do not have an aspiration or a strong motivation to really try to
generate a breakthrough to create a new society. As I have pointed out,
I do see some motivations within a group of local and central bureaucrats.
They are well educated and well trained. Sometimes they become major
driving forces of structural changes. Once a change occurs, a lot of
people are mobilized and do a lot of good things at the local level. Oneof the points in my lecture today is that in recent years there has been
an emergence of NPOs engaged in the nonprofit business, but that thisbasic structural change was initiated by the government. How about in
Bangladesh? What is the reason for people-driven social change? Is it
because the government is so weak?
AHMAD In Bangladesh, there is really a different community, because
these NGOs or NPOs started not from economic assistance but due tothe devastation after the war of 1971. I think now, about one-fifth of
the total official development assistance is channeled through NGOs.
The NGOs and the bureaucracy have a lot of rivalry competing forresources. I would like to ask you one question. Do these community
schools only look after the management, or do they also decide on the
curriculum?

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KANEKO Now, any public school can apply, through the local
educational board, to be certified as a special zone for an exemption
from part of the national curriculum. Come to think of it, this is quite
extraordinary, because the national curriculum is mandatory. So far
there have been 130 or so applications for special zones to do that. But
most of them remain to be minor exemptions.
AHMAD In a situation of a falling birthrate in Japan, what will happen
to the schools?
KANEKO Due to the declining population in Japan, public schools
are being closed all over the country. This means that there are a lot of
empty school facilities. NPOs can make use of them. There is one
particular case in Nagano Prefecture, one very small village of 1,000
people. They spent some village money to renovate an abandoned school
and make it into a dormitory. Then they applied for a special zone towork with an NPO to come up with a small middle school for people
who are reluctant to go to school for various family or personal reasons.
They were successful in opening a boarding school, which now has 16
students. They graduated three kids last year, and all entered high school.
AHMAD I have a question about the recent verdict in a court about
singing the national anthem or not singing the national anthem. How isthis perceived in Japanese society?
KANEKO In Japan, there is a group of people, not just old people but
younger people also, who are very nationalistic in a very superficial
way. They tend to be, in my opinion, very inward looking. They tend tobe nationalistic because they want to be able to think that they aresuperior, though they have no good reason for thinking that.
LEE You have been making reference to social entrepreneurship. Is
this different from social enterprise?
KANEKO The same thing is called differently in different contexts.
Nonprofit entrepreneur, nonprofit business, social enterprises, social
innovation, social venture; they are all about the same thing.

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I-House Seminar Room
29 September 2006

United Corporations of America
Yu Tanaka
Director, Future Bank LLP

I will talk about structures that predispose people: the problem of peakoil, the world going toward war, structures that make wars profitable,
and the trick called “globalization,” which is related to recycling inJapan.
Recycling programs in local communities in Japan started 10 years
ago. However, something wrong happened, and gradually it became
harder to maintain recycling in a community. The reason that recycling
had to be stopped is because raw materials imported from developing
countries were much cheaper than recycled products. Usually we goback to production by recycling. However, when recycled products aremuch more expensive than the original materials, the factory at the
production phase has to buy new materials rather than using recycled
products. Since recycling does not function well, a lot of the products
created are not recycled.
In Japan there are only three ways to treat garbage: burn it, bury it inlandfills, or dump it in the ocean, which all damage the environment.
The garbage problem came into being in Japan because export products
sold by developing countries were much cheaper than recycled products.
The volume, not the yen amount, of imports to Japan is eight times thevolume of exports from Japan.
For this reason, we cannot solve the garbage problem in Japan.
I did research on why imported materials from developing countries
were cheaper. The first factor was Japanese official development
assistance.
In local communities, we have been recycling aluminum cans. But
importing brand-new aluminum is cheaper than buying recycled

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aluminum. Cheap aluminum is imported from Brazil and Indonesia. It
takes a lot of electricity to produce aluminum. The cheapest way togenerate electricity is to build a dam. To secure electricity for producing
aluminum, Japanese ODA builds dams in these countries. In Indonesia,
Asahan Dam was built by Japanese ODA, while in Brazil it was Sukuroy
Dam. Asahan Dam is not profitable for the local people, because 90
percent of the electricity generated there is used for aluminumproduction. And 100 percent of the aluminum produced there is exported
to Japan. Indonesia does not have any factory to process the aluminum
into products. The Japanese ODA structure allows the Japanese
government to decide the export price of aluminum from Indonesia.
And the dam was built by Japanese companies.
One interesting point of Japanese ODA is that 55 percent of it is in theform of lending money to the recipients. Japanese ODA has created thelargest portion of the debt burden of the developing countries in theworld. Japan also has the largest share of loans to least developed
countries. I think Japan is the country most responsible for the poverty
in the world. Japanese ODA does not only make products cheap. It has
another element, i.e., structural adjustment programs recipients of ODA
must adopt. The more debt the developing countries have accumulated,
the smaller the value of their raw materials that remains with them,because of structural adjustment programs, or SAPs. The debt ofdeveloping countries is growing. Structural adjustments forced by the
IMF and the World Bank in developing countries are composed of threemajor elements. First, to enforce debt payments, the currency of therecipient country is devaluated, making imported items more expensive
and exports cheaper. Second, the recipient country’s national budget
for education and welfare is used for repayment. Third, local foodproduction in the recipient country is not allocated for domestic
consumption but for exports to earn foreign currency.
Right after the financial crisis in Asia, nearly 60 percent of the people
in developing Asian countries were suffering from malnutrition because
governments in these countries had to allocate their budgets for debt
repayment rather than allocating them to feed the people. SAPs havebeen imposed by the IMF/World Bank on more than 100 developing
countries in the world. They do not have anything to sell but raw
materials. All these countries export raw materials, so they are sellingthe same items to the world. Over 100 countries are selling the exact
same 30 items to the world. As a result, the price of raw materials hasSixty Days’ Chronicle

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become cheaper than the original price. Keep this in mind and let’s getback to recycling in Japan.
When you are in a position to buy materials for your company, you
look for low-cost, high-quality materials, don’t you? When you can get
raw materials really cheap, why bother paying more for recycledmaterials? That’s what’s happening in Japan. Recycled materials are
more expensive than raw materials exported by developing countries.
And that’s because of the SAPs. Then, things that can no longer berecycled in Japan are being exported to developing countries. These
products are exported at very low price. So scavengers in the cities ofdeveloping countries are no longer able to sell garbage that they collectfrom garbage dumps. And what scavengers do, or used to do, indeveloping countries is also a form of recycling. So, recycling in bothdeveloped countries and developing counties doesn’t work today
because of the SAPs imposed by the IMF/World Bank.
Now let us take a look at the Japanese ODA figures. Japan says that the
UN is the major recipient of its aid; however, the real situation isdifferent. A breakdown of Japanese ODA shows that 51.1 percent isgiven to SAPs. So we can see that many people are suffering through
SAPs largely due to what Japan is doing. Japan has reduced its ODA
recently. Today, many countries have repayment figures higher than
the aid figures. What Japan calls “aid” these days is money that is repaid
to it. Japan is actually taking money from countries where people are
already starving to death. The largest source of ODA funds is the savingsof the Japanese people; this money comes from postal savings, banksavings, or agricultural cooperative savings. This means that ordinary
people in Japan are involved in this process. If you deposit your moneywith one of these financial institutions, you may be supporting thegovernment’s official exploitation of developing countries.
Next, I would like to talk about the water issue in Japan. The demand
for water in Tokyo has been going down since 1971. Despite this fact,many dams have been built just for use in Tokyo. How is water fromthe dams being used? It is not even “used,” it’s actually just being
channeled straight into rivers. The financial formula used to support
this apparent waste is called the “general cost formula.” The utility
rates for water and electricity are decided based on the following
framework: no profit more than 3.8 percent is allowed to be made. For
example, if the total income from water-use rates is ¥1,038, then
¥1,000 is the actual cost, and the remaining ¥38 is the profit. Although
the framework of the system has been determined, companies still look78

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at how to increase profits without going over the 3.8 percent limit. For
example, if you want to make ¥3.8 billion as a profit, ¥1 trillion worth
of utilities needs to be consumed, which means that in order to increase
utility production, unnecessary dams are built for fictitious needs inorder to boost profits. This is why water-use rates are different in regionsthat have dams and in others that don’t have dams.
Now, I would like to talk about a different topic: the peak oil problem,
which is often referred to as the most serious problem the world isfacing today. Most of the large oil fields had been discovered by the1970s. From then until now, only small oil fields have been discovered.
However, the demand for oil is increasing each year. Although the output
of oil fields is increasing, once it reaches a certain peak, it is going todecrease. People say oil resources will someday run out. However, thereal problem is not when oil runs out but when production can no longer
keep up with the demand for it. This is the problem known as “peakoil”. The time the peak is reached is the issue; many scholars say it willprobably be around 2010.
Three and a half years from now, we will reach a time when oil prices
will rise so high that no one can afford it any more. When that timecomes, who is going to make profits? Well, it is the companies thathave possession of oil fields. Charts of world oil reserves list Saudi
Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iran, Venezuela, theformer USSR, Mexico, and the United States as the countries with themost oil reserves. The amount of reserves in Iraq has not been tested
for the past 15 years. Researchers assume that if research is done at thispoint, the Iraqi oil reserves would be more than what Saudi Arabia has,and for this reason, Iraq is occupied by the Untied States. The next
target for the US is Iran. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez was
captured by the CIA a number of times. We know that the oil reservesof Kuwait are actually half of what is listed. If a proper list is madeafter proper research, it will be observed that oil reserve charts are
directly related to the areas of war.
There are so many countries with oil and natural gas resources that are
related to war. One example is Aceh in Indonesia. Of the 250,000 people
who died in the 2004 tsunami in Asia, 200,000 died in Aceh. However,aid never arrived in Aceh, because there was a conflict going on there
involving people who wanted independence. In reality this conflict was
not because of the independence issue. It was the natural gas in Acehthat was causing the conflict. It is well known that Ache has abundant

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natural gas reserves. One-third of Japan’s natural gas imports comefrom Indonesia. And the majority of that came from Aceh. Actually,
Japan has built a natural gas refinery in Aceh through its ODA program.
(By the way, the refinery is currently used as a torture site, to torture
independence activists.). East Timor is another example. It became
independent after the Asian currency crisis. The Asian currency crisis
devastated the Indonesian economy, and President Suharto, who had
exerted enormous power over the country, had to step down. And what
happened next? Australia stepped in! Why? Because East Timor has anoil field called Timor Gap. You may think gaining independence isgood, and countries supporting independence are good, but it’s more
complex than that.
Another example. In Mindanao, the Philippines, just to eradicate 80
members of the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group, 20,000 troops composedof Philippine and US military personnel were sent in, resulting in thedisplacement of 50,000 people from their homes. I personally thinkthat to eradicate 80 people, using 20,000 soldiers and taking five years
to do it is too much. In reality, the objective was to control the resourcesof Mindanao Island. We all know that there are oil reserves in Mindanao.
In many places in the world, similar things are happening. At this point,
the most exported resource of Africa is oil. And in Sudan, Nigeria, andmany countries in Africa, conflicts are happening. It is the same situationin Latin America. The United States launched Operation Orange to get
rid of the drug production in Columbia. However, if we take a look at
the amount of drug production in the world, the country that is producing
the most drugs is Afghanistan after the removal of the Taliban regime.
If the real purpose of the United States is to root out drug production,
US forces should go to Afghanistan to enforce Operation Orange. And
we know that there is underground oil in Columbia. In Chechen,meanwhile, half of the population died because of the conflict there.
Why did Russia not allow Chechen to go independent? It is because
Russia’s only oil pipeline goes through Chechen’s capital. There is astrong relation between conflict areas and areas rich in natural gas andoil. If oil and natural gas are not the reason, then water or minerals willbe the reasons for the conflict. Conflicts over resources precipitate wars.
World military expenditures show that the world is ready to start a war.
Not all countries in the world have increasing military expenditures.
Half the military expenditure of the world is accounted for by the UnitedStates, with $520 billion allocated to the US military budget. US military80

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expenditures are 1.4 times larger than the Japanese annual governmental
budget. More than 5 percent of US workers are working in the defense
industry.
Directors of defense companies are also directors of oil companies. No
matter how much profit Unitel makes, however, politicians could not
make money from that. So a system was created to benefit politicians.
How do you do it? You make investments in defense corporations.
The Carlyle Group, an investment fund, is the biggest investmentcompany in the world. The company was started less than 20 years
ago. Carlyle buys stocks in the defense industry, and when the stock
prices rise, Carlyle sells them to make capital gains.
Stocks in the defense industry can only be invested in or bought bygovernments. We all know of George Bush senior, and his son, who isof course George W. Bush, the current president of the United States. If
Bush senior buys shares from Carlyle and his son orders militaryequipment from Carlyle, then Bush senior will definitely make a profit.
Do you think it’s too obvious for the Bush family to actually do that?
Well, here’s what happened. United Defense Industries made an artillery
product called the Crusader, but it was too big and it did not sell well.
So the stock price of United Defense got really low. That’s when Carlyle
bought UD’s shares in 1997.
For some reason, the son, President Bush, placed an order for the
Crusader artillery system in 2001. Through this purchase, the company
made a profit of $280 million. The former president of the Philippines,
Fidel Ramos; the former prime minister of Britain, John Major; theformer director of the CIA, Frank Carlucci; former Secretaries of
Defense, Donald Rumsfeld and Caspar Weinberger; former Secretaryof State, Colin Powell; former Prime Minister of South Korea, Park
Tae Joon, these were all advisers of Carlyle. Another famous person
who has invested in the company is Osama Bin Laden.
An analysis of US military expenditure and its distribution shows thatover half of it is being paid to just seven corporations. In 2002, Carlyle
ranked 9th in amount among companies that received orders from the
Department of Defense. Strangely, Carlyle fell to just 20th in 2004.
Why did it fall to the 20th in just two years? Or was no. 9 too high forthem? We will never know, but there’s one thing that may explain this.
The former President George Bush left the company in 2003.

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Interestingly, Halliburton went from rank 38 to 7 in those years.
Halliburton is represented by US Vice-President Richard Cheney.
Looking at the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq and the revenue
that Halliburton has made from the war, we can observe that they areboth increasing. Prior to its involvement in Iraq, Halliburton was inbankruptcy because of suits about their illegal treatment of asbestos;but the company has grown larger since the War in Iraq.
If the military expenditures of the world were spent to eradicate thedebt of developing countries, to get rid of all the weapons in the world,
to give food to people suffering from starvation, to remove land mines,
to reconstruct Afghanistan, and to provide services for women’s
reproductive health and water, there would still be $209.9 billion left
over. If only we decided not to kill each other. If the military
expenditures for one year were used for these programs, we could solve
most of the world’s problems. Yet we haven’t done this. We, instead,go ahead with killing each other.
Oil is expensive, because in order to get control of oil resources, theUnited States is spending a lot on its military. But the cost to develop
and control oil must also include the cost caused by the damage of
hurricane Katrina in the United States and the cost of global warming.
Then you can see how expensive oil is.
And that expensive crude oil is driving globalization. When you compare
fees for transporting goods within Japan and fees for transporting goods
from Singapore to Japan, you’ll see it is actually cheaper to send goods
from Singapore to Tokyo than to send the same things from Kobe toTokyo. You may think it’s funny but it’s because oil consumed acrossnational borders is tax-free. So it’s cheaper to import goods than
producing them domestically. If taxes were imposed on things that aretransported internationally, just like in the case of domestictransportation, it would be cheaper to produce things domestically.
Economic globalization has lots of tricks. Here’s another example, wheat
production in the United States. When the wheat is exported, it is soldat a cheaper price than the cost of its production. Why? Because
agricultural products are dumped, and it’s done systematically byindustrialized countries. Due to dumping by developed countries,
developing countries are not able to produce food. Wheat imports arerising in Indonesia and the Philippines. So some industrialized countries
are dumping agricultural products to developing countries.

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Some other industrialized countries are doing something different in
the same context of globalization and division of labor. Look at Japan.
The agriculture sector in Japan is losing its competitiveness. To obtainfood, Japanese people have taken control of lands abroad so that they
can have food produced there and have it imported to Japan. The
developing countries are exporting food to Japan. This phenomenon iscalled in Japan “hunger export.” People in developing countries canharvest, but that is not for their own consumption. Because of thisstructure, the people in developing countries, no matter how hard theywork, suffer from starvation.
The United States has a huge deficit in its finance and trade. So it cannot
support the war on its own. The United States issues bonds abroad toearn money for the war. Japan is the biggest buyer of United States
government bonds, followed by China and Britain. The bond issuanceenables the US to wage war. The money paid by the Japanese
government to buy US bonds comes from postal savings. In addition tobuilding dams or nuclear power plants, the postal savings of Japan areused to finance war. In the past, when Japan invaded Asian countries,
postal savings money was put to use then, as well. During the postwar
period, the Self-Defense Forces were established, and that was also
funded by the postal savings. Of course, ODA given to developing
countries is also funded by postal savings. The money you deposit withJapanese banks is invested, by the bank, in US bonds, and eventually is
spend to support war. Therefore, we can say that your money issometimes more powerful than you think. Your saving for the future
can sometimes destroy someone else’s future.
Well, I’ve talked a lot about the structural problems that are too serious
and too embedded in our life. What can we do to make the world abetter place? I personally think that there are three directions of
movements when you talk about changing the world. One is the verticaldirection: you go up the social ladder and become someone influential.
Become a lawmaker yourself, or become someone that can influencelawmakers so that you can make changes.. Another traditional way is
movement in the horizontal direction: convincing the person next toyou or creating an advocacy movement. Traditionally, Japanese people
have made use of the vertical way and the horizontal way. But they
have not worked well, and a lot of people have given up on changing
the world. I think there is another way, a diagonal way, which is tocome up with alternatives and put them into action.

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An example of the diagonal way is the creation of an NPO bank called
the Future Bank. It was founded with seven members including myself.
The seven members contributed about $40,000 at the inception of thebank. In the past few years, the Future Bank has invested $1.5 million
in civil society organizations, with a cumulative investment totaling $7 million So far there is no credit loss, and we have a $47,000 reserveagainst bad debts. Three kinds of projects are financed by the Future
Bank: environmental, welfare, and civil society projects, all with a 3
percent fixed interest rate. The idea was put into action 14 years ago,
and a lot of different organizations started doing the same. Now inJapan there are many NPO banks, and more are being formed.
If the world’s military-related emissions were reduced by 60 percent,global warming would have stopped. If you leave the military as it is,global warming will continue. A lot of people tell me that the movement
to save the environment is separate from and not related at all to war.
But this is a wrong perception. There is no meaning to focusing on
environmental issues if we do not focus on peace issues.
Pollution cannot be eliminated by just focusing on household emissions.
If you look at the emissions from Japan, half comes from 167
corporations. If businesses start to change their behavior, then pollution
can be reduced and eventually stopped. But if businesses don’t change,
then pollution can’t be stopped. In Japan, almost all the focus is put on
individual reduction of energy consumption, not on efforts on thebusiness side. But it’s actually the businesses that need to make efforts
in reducing energy consumption. We really need to make businesses
take actions. In households, electricity accounts for most of theemissions, and it comes from four items: air conditioners, refrigerators,
lighting, and television. The energy consumption of appliances has been
reduced in recent years. The energy consumption of refrigerators has
decreased by 80 percent, while the other three items reduced their energy
consumption by about half. If you replace the appliances in your housewith energy-saving ones, you can reduce your household’s emissions
by half. I invented a financing scheme to encourage people to replace
their old appliances with new, energy-saving appliances. Switching toenergy-saving appliances doesn’t just save electricity and cut down
emissions, but it also saves your money!
Extra effort, suffering, and perseverance are not necessary to save theearth from global warming. There are different ways to do this. One
example is what I just said here. Replacing energy-draining appliance84

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with energy-saving ones. Another example is to install window blinds.
Window blinds reduce the intensity of sunlight coming into the house.
So they don’t let the room temperature go up so much and you don’t
need to turn on your air conditioner. And it is much better to put theblinds outside the window, rather than putting them inside the window.
This way, the intensity of the sunlight is reduced even before it reaches
the window. And if you spray water on them, it will be a lot cooler
inside. This does not mean you need to have someone out there spraying
water all day. Something that has the same effect as spray is a green
curtain. By having greenery outside the window, the temperature inside
the room can be reduced by two degrees. Just by doing these things,
you can reduce air-conditioner usage, and thus, you can reduce energy
consumption. This, of course, means that your household emits lessgreenhouse effect gas.
In Japan, nuclear energy is said to be the cheapest form of energy andsafe to use. This is a lie, but that is what the government is telling us. In
reality, renewable energy is the cheapest form of all the energies
available. It is best for electric power companies to buy electricity fromrenewable energy sources.
We are living in a society that is built upon oil. If we turn this aroundand make a society built upon renewable energy, we can change thesocial structure. Energy will be generated by small units in society, andlocal groups and communities will be stepping forward to support smallenergy plants.
Today, energy security is what’s driving countries to war. But if andwhen households can generate energy just enough to meet theirhousehold demand, then we don’t need that kind of war any more. And
it’s not a wild dream now. If we use energy-saving types of electric
appliances, we only need solar panels just as big as an eight-tatami mat
room (approximately 10 sq feet).
When Bush comes to us offering oil, we can say ”No, we do not need it
anymore!” This means that we shall be able to transform society into
one that is not revolving around oil. Until now, when people gavethought to changing society, they assumed they had to change everything
and make everything green. But in a way this is a kind of fascism.
Rather than trying to make a sweeping change of everything, let us go
into all the different reasons, all the different places, and try to makelittle patches of green and help it grow from there. If we start doing
this, eventually it will spread.

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Dialogue
MOHIUDDIN AHMAD This is really a fascinating presentation. I
have been able to discover a completely different life within Japan. I
would like to connect this global hegemonic powers issue to the local
level in the field of nature. We in the Asia region are in many ways
victims of global financing. In Asia, the major institution is the AsianDevelopment Bank. How does Japanese ODA promote the ADB? I cancite the example of Bangladesh. I think Japan is the single largest
creditor. Much of this aid comes directly, but loans also come from the
ADB, which draws on Japanese money. I know that in certain regionsin Asia where the World Bank is shy of funding because of resistancefrom community groups, the ADB comes in to fund them. Incidentally,
we cannot sue the ADB for committing crimes. I do not know if this is
the case in other countries, but in Bangladesh the ADB has immunity. I
would be very much interested if you could give us some insight into
the Japanese ODA-ADB connection. Are there any discussions within
Japan on how to deal with the ADB?
YU TANAKA First of all, the IMF/World Bank and regional banks
like the ADB are working based on investment. Half of the funds of the
IMF and the World Bank are from the Group of Seven, and decisions
are made within the G7. In the case of the ADB, Japan has the highest
investment and so it comes first in terms of voting rights. Pretty muchfollowing Japan is the United States, and they together make up half ofthe voting rights. So Japan and the United States make the decisions in
the ADB. The budget of the Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund ofJapan (OECF), which finances ODA projects, is just as big as that of
the World Bank, but the number of OECF staff members is just 1/20 ofthat of the World Bank. So OECF opts for financing a few large projects
that need a large amount of funding, instead of funding numerous small
projects, because it’s more time and effort consuming to handle
numerous small projects. So OECF just gets on the bandwagon andparticipates in large projects that are designed by organizations such as
the World Bank and the ADB. I think the most effective way to deal
with this is to place the problem before the Japanese government.
In Japan, there is one group that focuses a lot of effort on things related
to the ADB, but the bank is still not a very large focus of attention
among activists. The way these groups usually think is that ADB projects
are good and beneficial; they are not thinking about the actual structuralproblems involved. What has to be done to make meaningful changes

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is to have the real damage being caused by the ADB known to theJapanese government, using Japanese NGOs to convey this message.
LEE SEEJAE I have three questions. First, you said household use ofelectricity has a quite limited impact on climate change in Japan. Do
you have any ideas about changing companies or enterprises to reduce
emissions? My second question is about changing refrigerators. I am
always confused about whether I should buy a new one or not. I have
many electrical appliances at home, and I keep them as long as I can
use them. Of course, buying a new one means garbage, and also there
is a lot of energy embedded in the electrical appliance. You counted
only the savings in electrical energy achieved with a new refrigerator.
How would you explain it? Third is how postal savings get into thedebt structure. Do you mean that postal savings are used to buy Japanese
government-issued bonds? Recently, former Prime Minister Koizumi
Jun’ichiro reformed the postal savings system. How will his reforms
affect the scheme?
TANAKA First, I will talk about electricity consumed by businesses.
In Japan, around 4 am to 5 am is the time when the least energy is being
consumed, while the peak time is 2 pm to 3 pm. The total amount ofenergy consumed in a household is 23 percent of the total energy
consumption in Japan. Household energy consumption is high in themorning, low in the afternoon, and high again at night. Electricity cannot
be saved for use, and so just to meet peak demand, electricity is being
generated.
And when it comes to electricity bills, the more electricity is consumed
by households, the higher the electricity rates get. So there’s incentive
for households to cut down on their electricity use. On the other hand,
the more electricity is consumed for industrial use, the lower theelectricity rates get! So there’s no incentive for industries to cut downon their electricity use. The very simple solution to cut down on total
electricity consumption in Japan is to change the energy rate matrix.
Refrigerators are usually used for an average of 12 years, and 91.7
percent of the energy consumed by a refrigerator is in the form ofelectricity during the life of the refrigerator; the next 7 percent is forthe mining and refining of raw materials.
Energy used in disposal of a refrigerator is just 0.3 percent of the totalenergy consumption of a refrigerator throughout its product life. Aftertaking into account the amount of energy required to produce theSixty Days’ Chronicle

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refrigerator and also the energy needed to dispose of it, we find that the
1.4-year period is the breakeven point to recoup the energy needed fora new refrigerator. If you are going to use your old and energy-draining
refrigerator for more than 1.4 years from now, then it is energy-efficient
to replace it with one that consumes less. To save energy, some people
pull the plug out. But then the temperature inside goes up, andconsiderable energy will be necessary to get it back down when you
plug the refrigerator in again. New appliances consume less energy, so
it is more energy-efficient to replace old appliances than to continue to
use them for a long time.
The Postal savings system is a very handy system for the Japanese
government because the government can tap into the large deposit base.
The deposit base that the government uses for its projects is as big as\600 trillion. Do you know how big is the Japanese government’s annual
budget? It’s just \80 trillion. And of the \80 trillion, \40 trillion is notreally utilized by the national government because a part of the \40trillion is spent to redeem governmental bonds, and another part goesto prefectural governments in the form of subsidy. So, only theremaining \40 trillion is actually spent by the national government tocover all national needs. Compare this amount with the amount thatthe government has a free hand to spend, the \600 trillion!
Government bonds are mostly used for domestic development, forexample, for construction. The source of this money for investment is
the postal savings system. One person who built a base on postal savingsand the construction industry was former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka.
He got all his votes through appeals on the postal savings issue, andthen he spent all the money on construction.
KUNDA DIXIT I was wondering whether the general strategy is tochange people’s lifestyle to be less energy intensive. Or is it to notchange lifestyles but make them more cost effective and energy efficient?
I liked the horizontal-vertical analogy, which way to go. I used to be
horizontal, now I am diagonal. Being in the media, I face the sameproblem at home: how to convey this kind of activism through media
to change the mainstream economic culture. I am completely frustrated.
I wonder how you handle outreach.
TANAKA First I would like to create a society that is not energy
dependent. I would like to create a program where people who have noparticular interest in energy issues will come on board. Lay people are88Communities in Action

sensitive to costs, to money, so if you make something that is more cost
efficient and cheaper, then they will come on board.
The media issue in Japan is in a desperate situation. Changing to digital
broadcasting costs a lot, and the money to finance the change has to betaken from mobile phone usage fees. This is one of the reasons thatmobile phones in Japan are very expensive. This allocation was decided
upon by the Liberal Democratic Party. In Japan, if you do not follow
what the LDP says, then you cannot get subsidies. Since the advent ofdigital broadcasting in Japan, the broadcasting agencies have stopped
reacting against the government. Another factor is that television, radio,
and newspapers are all being run by the same conglomerates. I think
the only thing that we can do for the moment is to start with little patchesof green. Personally, the one method that is available for me is to startthese little points of green by giving this kind of presentation andpublishing books to get the message out.
ALBERT ALEJO I wonder if you can say something about mining.
You talked about water and oil, but what about mining? How does itenter the picture?
TANAKA It is something that I do not want to talk about in particular.
The two companies that are owned by Rothschild are the two companies
that are the biggest culprits in terms of this issue. The subsidiaries ofthese companies are involved in all the mining activities throughout
the world. Many people who protested against these activities havebeen killed for their activism. The fact that this is such a huge issue interms of the environment and that people are being killed for theiractivism means that it has not been taken as seriously as it should havebeen.
ALEJO Why don’t you talk about it? What is Japan’s role?
TANAKA Japanese companies are not the major companies undertaking
mining; they just come in and take part in a small part of the mining, orthey come in after big companies that are not based in Japan. I think theoriginal problem is Rio Tinto. I think there should be investigations
into Rio Tinto; these things have not come through yet. Which companies
are involved in Mindanao?
ALEJO All the major companies are involved in Mindanao right now.
Rio Tinto wanted to go in, TVI of Canada, and I think Chinese mining
companies are coming to Mindanao.

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TANAKA I think that if Japanese companies take this up as an issue, it
could have an effect on making improvements. I think the capital funds
for Rio Tinto and the Canadian company all are coming from the same
area, from Rothschild in England.
MARIA HARTININGSIH In Indonesia, the areas of conflict, bothhorizontal and vertical, are in places very rich in mining and gas
resources. We have a conflict in Patuana that has been going on for
more than 25 years. In Aceh, it is not only gas exploration but also
mining exploration. We have big problems with Freeport, Rio Tinto,and Newmont in all these areas. There are conflicts now between people
because they use the divide and conquer method.
TANAKA I think this issue of creating conflict within the region isalways being carried out by these kinds of operations. In Bougainville,
Rio Tinto was doing the same kinds of things. The mining in
Bougainville made up two-thirds of Papua New Guinea’s foreign
currency reserves. The conflict there was between Bougainville andthe island. I think it was a war set up by Rio Tinto, which went there formining purposes.
DIXIT I would just play the devil’s advocate a little bit and ask you
this: There are countries that have benefited from globalization. There
are raw material producers that have benefited: Chile from copper,
Malaysia from oil and rubber, Singapore from trading. Maybe it is notglobalization per se that is bad but how national governments become
involved in an accountable way. I just want your reaction on that
proposition.
TANAKA If you look at the world, if you look at the top 100 profit
earners, you find that 51 of those are corporations. There are about fivedeveloped countries that gain from globalization; after that, the list is awhole big list of corporations. In the United States, there is actually adeficit in trade. But when you put together all the multinational
corporations that come out of the United States, it usually comes fullcircle. If you take IBM or McDonalds within Japan and you put theminto the picture, you will see it is the main companies in the UnitedStates that are making profits. Because these profits are not taken backinto the US, because they are hidden in other places where they havetax-free zones, the main profits do not return to the United States. So it
looks like there is a deficit. I think the whole planet now is revolving
around corporations. The power of the state is being reduced so thepower is with corporations now.

Ryukyu University, Okinawa
11 October 2006

Some Ideas on “The Cocktail Party”
Oshiro Tatsuhiro
Writer; the first winner of the Akutagawa Award in Okinawa

I want to focus on the short story “Cocktail Party.” First of all, it seems
to be important to provide an outline of the history of the modern
literature of Okinawa. Okinawa was an independent kingdom called
the Ryukyu Kingdom until the last stage of the eighteenth century. The
language basically originated from the same roots as those of Japanese,but it went through major changes in the course of history. The genreof literature was limited to short poems called omoro and ryuka. Novels
did not develop in the Ryukyus. To my knowledge, only one short lovestory was written in the Japanese language in the eighteenth century. It
was influenced by Japanese examples. It is interesting to think about
why the novel did not develop. This is because the history of the kingdom
lagged behind Japanese history for as long as 10 centuries: 1,000 years.
The system of private landownership and feudal society was notdeveloped in Ryukyuan history. In such an immature system of society,
the Satsuma domain of Japan invaded the Ryukyu Kingdom in the
beginning of the seventeenth century.
Under the control of Satsuma, a new stream of history was developed;
a semifeudal society was formed under the king. Aristocracy wasmaintained, but the people of the governing class did not wear any
weapons, and farmers were not permitted to own their land. The kingdom
was controlled only to produce tax with agricultural products. The
objective of Satsuma was to exploit the profits of the Ryukyu Kingdom
in trade with China, which had started in the fourteenth century. It isuseful to point out that personal names did not begin to appear in the
Ryukyu Kingdom until the first stage of the seventeenth century,
although they had already appeared in the sixth century in Japan. In theeighteenth century, an original style of drama like opera was achieved.
It was called kumiodori, created by the genius Tamagusuku Chokun.

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Kumiodori is still performed, and it was designated as an intangible
cultural asset when Okinawa reverted to Japan in 1972.
A new stage of the Okinawan history of spirit and culture evolved
beginning with the abolition of the kingdom and annexation to themodern imperial nation of Japan in 1879. Japanese society and its
government required Okinawa to follow Japan in its aspiration for thewealth and military strength of the modern nation. But this was a big
burden for Okinawa, because it was not trained for productivity. The
influence of this time lag in history has continued to be felt since thebeginning of annexation until now. Okinawan society was discriminatedagainst by Japanese society because of radical differences in language
and the customs of daily life. More than that, Okinawans experienced afeeling of being a minority within Japanese society, and they waged aspiritual struggle born from an inferiority complex against mainland
Japan. As you may know, Okinawan people suffered from the Battle of
Okinawa in the last stage of World War II. This sacrifice was stimulatedby the inferiority complex, especially among students. They fought tobe bona fide Japanese and to free themselves from the status of minority.
Modern Okinawan literature did not start until the beginning of thetwentieth century, and it took the style of imitating the Japanesetraditional form. The first novel was written in 1910. In most literaryworks, especially novels, the main theme was the depression andfrustration arising as Japanese, and the biggest problem was how to
express the feelings of the Okinawan dialect in the Japanese context.
This still remains a major problem in contemporary Okinawan literature.
When the Battle of Okinawa ended in 1945, some people felt liberated
from Japanese control. But soon political control by the US military
government became a burden for the Okinawan people.
In the new stream of literature, the activities by the students of the
University of the Ryukyus, starting in the 1950s, were outstanding.
The group called themselves the Ryudai Bungaku, which means“literature by the University of the Ryukyus.” The main theme for them
was protesting against the US military government based on the ideology
of social realism.
I began my literary work in the beginning of the postwar period. I wished
to be free from every stereotype including the works of the Ryudai
Bungaku. I often strongly criticized them. They did the same to me.
The opposing positions between the Ryudai Bungaku and Oshiro
Tatsuhiro are well known in the cultural history of postwar Okinawa’sSixty Days’ Chronicle

93

literary works. Shadows of America have been a big motif. In various
forms, this shadow has been portrayed by many writers, including thosein mainland Japan. But I was not satisfied with those works. In the laststage of the 1950s, I was interested in the friendship between America
and Okinawa. In many places we found scenes of friendship. But I
thought that these scenes had been covered with deception. The truth
should be presented clearly, and so I believed in clarifying theextraterritoriality behind untrue friendship. But when I started writing,
I found a problem, that simplistic criticism and resistance to the militarybases are hardly acceptable in literature. I believed that such issues
should be dealt with only in essays. Reflecting deeply, I thought about
how to answer if I were asked about our crimes in China in the last war.
If our crimes in China are forgiven, the crimes of America can beforgiven as well. Based on this question, I decided to answer that weshould not forgive either. I found that this idea could build an entire
fiction. By the way, I will confess that I conceived this idea through myexperience in China. I lived in Shanghai as a student for three years
during the last stage of World War II.
In my evaluation, I believe that Okinawan literature has emancipateditself from the feeling of victimization. Standing from this point of view,
the Ryudai Bungaku group simply switched Japan in the prewar modern
literature of Okinawa to America in the postwar literature. In describing
the feeling of victimization, you may know that some US ex-servicemen
opposed the exhibition of the atomic bomb at the Smithsonian Museumin Washington in 1995. They claimed that the crime of atomic bomb
should be forgiven in exchange for Pearl Harbor. If we take into
consideration the theme of my “Cocktail Party,” both should not be
forgiven. I believe that this idea may be radical in the twenty-first
century. In conclusion, I would like to propose this idea, which I call“absolute ethics” and which could be one of the major achievements inmodern Okinawan literature. I reached this idea through struggles anddifficulties after World War II, through the long history of Okinawa.

Dialogue
MOHIUDDIN AHMAD I would like to know about your writings on
Okinawan political and cultural assertion; how are your writings
perceived by the writers in the northern islands of Japan?
OSHIRO TATSUHIRO I think the mainland writers only portray theinside of the person; what they are thinking. Many people focus on my94

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protest against the US military occupation in “The Cocktail Party.” But
my real intention was for readers to understand absolute ethics, whichis the main focus of the novella. But many people still do not understandthat point; that is why I keep on talking.
ALBERT ALEJO Can you explain more about absolute ethics? Whenyou say both crimes should not be forgiven, are you saying, “should
not be forgotten but should also not be forgiven?” Why do you say theyshould not be forgiven?
TARSHUHIRO By not forgiving, both sides would be able to reachabsolute peace. If we forgive war crimes or mistakes, we may repeat
the same mistakes. Not forgiving means not forgetting. We can create
peace in our society.
MARIA HARTININGSIH How would you balance between forgiving
and forgetting the crimes in war?
TATSHUHIRO In “The Cocktail Party,” the protagonist’s daughter
was raped; so he wanted to criticize the crime of the US soldier. But
then he has to think about what happened in China during the war; thecrimes committed by Japanese soldiers. So by not forgiving either side,
he realized he could not forgive himself. He then gained the right tocriticize both sides and to understand himself. That is what he meansby absolute ethics. That is the merit of not forgiving both crimes.
The US is now criticizing Iraq. The Arabs also criticize the US. How
should we think about that? Should we forgive them and forget them?
This is the dilemma of absolute ethics. By criticizing both, the narrator
gained freedom to think of what happened in Okinawa.
KUNDA DIXIT Yesterday we went to two museums, Himeyuri no To
and the Peace Memorial Museum. It was a very shocking story ofcivilians caught in the violence of both sides, which usually happens inmany war situations. The truth is so dramatic that you do not have toinvent fiction in literature. Is absolute ethics a way to expose hypocrisy?
What more of a role can literature play? For example, in the antiwar or
pro-peace movement, is there more of a role for testimonies in themuseums where there is more fact than fiction? What is the role ofliterature when the truth is much more dramatic than fiction?
TATSHUHIRO I write about war. But people say that is different fromwhat they experienced. So it is difficult. You are right; the fact itself isheavy, dramatic, too shocking. Fiction may not be powerful enough toSixty Days’ Chronicle

95

face that kind of situation; so that is the difficulty that writers have to
face. I wrote a long novel called Hi no hate kara, meaning “From theEnd of the Day,” which won the Hirabayashi Taiko Award. It was about
the last days of the war in Okinawa, the battle fought on the southernend of Okinawa, the fierce and the terrible war. It was very, very realistic
and very shocking. But as you say, the fact can be more shocking thanthat. Nevertheless, it is the fate of writers to face this kind of heavy,difficult fact; but still they have to write; it is the fate of writing.
LEE SEEJAE I come from Korea. This is my third visit to Okinawa.
Okinawa is in a very important position to view the Japanese occupationin Korea, the Japanese occupation in China, as well as the US military
position in Asia. I would like to ask how Japanese crimes in China canbe compared with US military crimes in Okinawa. When you talk about
the Japanese crimes in China, do you feel yourself part of the Japanese?
Or is it their crimes? Would that be the identity problem?
TATSHUHIRO Okinawa is part of Japan in that case.
Seejae So you feel responsible?
SEEJAE Yes. That is where the fluctuation occurs all the time.
Sometimes you become Japanese, sometimes you become an Okinawan.
ALEJO When I saw the museums yesterday, it appeared to me that
Okinawans had two enemies, the Americans and the Japanese. If you
say, “Let us not forget the crimes,” what is the crime of Okinawans? It
is like you are just being implicated by the crimes of the Japanese.
TATSHUHIRO That is a big question. Recently, some Okinawans had
started seeing Okinawans themselves as victimizers in the war. “The
Cocktail Party” discussed the issue of victimization. By bringing inwhat happened in China, the protagonist said, we are also victimizers.
We are part of the oppressive forces. That trend, that kind of thinking
may have started with “The Cocktail Party.” Many Okinawan historians
and scholars started to talk about what Okinawans did in China, Taiwan,
and even here; so that is part of our crime, too.
JANET PILLAI I wonder whether the geopolitical location of
Okinawa, which is so strategic, has an impact on the vacillating identities
of Okinawans. I am talking about the Ryukyu maritime kingdom when
it was under Chinese domination, then Japanese. Will the vacillation
ever be resolved because of its geopolitical position?

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TATSHUHIRO As long as I live, it is not clear if we can resolve it.
KAMATA YOJI I heard you wrote about Okinawan culture, Okinawa
within. That was the first attempt to grasp the cultural and speechtradition of Okinawa in the 1970s. My question is what you think about
the so-called essence of the cultural tradition of Okinawa. My second
question is, as Japanese, I feel that, through the process of modernization,
most Japanese have lost any connection to their spiritual roots, including
me. Will Okinawa’s cultural tradition help Japanese to find their spiritualroots?
TATSHUHIRO There is a time warp with the mainland of 1,000 years.
That time span has a rich potentiality. The Japanese life is way aheadof Okinawan life. Set against the Japanese standard, what we are doing
may look inefficient and slow, but that slowness could contributesomething to Japanese fast life. The potentiality has not been accepted
yet in Japanese society. It could change the Japanese lifestyle; it cancontribute to changing or enriching Japanese life.
SEEJAE It would be a good contribution; Okinawans enjoy long life.
TATSHUHIRO For example, if a Japanese company goes to anothercountry in Asia, the kind of efficiency the Japanese company demands
may be too much for the Asian country. But if an Okinawan company
goes to other Asian countries, there will be some kind of compatibility.
We get along well. But then, the Okinawan company will be controlled
by a Japanese company, and it has to follow the lead of the mainland
company. That is the kind of difficulty we see.
Ten years after Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972, the bureaucrats
from mainland Japan and its capital invaded Okinawa. Okinawans
experienced a big crisis, struggle, and confusion.

Haebaru Museum, Okinawa
13 October 2006

Okinawan Identity
Ben Takara
Poet; Archivist
Okinawa Prefectural Archives

History of Okinawa
It is said that people started inhabiting Okinawa Island 18,000–20,000
years ago. The Minatogawa Man, whose skull was discovered on
Okinawa, was one of the oldest excavated in Japan. There are many
theories on where the Minatogawa came from, but a leading theory
now is that they came from Indonesia. Looking at a map of the Ryukyu
Islands, you can see that from Okinawa Island it is easy to hop from
one island to another to go north to mainland Japan, and you can also
travel by boat from the Miyako and Yaeyama islands in the southernpart of Okinawa Prefecture to Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
However, there is a long distance between the Miyako and Yaeyama
islands and the Okinawa islands (the central group of the Ryukyus).
Because of this distance, until the tenth century, the northern andsouthern parts of the Ryukyus developed two different cultures.
Archeologists also back up this notion of different cultures. The Amami
islands and Okinawa islands in the northern half had influence frommainland Japan. They also had Japan’s Jomon and Yayoi periods. But
these cultures did not cross over to the Miyako and Yaeyama islands,
where shell fragments, used for cutting and boiling stones to cookmaterials, have been excavated. The people on those islands did notuse any pottery. There is history of non-pottery use in the southern partof the Kingdom of Ryukyu. Archeologists say that during the tenthcentury, those in the southern area were closely related to Taiwan, thePhilippines, and Indonesia in terms of cultural heritage.
Not until the twelfth century did the northern and southern culturalareas begin to merge. Then, mainland Japan was in the Kamakura period,and in Okinawa, the Gusuku period. Gusuku means castle in the
Okinawan dialect. During the Gusuku period, many castles were built

98Communities in Actionin the Amami and Yaeyama islands. In any Gusuku excavation, there
are five common features. First are iron tools, which were probably
imported from mainland Japan or the Korean Peninsula. Second,chinaware from China and Southeast Asia is also found in Gusuku
excavations. Third is Sueki pottery. Fourth is a stone that is only foundin Nagasaki Prefecture. Lastly, Gusuku-style pottery, which is common
to local Okinawan people. From Amami in the north to Yonaguni in thesouth, those five materials were excavated in every Gusuku site. It canbe concluded that the people who were ruling the Gusukus developed
trade with Japan, Korea, China, and Southeast Asia. Some Gusuku lords
became stronger and gained more control over the land.
By the fourteenth century, the island of Okinawa was divided into three
kingdoms: Hokuzan, Chuzan and Nanzan. In 1429, for the first time in
Ryukyu history, King Sho Hashi succeeded in unifying the three
kingdoms into one. The Sho dynasty of the Ryukyu Kingdom was atrade-oriented kingdom, having trade with Japan, Korea, China, andSoutheast Asia. At that time, Shuri Castle became the capital of the
kingdom. The Ryukyu Kingdom reached its apex during the rule ofKing Sho Shin. The kingdom had a trading agreement with the Ming
dynasty in China (the so-called Sappo system).
In 1609 Satsuma domain in current-day Kagoshima prefecture invaded
the Ryukyu Kingdom. After the invasion, the kingdom was turned into
one of the colonies of Satsuma, which meant that the approval of
Satsuma was required to become the king. The people of the Ryukyus
tried to balance the situation by utilizing political negotiation to maintaina balanced relationship between Satsuma (Japan) and China in order tosustain their independence. During the same period, European andAmerican influence started to come into the Ryukyu Kingdom. Holland,
Britain, and the US wanted to have some trading relations with the
kingdom, and they sent messengers. The most major incident with theWestern nations was in 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry of theUnited States came. By means of military power, Perry threatened toopen trade between the Ryukyu Kingdom and the US. From there, Perry
went to mainland Japan to try to open Japan’s economy.
King Sho Tai was the last king of the Ryukyus. In 1879, the Japanese
government abolished the Ryukyu Kingdom and replaced it with
Okinawa Prefecture. King Sho Tai was abducted from Ryukyu to Tokyo,
and he remained there until his death. After the Meiji Restoration of
1868, Japan also took over Hokkaido, the northernmost of the main

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islands, where the Ainu people lived. The Meiji government told the
Ainu that their land was part of Japan. In 1869 the name Hokkaido
Prefecture first appeared in the records. Ten years later, King Sho Tai
was abducted to Tokyo, and the Ryukyu Kingdom became Okinawa
Prefecture and another part of Japan. In this process, Japan also annexed
Taiwan and, 10 years later, the Korean Peninsula.
Before World War II, Okinawa was a domestic colony of Japan. Many
Okinawans went to foreign countries as migrants to earn extra money.
The migrants worked in Hawaiian sugarcane plantations. They also
migrated to Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, the Philippines, Bolivia
and Singapore. During World War II, we suffered the Battle of Okinawa.
In 1945 Okinawa was placed under US occupation, which lasted for 27
years. I was born in 1949, during the occupation era. When I was 21,
Okinawa reverted back to Japan. So I lived in the era when people used
the US dollar as their currency and all high-ranking Okinawan officials
were US military members. When I see the Afghanistan or Iraq situation
on TV, I cannot help but remember my younger days.
Okinawan Identity
Until 1879, the Ryukyu Kingdom was independent and had its distinct
culture and heritage. From 1879 to the prewar period, Okinawans
identified themselves as Ryukyuan. But the Japanese government did
not view them as Ryukyuan. They said that we were Japanese. Duringthat period, the people were Japanized through education and culturalcleansing. The persecution of Ryukyu culture is very similar to what
was done in Taiwan and Korea and to the Ainu in Hokkaido. A major
strategy was to stop the people from using their own language.
The head curator of this museum and I are high school classmates; wehave been friends since then. We speak only the Okinawan language.
We are 57 years old, and people of my generation can speak Okinawan.
In school the use of the Okinawan language was prohibited. If students
spoke Okinawan, they would be punished. A similar thing happened in
Korea: People had their names changed to Japanese names. In Okinawa,
there are names that are very difficult for mainland Japanese to read,and so these names were changed into common Japanese names. For
example, a popular Okinawan name, Shimabuku, was very difficult tounderstand for mainland Japanese, and so they changed it to
Shimabukuro. But even that was difficult, and so they further changed
it to Shima. The name of the curator of this museum is Oshiro. In

100Communities in Action

Okinawan pronunciation, it is Ufugusuku. But that is difficult for
mainland Japanese to pronounce, so it became Oshiro.
Sometimes I wonder why the colonizers focused on language and names.
One theory I came up with is that, in order to build a strong military,
the commander needs to be clearly understood by the troops, so it isnecessary that they speak in the Japanese language. They also need to
be able to call out soldiers’ names. In the process of assimilation into
Japanese culture, there occurred a change in terminology in journalism
from Ryukyuans to Okinawans, i.e., the Okinawan people as an ethnic
group. However, the term Okinawans was not acceptable to mainland
Japanese people, either. By 1935, they started calling us Okinawa kenjin, meaning the people from Okinawa Prefecture. Hence, when the
Ryukyuans were made into Okinawa prefectural people, they were sent
to wars as Japanese people; they went to war in Korea, China, andSoutheast Asia to annex overseas lands. According to research done at
the University of the Ryukyus in November last year, asking about theidentity of Okinawan people, 50% of those who answered said they are
Okinawans who are different from the mainland Japanese. Because of
these underlying background of Okinawan culture and history, every
time a major incident happens, a cry arises in Okinawa for culturalreformation or reversion to independence.
From 1945, when the war ended, until 1950, the majority of Okinawan
people said that they would become independent again. A kind ofnational flag of Ryukyu was created in 1945. In 1972, right after
reversion to Japan, there was much discussion in new Okinawan literaryworks about whether it was right to be part of Japan. The idea of creating
a Ryukyu constitution was proposed in 1981. In 1997 a forum withover 1,000 participants was held, and they proposed the possibility of
Okinawa becoming independent. Last year, a University of the Ryukyus
questionnaire asked if it was better for Okinawa to be an independent
country. Some 25% answered in the affirmative, saying that Okinawa
should be an independent country. However, this is not a politicalmovement; the cry for Okinawa’s independence as a political movement
is very minor. In terms of cultural and heritage aspects, however, 25%of the people were saying that Okinawa should become independent.
Okinawan as an Indigenous Population of JapanFor the past 20 years, Okinawans have communicated with the Ainu
people in Hokkaido as indigenous peoples of Japan. There are about
25,000 people who acknowledge themselves as Ainu. But because of

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the oppression that still exists, it is said that about 50,000 are still hiding
their Ainu identities. Okinawan people identify them as Uchinachu in
the Okinawan dialect. I was a chemistry teacher in high school. WhenI once asked my class what their identity was and what their nationality
was, my students answered, “My nationality is Japanese but my identity
is Okinawan.” Within Okinawa, 1.3 million people call themselves
Okinawans. Overseas, there are about 350,000 people who say thatthey are Ryukyuans. For the past 10 years, representatives of Okinawa,
together with those of the Ainu, have petitioned in the UN to berecognized as native groups of Japan. Some Ainu people lost their lives
in the Battle of Okinawa in World War II. There is an annual memorialservice for the wad dead held in Itoman City, where there is a memorial
called the Namboku no To, the north and south statue. Every year wehave a memorial ceremony there with Ainu people, and every five years
we have a special ceremony. Haebaru Cultural Center is one of thevery first centers to have started exchanges with Ainu. We had Ainu
craft exhibitions, offered demonstration of Ainu songs and dances, andheld Ainu cultural workshops.
I was born in a community in the south of Haebaru. Right now I live in
Haebaru. Oshiro, my high school classmate, invited me to work together
with him, and so I moved to Haebaru. I have been one of the councilmenof the Haebaru Community Center since it was established. The center
maintains communication with Asian countries. Filipino, Indonesian,and Korean exhibitions have been held in the center. We have peaceenvoys to all nations. In the 1980s, before Kim Dae Jung and Kim
Jong-Il met, we actually had a South and North Korean convention
here.
The center used to be a food preparation place for a middle school.
After renovation, it became a cultural center. Even though the space isvery limited and the building is very old, what we are doing here isvery international and valuable. I am also one of the members of thehistoriographic institute of Okinawa. Basically, we collect historical
documents and edit and publish them in historical books. Among theoutput of our section is a collection of immigrants’ historical documents.
I also assist in writing and producing the city records and history books.
The institute also has documentation on the Ryukyu Kingdom; all theofficial documents that passed between China and Southeast Asia havebeen collected. I am also a member of the Okinawa Prefectural Boardof Education. The scholastic works I have done have been used in school
textbooks and other materials. An example is the Okinawan history

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and culture booklets, which are distributed to middle school students.
Part of my job is to collaborate with Haebaru Cultural Center researchersand publish documents to improve our cultural heritage and history.
My Literary Works
Right now I am a public servant. But at 5 pm, I become a poet. My
name also changes from Chosei Takamine to Ben Takara after 5 pm. In
1990 I went to the Philippines to study for seven months. I have kept
ties with Sionil Jose, one of the famous Filipino novelists. In 2001 I
was invited to Indonesia for a poetry festival. I have also visited Korea
many times. The focus of my work is to maintain a network with other
Asian poets. I started publishing poetry when I was 17. We have amagazine called Kana, which means love—love for people, love for
all—in the Okinawan dialect and also in ancient Japanese dialect. In
the Okinawan dialect, “Kana san do” means I love you. When four tofive poets gather together and contribute their works, we publish an
edition of the magazine. The latest one is the twelfth edition.
My first poetry book was published when I was 22 years old, and so far
I have published seven poetry books. Unfortunately in Japan, poetry
books do not sell. I was very surprised when I went to Indonesia. I was
asked many questions, such as how many poetry books I have published.
When I answered “About 500 to 1,000 copies,” they told me that I
would be a bestseller in Indonesia. In Japan, it takes a bookstore about
five to ten years to sell 20 copies of a poetry book. One of the mostprimitive ways to sell books is to carry them around and sell them retailin street markets. I have been to the Amami and Miyako islands, hosting
poetry reading sessions and selling my books in this way. Unfortunately,in the whole country of Japan, I know only one person who is a fulltime poet, Shuntaro Tanikawa. He is not only a poet but also writes
lyrics of songs and animation. He lives solely on his literary works.
The rest are professors or civil servants or something else, and parttime poets.

Dialogue
LEE SEEJAE What kinds of topics do you choose as poetry themes?
BEN TAKARA There are universal themes, joy of birth, sadness ofdeath, love, and hate. Those four may be universal themes of poetrywork. What do you think?

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MOHIUDDIN AHMAD I wrote about different feelings at different
times.
TAKARA It is very difficult to answer that question. If I can come up
with a very good answer, I will win the Nobel Prize for poetry.
[Text partly omitted.]
LEE To preserve the Okinawan language, is this nationalism for you?
In the Philippines, is it only Tagalog?
ALEJO It could be language, it could be the state, but it is ultimately
love, the vagueness of that message.
LEE How many people can read you if you write in the Okinawan
language?
TAKARA People above 50 years old maybe are able to read it. But
Okinawa also has different problems. The Okinawan dialect, Miyako
dialect, and Yaeyama dialect are different from each other. As I said
earlier, because of the separation into northern and southern culturalareas, communication between those two has been difficult.
JANET PILLAI So do you use Okinawan to talk to each other?
TAKARA We cannot communicate using the Okinawan dialect with
Miyako people. The Ryukyu language has five different dialects:
Amami, Okinawa, Miyako, Yaeyama, and Yonaguni.
LEE Do you have any moments writing in Japanese when you cannot
express something, for example, difficulties arising from the meanings
of words?
TAKARA I do have that. In the Okinawan language, there areexpressions that cannot be reproduced in Japanese.
LEE Using the Japanese language and having that gap of meaning, is itdifficult to express Okinawan ideas and identity in Japanese?
TAKARA Of course, if I say it is difficult, that is the end of the story.
Take, for example, a person who is suffering, who may have lost a leg
in a fire and has low income or something like that. In the Okinawan
language we say chimugurusa, which when translated into Japanese issomething like kawaiso. The direct translation is chimugurushii, whichmeans your liver or gut is tormented. But in Japanese, kawaiso is kindof the wrong way to express that. In Japanese your emotion isemphasized, but in chimugurushi this person is bitter because of
suffering, and that feeling is the same as mine.

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LEE How about writing Okinawan literature in the Japanese language?
TAKARA Probably some expressions are overlapping, some are not.
There are some portions you cannot directly express in Japanese but
some you can. We have Japanese-Korean poets; we also associate withthem, and their emotions are also similar.
AHMAD You mean that among people, because of age, it may bedifficult to communicate with them in the Okinawan language.
TAKARA Right.
AHMAD So after 30 or 40 years the language will die?
TAKARA Nice question. September 18 has been designated by
Okinawa Prefecture as Okinawan local language day. An Okinawan
councilman said that if we just leave it alone in the course of nature, theOkinawan dialect will become extinct. We should preserve the Okinawan
language. The Ainu are already restoring their language. In Okinawa
we are planning to restore the language. This is a school textbook; wehave a subtext written in the Okinawan language. Starting from
Okinawan history and social studies, we are writing in Okinawan. Thisis for middle school, and the other one is for high school.
AHMAD Are you aware of the international mother-language day,which is on February 21? It was declared by UNESCO and has beencelebrated for the last five years. In 1952, students in the University of
Dhaka were demanding that Bengali be made a state language ofPakistan. Some students were killed by the police. Since then, February
21 in Bangladesh is a language day.
PILLAI Can I ask why this generation of writers, who speak Okinawan
and think in Okinawan and also write in Japanese, why didn’t they
write in Okinawan?
TAKARA There are two reasons. Some literary works used the
Okinawan language. Some people from Yaeyama wrote in the Yaeyama
language. If I read that, I cannot understand most of the meaning.
LEE You are bilingual. Why didn’t you write in two languages?
TAKARA That is precisely why I sometimes write bilingual poetry, in
Okinawan and Japanese. The first reason is that each work is a literarypiece, so we cannot really do anything. The second reason is that even
if I write Okinawan or Yaeyama or Miyako or Yonaguni, the number ofpeople who can read what I write is limited. But if you write in Japanese,Sixty Days’ Chronicle

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maybe you can publish 500 copies. If you do that in each language, lesspeople would understand fully.
LEE In the US occupation period, what was the US idea about thisdialect?
TAKARA Up to 1950, before the outbreak of the Korean War, the US
troops were thinking that the Ryukyus would be separate from Japanand could become independent. So they started education in English.
They started producing textbooks in English. Actually in school theyencouraged children to speak the Okinawan language. But Okinawan
teachers saw through this scheme, and they protested and said, Okinawa
should go back to Japan. The reversion movement began. At that time,
if we had educated children in the Okinawan language, we might havebecome independent. But the Okinawan people had to decide whether
to choose English or Japanese, and they opted for Japanese. After the
Korean War, US troops were trying to monitor and suppress China andKorea. They had to stay in Okinawa. So US troops had to agree to thedemand from Okinawan teachers that education be conducted inJapanese.

I-House Seminar Room
17 October 2006

Required of Journalism in Asia:
From the Perspective of an Independent Journalist
Akihiro Nonaka
Founder/ Representative, Asia Press International

We use TV and newspaper to know what is going on. If the information
we get through the media is warped or biased in some way, it meansthat we do not get accurate information about the world. Veryunfortunately, the amount of biased information given in the mass media
is getting bigger. This is why people are looking into alternative media.
The need for “alternatives” is becoming stronger around the world.
Today I would like to talk about the actual experiences of Asia Press bygiving you some specific examples. I would like to talk about the statusquo of the online media as well as what we can get from it.
Members of Asia Press go to all kinds of areas in Asia, and their objective
is not just to cover conflicts and wars. For example, last year in February
there was a coup in Nepal. The national media was under the censorshipof the king. The Nepalese had to rely on broadcasts of BBC to learn
about their own country. In Afghanistan in October of 2001, after 9/11,
the US and British forces attacked the Taliban. I went to cover the conflict
there. If you went to little towns that did not even have electricity, youfound that they too were attacked. They knew why it was happening,
because they were listening to BBC broadcasts by radio. I have also
been to East Timor several times. The world was watching the situationin East Timor as they fought for independence from Indonesia. The
people in East Timor were watching BBC and CNN. But BBC andCNN were regarded by the pro-Indonesia people as the enemy, because
their broadcasts were pro-independence. Sometimes you would see
someone being interviewed by BBC or CNN in the morning. Then in
the afternoon people would watch that interview, and in the evening
you would find the same person being critical of BBC or CNN.

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The public broadcaster of Japan, NHK, has no influence whatsoever.
That is because NHK is only broadcasting in Japanese. The news
broadcasts that are watched all over Asia are mainly the English
channels. It seems we do not have a system in Asia yet where the people
in Asia can provide information or broadcast information to the outside
world. As a result, people around the world are only learning about
Asia through the Western media.
I would like to look at how biased or twisted the Western media can be.
I would like to use as an example the US footage of the Iraq war. [Textpartly omitted.]
The war in Iraq started on March 20, 2003. By April 9 Saddam Hussein’s
regime had fallen. We have seen the scene many times where the statueof Saddam Hussein was toppled. A member of Asia Press was in
Baghdad when it happened. But the Japanese journalists who werecovering for Japanese TV and newspapers were already out of Baghdad
before March 20. On April 9, apart from three people from Kyodo,
only independent journalists were in Baghdad to cover that day. The
member of Asia Press provided coverage from Baghdad for many major
news agencies in Japan. I discussed with the person in Baghdad whatkind of comment he would give about the scene when the US militarycame into Baghdad. To be more specific, the point that we discussed
was whether the people in Iraq welcomed the US military or not. Whichside should we have presented? Our reporter was there before April 9
and had been covering Baghdad for about a month.
The journalist said in the first report that when the US military came to
Baghdad, only a few residents welcomed them. But the next day, on
April 10, two major Japanese newspapers, the Asahi and Yomiuri, both
said that the residents welcomed the US military. For example, theYomiuri, which had the Iraq story on its front page, said that the citizensof Baghdad welcomed the US military, saying that they were theirliberators. On another page, they had a second story with the headline,“We are now free, the citizens rejoice.” The reports were completely
different from what the reporter in Baghdad said. The person who wrote
this for the Yomiuri actually was in Amman, not in Baghdad. We asked
him how he wrote the story without being in Baghdad. He said that hewatched TV and wrote the story. If you visit a correspondent working
abroad, you will usually find in his room four TV screens tuned in to
the BBC and CNN. I asked the Yomiuri reporter if he had watched Al
Jazeera. He said no, because he did not understand Arabic. When thesemajor news agencies said that the Iraqis welcomed the US military, theSixty Days’ Chronicle

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Japanese people’s perception, even people who were against the war,
was likely to be that if the Iraqis were happy, maybe the war was right.
Regarding Saddam’s statue, the Asahi reported that there was a big
crowd of people rejoicing in the fall of the statue. But according to the
Asia Press reporter, there were only about 150 to 200 people there. Can
you really call this a big crowd? If you remember the TV coverage ofthe statue’s toppling, you will recall that the camera was focusing only
on the people around the statue. This created an image of people rejoicing
on the fall of the statue. That image was created through camera work.
The fall of the statue and the fall of Saddam Hussein regime created animage that this was a historic event equivalent to the fall of the Berlin
Wall. There were people in the United States who thought that the image
created by the US media was questionable. The ABC report said thaton the scene you would find people dragging the head of Saddam’s
statue. There were 18 people involved, 7 of whom were reporters. With
the camera zooming out of the crowd away from the statue, you could
see that there was no crowd. The camera panned out, and you saw fromthe top. Not many people were around the statue three minutes after it
fell. Even with such a historic event, we may not be learning the real
story of what actually happened.
In an NHK report, it was analyzed how the world media in Britain andthe US as well as Japan reported the war in Iraq through their news
bulletins. The first image that was broadcast over and over again was
the rows of US tankers coming in. The second image was missiles being
launched from US vessels. Third were the Iraqi bases that were attacked
by US and British forces. What we did not see much was the damage
caused to Iraqi people. Intentionally, the damage on Iraqi people was
not shown. Let me give another example, what was broadcast on NHK
about the war. What we saw most was the attack and the operations of
the US military. Only ranked eighth was the citizen’s damage andcasualties. If the ranking had been reversed and we had heard more
about the damage and casualties, probably we would have had a larger
voice from around the world against the war.
Before we sent people to cover the Iraq War, we had one thing in mind
about the viewpoint that should be there, and that was to show thedamage on the side of the Iraqi citizens. We thought that already themass media had their embedded journalists in the US forces; therefore,
we were sure to learn a lot about that. What we could not expect to hearmuch about was what was happening to the citizens. So our viewpoint

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was on the citizen side. An NGO from the US and Britain compiled abody count. The count as of today is a minimum of 44,000 and amaximum of 68,000. A report made by a US research institute said thatso far 650,000 people have died in Iraq. Obviously there has been greatdamage, but nobody knows its true scale because nobody is actuallycounting. One US general said, “We do not do body counts.” He wassaying that casualties are not a priority.
I went to the ceremony for 9/11 last month. There you could see thebereaved families calling out the name of each person who died. The
names of the victims of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not being
called. There was nobody out in the world mourning their death. At
Asia Press, we believe this is totally unfair. It is impossible to reportfrom a neutral stand and have an objective report. For example, suppose
you are reporters and I ask you to file a neutral and objective report on
Iraq. What would you go out to look for? I have been to Iraq, and I havespoken to the US soldiers there, very young men, 19 or 20 years old.
There are also women soldiers. It seemed I was talking to high school
kids from rural parts of the US. They believe that they are there to saveand liberate the people of Iraq. They are there for the sake of democracy.
For the Iraqi people who lost a family member because of the US attack,the war is a national terror for their country. In a war like that, there is
no way you can report from a neutral and objective viewpoint. In
democracy what is important is not to have biased reporting, and yet
there are many reports from a biased viewpoint. When there is just one
biased viewpoint, then that causes many problems. But when you haveseveral, many reports, many programs from different viewpoints, witheach one maybe biased, we will then be able to get a larger picture of
the actual situation. When Asia Press reporters go out, we try to have avery clear idea of the viewpoint from which we are going to look at thesituation. If we are asked whether or not we are biased, we will say,
yes, we do have a bias. But in this democratic world of the media, we
believe that our role is also essential.
Sometimes our view at Asia Press may conflict with the view held by
the government or the nation. We still have people in Iraq. Almost every
day I get a phone call from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs telling us
not to send reporters to Iraq. The ministry is making this request because
there are many reporters or NGO workers getting caught as hostages,
sometime being killed. If we believe that there is a reason to be out
there, we will send reporters. The viewpoint held by the Foreign Ministry
will in no way influence our thoughts. I believe that among the many

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media reporters in Japan, Asia Press is probably the organization thathas the most reporters being smuggled in and out of countries. If wewant to cover the guerillas and their activities in Afghanistan, it meansthat we will cross the border from Pakistan. If we want to cover the
militant minorities from Burma, we cannot travel from the Burmese
capital. It means we will have to cross the border from Thailand into
their territory. Of course we may get arrested at borders or captured as
hostages, but we are totally responsible for whatever happens to us. We
discussed this with the reporter in Iraq before he left: what to do if hewere arrested or captured.
In the past, when a Japanese national was taken hostage in Iraq, theymight ask for money. Sometimes there would be a request to withdraw
the Self-Defense Forces. It is our rule that if one of our members istaken hostage or captured, no rescue operation will be carried out. Be it
an NGO that wants to intercede with the hostile party or even thegovernment, we would reject any request or any proposal made about arescue operation, because we are journalists. If we are journalists andare covering a war, we need to be out there in the battlefield. Whatever
happens to us when we are out there, we are totally responsible for that.
It is not the government that should be responsible for whatever happens
to us. Our viewpoint does not need to match the view of the government.
There are several issues that the Japanese mass media have in
relationship to the government. When it comes to working with thegovernment, it seems that they forget about the rules of journalism. On
the issue of Takeshima, or Dokdo Island as the Koreans call it, this is aterritorial dispute between Japan and South Korea that was a big issue
last year. Even though it is such a big issue, however, Japanese TV
stations broadcast almost no reports on Takeshima or Dokdo itself. I
wondered why nobody was covering the island itself, or even the areasurrounding the island. I decided to go myself. I first went to Seoul andmet a correspondent of a major newspaper and asked why the Japanesejournalists in Seoul did not go to cover the island. Did anybody haveany clue or answer? Why they did not think to go out? I was told thatthey did not go to Takeshima because the Japanese embassy there asked
them not to. The embassy’s stance is that Takeshima is a Japanese
territory; so if a Japanese journalist travels from Korea to Takeshima, itmeans that we are accepting the fact that it is a part of Korea.
Japan has another territorial dispute, one with Russia regarding a groupof islands in the north, but the same kind of logic works there, as well.

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We had a member who covered the islands to find out what the Russian
residents of the islands thought about the issue. We wanted the report
to be broadcast by NHK. But the NHK producer, when I approachedhim, said that this would be very difficult. He asked me how the reporter
got there. I replied that the visa came from Russia. Because the islands
are under the rule of Russia right now, you cannot get to them withouta Russian visa. Upon hearing that, the producer told me that because
the Japanese government takes the position that the islands off Hokkaido
are part of Japanese territory, going there on a Russian visa is totally
unacceptable. To do so would imply acceptance of the fact that theislands are part of Russia.
There is something really weird going on here. As a journalist, youhave to go out there to meet the people to get their stories. But it seems
that the mass media is voluntarily refraining from going out there
because of the demands or pressures of the government, which as ajournalist is a totally unacceptable attitude. Anyway, I traveled toTakeshima last year. I asked a person I knew in the South Koreanparliament to facilitate my visit to the island. Since I was only the second
Japanese person to travel to the island in 50 years, staff members of the
Korean broadcaster KBS went with me.
As I was covering these stories, people told me, “You aren’t a Japanese,
you’re anti-Japanese.” When I try to cover other stories like thecontroversy over Yasukuni Shrine, some people tell me that I am suchan unpatriotic person I should leave the country. I say to them, “Sure, if
you pay me $3 million, I’ll leave the country for you.” When I traveled
to Takeshima, I rode in a boat also carrying Korean passengers. I wastold to remain quiet, because if people found out that I was Japanese,
there could be a problem. But when I got on the boat, I heard people
saying, “That’s a Japanese person.” They knew right away. So I ended
up getting a chance to chat with the South Korean residents. They wanted
their views to be known.
Several years ago there was a big issue about a Korean fishing vessel
operating in Japanese waters. I tried to cover the story because it was astory about Korean and Japanese fishermen in conflict. I tried to get aJapanese member of Asia Press on a South Korean fishing vessel, so
we could learn why they need to operate in those waters. But Japanesepeople cannot board such a vessel. So I asked a Korean member ofAsia Press from Pusan to go instead. The small fishing boat was anillegal vessel in South Korea. Its operations were a problem for Korea

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as well, because it was an illegal vessel to begin with, and it was fishingin Japanese waters. When a correspondent of KBS learned that we would
have a Korean member of Asia Press boarding the ship, he told the Asia
Press member that he should remember that before he was a journalist,
he was a Korean. “What are you thinking, trying to report the shame ofSouth Korea on Japanese TV?” The program was aired on NHK, andon seeing it, some Japanese fishermen got in contact with us to say thatthrough the program, they learned that Korean fishermen had similar
problems to theirs. It was a shared issue between the two. Without sucha program, they would just be enemies. The Japanese and Korean
fishermen had no opportunities to get together to speak with each other.
But because they learned about each other through the program, they
are now able to see those on the other side as human beings.
North Korea is a big problem now. The question is how we shouldreport on North Korea. Several years ago some North Koreans tried toseek asylum in a Japanese consulate in China. It was a big issue. Major
Japanese TV networks asked Asia Press whether we had videos of people
fleeing North Korea to China. I wondered why Japanese TV stations
and newspapers did not have any footage of their own of North Korean
refugees crossing the border with China. The North Korean issue is thelargest international issue in Japan. If we want to know about the issue,
the quickest and most accurate way to learn is to interview the people
from North Korea crossing into China to ask them what is happening.
But nobody is asking questions. Japanese correspondents are not there
on the border to speak with the people who flee, because the Chinese
government does not look at the people fleeing into China as refugees.
It regards them as illegal immigrants, and it does not welcome foreign
journalists who want to cover their stories. Major Japanese TV stations
and newspapers have large offices in Beijing, and they do not want toanger the Chinese authorities.
I believe the number-one role for a journalist is to provide information
on what Japanese citizens want to know. Right now Japan wants toknow what is happening in North Korea. The weakest point of Japanesejournalists is that they cannot stand up against the authorities. A friend
at CNN said that he is never worried about not getting a visa or getting
kicked out of the country when he goes out to cover a story. The problem
with the Japanese media is that, although we need to be the watchdog
of authority, critics of what is happening, we are not doing that.
Sometimes the mass media even bow before the authorities. Membersof Asia Press have covered the border issue several times. We know

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Communities in Actionthat the Chinese police have photographs of us and are watching to seethat we do not wander across the border into North Korea. As we arejournalists, we have people who are happy to cooperate with us, so we
do not have to stay at hotels when we travel. Members who cover Korean
issues can speak Korean. Therefore, we have been fortunate not to bearrested by the police as we cover the story of the North Korean refugees.
Some Japanese mass media do have good coverage and do produce
good work. However, when it comes to the Iraq War, North Korean
issues, and territorial issues, topics which the Japanese want to know
about, the reports of the Japanese media may be problematic.
The Asia Press is a group of professional journalists. When we go out
to make a report, we want to make a difference. We want to be different
from the mass media.

Dialogue
MARIA HARTININGSIH I totally agree with the reporting on the
Iraq War. However, a photo shown in your reports from thepsychological perspective was very frightening and violent. I am afraidthat journalists may tap into what psychologists describe as the
pornography of violence. You also spoke of the history of the Taliban,
the Mujahedin, and the war in Afghanistan, saying that the violence
has been there for a long time. According to many books I have read,
before the Soviet invasion, Afghanistan was not that kind of state, it
was a more peaceful state.
AKIHIRO NONAKA I do believe that people may have similar
opinions about what you have mentioned on the Iraq War. But what
happens in war is that people kill each other; that is the reality. As ajournalist, one’s first rule is to show the reality. So when we try toshow what is happening out there, sometimes we have to show a deadbody.
[Text partly omitted.] The first time I visited Afghanistan was in 1983.
You remember General Masud, who was killed before 9/11? He wasstill a hero, a person who stood up against the Soviet Union. I was thefirst Japanese to meet Masud face to face. I crossed the border from
Pakistan and visited a valley called Panjshir, which was 100 kilometers
away from Kabul. Since then, I have been back and forth between
Pakistan and Afghanistan. We have been covering Afghanistan for over

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20 years. One other thing about Japanese TV is that they are very
concerned about viewer ratings, how many people watch a program.
When we cover such issues as Palestine and the Israel-Lebanon warfare,viewership will go down. In Japan, the rate is calculated every minute.
Although we have covered the Afghanistan issue, Palestine, and theconflict between Israel and Lebanon, this is not really welcomed by
Japanese TV.
LEE SEEJAE What do you think about Japanese TV reports on North
Korea? Do they tend to emphasize the difference with South Korea?
When you report on North Korea, what is your viewpoint?
NONAKA The coverage of North Korea in the Japanese media isstereotyped. We cannot really see the faces of the people living in North
Korea. Many Japanese people, because of the news coverage on TV,
think that North Korean people are like robots, that they are brainwashed.
Because we cannot freely walk around North Korea to make reports, insome ways we cannot help that. There are two major issues. One is thateven when Japanese correspondents travel to North Korea, they do notsend back many critical reports. There is one thing that Japanese media
want when covering North Korea, which is a one-on-one interview
with leader Kim Jong-il. wants to have an interview with Kim, and if it
criticizes North Korea too much, it will be shut out of the country. The
other issue is viewer ratings, which are calculated every minute. For
example, in a news bulletin, suppose there is a feature on North Korea.
If it is about North Korean history, the ratings will definitely go down.
On the other hand, if the North Korean feature is on entertainment
women, called “women who give joy” in Japan, that will bring up theratings. That is reality, especially with the commercial broadcasters, towhom the ratings are everything.
I sometimes teach at universities. From time to time, I ask the students
if they know why there are two Koreas. The other day, I taught 30
students at the University of Tokyo; only three of them came up withthe correct answer. In short, students do not know history. Last July
North Korea test-launched some missiles, which was a very big issue
in Japan. I think that North Korea is not a threat to Japan. Some people
said that the missiles were meant for Japan. But if you look at where
the missiles fell, you find it was within or close by Russian territorial
waters in the Sea of Japan. Even today we have one member in
Pyongyang. Among the military there, there is a great food shortage.
There are many soldiers who are malnourished. There is a blackout

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almost every day in Pyongyang. The economic scale of North Korea isequal to one prefecture here in Japan, Shimane Prefecture. North Korea
may be capable of launching several missiles, but they are not capableof waging a war. They have no rational reason to attack Japan. For theJapanese mass media or Japanese politicians, the great danger North
Korea poses is that it provides a reason to remilitarize Japan, to change
Japan’s Self-Defense Forces into a full military. People who want tochange the opinion of the Japanese toward remilitarization can utilize
it. If there were going to be a war in Northeast Asia, it would be causedby actions of the United States. I believe that war is not going to be
initiated by North Korea.
I am not pro-North Korea. I am just trying to think logically. As ajournalist, I believe that our job is to provide materials that can help
viewers or readers to think about North Korea, to learn about North
Korea, including its history. Right now, the coverage of North Korea
has an emotional touch to it. There is a sense of urgency in Japan. We
are making an appeal for people to look calmly at the issue. Sometimes,
I imagine that President George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, and Kim
Jong-il are connected by a hotline. As long as the US is fighting a war
on terrorism, bin Laden has an excuse to carry out his war. If Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe has a hotline with Kim Jong-il whenever he needs
to increase his power, he may have Kim fire a missile or carry out anuclear test. There is a rather funny relationship between two sides: theenemy is making its enemy stronger. The enemy is providing strength
to the other.
JANET PILLAI What do you think of the future of alternative media
in the light of the trend for the media to be politically and financiallycontrolled by governments in Asia? Another question is whether you
think there is room for neutrality on the Internet.
NONAKA Unfortunately, online journalism is only successful in small
parts of the world, for example, in South Korea. In Japan, online
journalism is not established yet. Some people say that online journalism
will replace the TV and newspapers that we have today. But I believethat it may take 10 to 20 years for that to happen. If you look at theJapanese Internet, you find that Yahoo, Google, and a number of otherportals are providing some news. However, it is not journalism. It isjust an information industry. I say this because one major role ofjournalism is to assign priority to issues. There are many things
happening around the world. The role of journalism is to pick out theSixty Days’ Chronicle

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important issues and provide information on them. Sometimes some of
our work goes to Yahoo. The people working at Yahoo are not journalists;they are simply computer engineers. They do not prioritize which issues
are more important than others.
It would take 5, 10, or more years for the Asahi Shimbun to change tooperations focusing only on the Internet. One reason is that newspapers
are physically delivered to households. There are 82,000 people who
deliver newspapers. This means that the Asahi buys the newsprint, prints
the news on it, and delivers the papers to delivery centers, from where
people deliver them to households. It is a high-cost operation. For
example, if you want to subscribe to the morning and evening editionsof the Asahi, over a month it would cost roughly $33. The good thing
about a newspaper is when you take one look at a page and see the sizeof the headlines, you see what are the important issues of the day. We
do have some online papers. However I believe that they are not goingto succeed. Several years ago, one Japanese Internet newspaper was
established, but it is not doing well. I am not optimistic about online
journalism.
For people at NGOs or NPOs, the Internet is a very strong tool. But
there is one big danger: The Internet provides a lot of information, andso we may think that it is the smartest medium. What is actually
happening is that it is changing people’s thoughts into more simplified
thinking. We are getting too much information that we cannot digest;
so we are asking somebody else to make the judgment and select which
items are important. It seems that with more information, Japanesesociety is becoming more uniform. Thought is becoming simpler because
the large amount of information is not making people think smarter, it
is making people stop thinking.
Finally, I would observe that we have a member of Asia Press in China,
and it seems that freedom of expression is slowly but steadily growing
there. I believe that this trend is not going to be reversed. On the one
hand, freedom of expression in Asia is spreading; but on the other, themedia in the US as well as in Japan are coming under the control of big
capitalist conglomerates. We believe this picture is not going to change.

I-House Seminar Room
6 November 2006

The Most Dangerous Scenario of
the Yasukuni Problem
Tetsuya Takahashi
Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
University of Tokyo

The Yasukuni issue has been a major topic ever since the advent of theKoizumi administration. This is not the first time, however, that
Yasukuni Shrine has been at the center of controversy subsequent toJapan’s defeat in World War II. It is, I believe, the third round ofcontroversy. Yasukuni Shrine has evolved in association with war. In
the nineteenth century, at the end of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, it
was constructed as a shrine to worship the war dead, consequently
becoming a symbol of the military and militarism. Initially the shrine
was run and managed by the state. After the defeat in World War II, it
was separated from the state and made a religious corporation. As astate shrine and military shrine, 2.46 million fallen soldiers wereenshrined in it.
After the defeat, the first round of controversy over Yasukuni occurred
during the period of 1969 to 1974, when a nationalization bill was
submitted in order to make it again a state shrine. At the time, there
were militant arguments between those for the nationalization of theshrine and those against it. Consequently, the bill was not passed. The
second round of controversy was the period of 1985 to 1986, whenthen Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone announced that he would makeofficial visits to the shrine. On August 15, 1985, Nakasone visited theshrine, thinking that postwar politics had totally resolved the issue.
Japan had been exercising restraint, and it was the end of the troubled
past. Nakasone asserted that Japan should move forward, become amajor power, and play a major role in the world.
The Nakasone government was said to be a hawkish government.
Because of the official visit, there were criticisms within Japan. Many

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considered the government’s position to be problematic. For the firsttime, China criticized Japan, because 14 class-A war criminals wereenshrined in Yasukuni as kami, or deities. These were the criminals
adjudged in the Tokyo war-crimes trial (International Military Tribunal
for the Far East) as the leaders of Japan’s war of aggression. So for theJapanese prime minister to make a show of public worship at Yasukuni
offended those countries that were victimized during the war. The media
in South Korea, Southeast Asia, and other places also severely criticizedJapan. Because of the intense criticism of his 1985 visit, in the following
year Nakasone discontinued the visits.
The third round of controversy began when Jun’ichiro Koizumi became
prime minister in 2001. Every year in August Koizumi would visit theshrine, and each time the Chinese and South Korean governments would
harshly criticize the visit, resulting in the cancellation of summit talks
between Japan and China and Japan and South Korea. The arguments
over the Yasukuni visits of Koizumi centered on the charge that it was
problematic to have the prime minister visit a shrine where class-A war
criminals were enshrined. The visits were hardly good for Japan’s
political relations with China and South Korea. To the end, Koizumi
continued to be criticized on this matter by China. But despite thecriticisms, he announced that he would not give in to arguments fromoverseas because they were attempts to meddle in domestic affairs.
This stance enhanced his popularity in Japan.
The war of aggression and Japan’s colonial rule in China, Korea, andsurrounding nations in Asia have not been settled and dealt with properly.
I feel the matter of war responsibility has not been properly addressed.
In the 1990s there were 70 suits made to Japan’s courts seeking apology
and reparations. For Japan to regain the trust of Korea, China, and othercountries, the prime minister should not visit Yasukuni Shrine.
When we consider the increasing opposition and criticisms of foreign
governments, we must conclude that the Yasukuni issue cannot be
resolved as a diplomatic problem if we strictly limit our thinking toforeign relations. One argument is that if Japan gives in, that would bea disgrace that could result in rising feelings of nationalistic thoughtson the part of the Japanese. In addition, a mechanism has been created
whereby the prime minister can leverage the issue in order to maintainpopularity. The Yasukuni issue in terms of diplomatic relations focuseson the class-A war criminals. According to Prime Minister Nakasone
and others, if Japan were to remove the war criminals from the shrine,Sixty Days’ Chronicle

121

the criticisms of China and South Korea would probably stop rightaway. Therefore, there is a trend among Japanese politicians to favor
the separation of the criminals from the shrine, to take them out of thepicture. However, the shrine officials assert that all the war dead havebeen enshrined as kami, and once they have been enshrined, it is
impossible to remove them. In Shinto, they say, it is not possible toconsider a deity already enshrined as no longer being enshrined. This
argument makes it difficult to seek a solution by simply removing the
war criminals from the list of the enshrined.
Hypothetically, what might happen if the war criminals were dissociatedfrom the shrine? Without the criticisms from China and South Korea,
the Japanese prime minister would be able to worship there. However,if the prime minister visits the shrine, it would still violate the article of
the Constitution that separates religion and state. Until the end of thewar, Yasukuni was a state shrine, one which played a major role in thewar. If the prime minister visits the shrine, it would mean the return ofa relationship between the shrine and government that violates theConstitution. The stronger the association between Yasukuni and thegovernment, the larger is the possibility for state politics to utilize theleverage of the shrine in order to foster a positive mindset toward war
among the Japanese public. The state would be able to urge the public
to pray for the war dead who fall for the sake of the nation. The
Constitution, though, forbids the use of Yasukuni by the government
for war.
There were three lawsuits made by the people against Prime Minister
Nakasone’s visit, each saying that it was unconstitutional. For Prime
Minister Koizumi, seven lawsuits have been lodged. Two court
judgments have agreed that visits to the shrine violate the Constitution.
One judgment said that there was a strong possibility or suspicion of
the visits being unconstitutional, while the other said that if the visits
continued, they would become unconstitutional. The issue has notreached the Supreme Court yet, but a High Court ruling of the visits
being unconstitutional has been delivered.
The class-A war criminals were enshrined in 1978. From 1985 onward,
the governments of China and South Korea started to view the visits asproblematic. But the fact that the war criminals were enshrined isunrelated to the fundamental matter of the shrine, because Yasukuni
without the war criminals would still be Yasukuni Shrine. The shrine
was founded in 1868, and it remained a state shrine until 1945. After122

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the defeat in 1945, it became a religious corporation functioning without
the class-A war criminals until 1977. As for the war criminals and theshrine, it is not as if they are indispensable to the shrine. The focus of
the discussion on the Tokyo trial, which found the class-A war criminals
to be guilty, was the war responsibility for the events from theManchurian Incident of 1931 onward, that is, the Japanese aggressionin China and the Pacific War.
What Japan did prior to the Manchurian Incident was not covered by
the class-A war criminals concept. At the time of the Manchuria Incident,
Japan was already an imperial nation with several colonies: Korea wasannexed in 1910, and Taiwan was placed under colonial control in 1895.
The war dead who had fought for the state and contributed to thecolonization of the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan were enshrined in
Yasukuni. Thus for Korea and Taiwan, consideration of the Yasukuni
issue and Japan’s responsibilities in terms of aggression in Asia cannot
be fully covered by talk about the class-A war criminals, because theshrine played a major role in Japanese colonialism prior to the time of
their acts. This is a problem of the scope covered by the class-A war
criminals concept and the scope of Japan’s responsibility for aggressionin Asia, as well as of the constitutionality of visits to the shrine byprime ministers.
The recent discussions of the Yasukuni issue have been focused just on
Prime Minister Koizumi’s visits to the shrine. But deep down there isan even more important issue: worship by the emperor at Yasukuni.
For the people supporting the prime minister’s visits, the ultimate goal
is not to fully establish these visits but rather to resume the visits by theemperor. The current foreign minister, Taro Aso, who was also foreign
minister under Koizumi, said last year that from the point of view ofthe war dead, they did not die saying banzai to the prime minister; theysaid banzai to the emperor. The war dead, in short, died for the emperor.
So the most important thing is to make visits by the emperor a reality.
The Japanese education system until the end of the war taught children
from elementary school on that it is the people’s obligation to give
their lives for the sake of the state and the emperor. It was instilled
through the education that soldiers who acted on their obligation andhad fallen in war for the emperor were models, and so they wereenshrined in Yasukuni. The soldiers lost their fear and anxiety of war
by thinking that if they died, they would be enshrined as kami andwould receive visits from the emperor. The thought of becoming a modelSixty Days’ Chronicle

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for the Japanese people and receiving praise restrained their fears andanxiety and pushed up their morale. That was the kind of role played
by Yasukuni Shrine. The significance of the emperor’s visits does not
only have meaning for soldiers; it also played a major role in sublimating
the sorrow of the bereaved families of the war dead, turning sorrow
into joy. Naturally it is painful for a mother to lose a son or a wife tolose a husband. But once these sons and husbands are enshrined andthe emperor comes for a visit, the bereaved families are invited to theceremonies, and when they see the emperor worshiping at the shrine,
they find joy from death in war.
I have a 1944 magazine article that is quite interesting. It is about awoman named Matsu Tsutsui who was married to a farmer in a poor
village on the island of Shikoku. She went through physical hardshipworking in the fields. Her husband died from illness, so all by herself
she raised her four sons, who all entered the military. Out of the four
sons, three died in war and were enshrined in Yasukuni. Despite thefamily’s poverty and her difficulty in raising her sons, she became
recognized and praised as the mother of the military nation. The article
talks about her feelings when she lost her eldest and second son in thewar. While she was working in a field, the town officer came to tell herof her eldest son’s death. She was so shocked to hear the news that she
sank to the ground until she was just gazing up at the sky. When thesecond son was reported to have died in China, she was saddened again.
When these two sons were enshrined, she was invited from the deepmountains of Shikoku to Tokyo. At the ceremony, her thoughts werechanged as she saw the emperor worshiping at the shrine. She said in
the article, “We poor peasants, even if we died of old age and sickness,no one would care; but because my sons died in war and died for thesake of the state, the emperor is worshiping their souls at the shrine.
There is nothing that could make me happier.”
In order to have visits by the emperor take place, discussion ofnationalizing the shrine will have to come up. Actually visits did takeplace in the past, the last one occurring in 1975. This summer, one of
the influential politicians of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party said
that it was important to have the emperor visit the shrine once again,
and for that it was necessary to have the shrine nationalized. Aftermaking it a national shrine, the government could decide to move theclass-A war criminals out of the shrine. The logic is that with the war
criminals removed, naturally the prime minister can worship, the124Communities in Action

emperor can visit, and there will be no criticism from China and South
Korea.
I believe that this nationalization logic is a very dangerous scenario.
The LDP wants to change the war-renouncing Article 9 of theConstitution and to have Japanese military forces go into action with
the US forces. Recently Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that within his
term, in six years or less, he would like to have Article 9 amended. He
is also thinking that even without revising Article 9, the government
can change its interpretation of collective self-defense, thereby
permitting Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to exercise military power whenacting in self-defense alongside US forces. In this way, with or without
an amendment of Article 9, the time may come when the Japanese SDF
or a new military body would exercise armed force, and soldiers whodied in combat would be enshrined in the nationally run Yasukuni Shrine,
where the prime minister and the emperor would go to honor their spirits.
That is a landscape I can envision for the future. When the SDF weredispatched to Iraq, a study was started on whether SDF troops could beenshrined in Yasukuni if they died. The conclusion of the study wasthat under the current Constitution with its separation of the state andreligion, war dead from Iraq could not be systematically enshrined.
But if Yasukuni were made a state shrine, the war dead of the SDF or
some other military body could be enshrined.
The system of the old days, which Japan has not had since 1945, could
be revived. In the nineteenth century, when the Japanese military was
first created, Yasukuni Shrine was established to support it. This system
was dismantled with Japan’s defeat in World War II. But what we may
see in the twenty-first century is the revision of Article 9 by the Japanese
government, the creation of a true Japanese military, and the foundationof a nationally run Yasukuni Shrine. The scenario I am sharing here is
not related to the class-A war criminals. With the removal of the war
criminals from the shrine, it would work even better. Thus Yasukuni is
not just an issue of memories of the past; it is an issue of grave meaning
to the present and the future.

Dialogue
KUNDA DIXIT By going to Yasukuni, successive prime ministers havebeen doing a popular thing. The visit itself is a populist move. Is therea problem in public opinion, which has not coalesced against militarism?
And is the media at fault?

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125

TETSUYA TAKAHASHI I think you have pointed out appropriately
the linkage to populism. But the issue only became clearly visible after
Koizumi became the head of the government. Until Koizumi, criticism
by the Chinese and South Korean governments had been given a certain
amount of consideration or care by Japanese prime ministers and thegovernment. When Prime Minister Nakasone was harshly criticized,
he considered having the class-A war criminals removed from the shrine.
But because the shrine rejected that idea, he stopped going after justone visit. In the case of Prime Minister Koizumi, despite the criticism,no matter how often he was criticized, he continued to make visits. He
realized for the first time that his stance increased his popularity. Amongthe postwar prime ministers, he was the first to utilize the populism
associated with Yasukuni.
Using the media is very necessary for a populist politician. For the
Koizumi administration, the major point of the Yasukuni issue was thefact that the harsh criticisms by China and South Korea were reportedby the media as a clash of nationalism between Japan and China andJapan and South Korea. This led to the enhanced popularity of Koizumi.
I find problems with the manner in which such reports were made. The
media tended to be sensationalistic, to seek something that was
stimulating and to report in a manner that would be popular among themasses. The Japanese media tend to appeal to nationalistic emotions intheir reporting.
MARIA HARTININGSIH What the politicians have been doing so
far reminds me of the ethics of responsibility.
LEE SEEJAE Why were the class-A war criminals enshrined in
Yasukuni in 1978? I did not really understand the Yasukuni problem.
You explained that the problem is not limited to the war and colonialism,
so I learned a lot. Is there any support for the idea of a secular national
cemetery? We have one in Korea. At the final stage of the Koizumi
government, the Yasukuni problem was really devastating in terms ofnational interests. I recall that Japanese businesses requested thegovernment to defend their interests. While Koizumi was in power hewas very powerful; even without the Yasukuni issue, he could maintainhis position. Why is it that when he was almost finished with his term,
he still went to the shrine? His aim was not to gain popular support atthat point.
TAKAHASHI When the shrine was separated from the state, full
information regarding the war dead could not be obtained from the126Communities in Action

shrine only. Information as to who would be enshrined as war deadcame from the Ministry of Health and Welfare. For the 14 class-A war
criminals, some were sentenced to death, others died in prison. They
were treated as those who died during official duties, and the MHW
instituted measures to provide the bereaved families with pensions. That
happened some years ago, before 1978. Since the MHW considered
the class-A war criminals as war dead along with the others, a list of thewar dead including them was provided to the shrine in the 1960s.
Naturally, when the shrine received the list, it prepared to enshrine
them. But the chief priest at that time felt that if the war criminals wereenshrined with the others, it would create social problems, and that
could make it impossible for the emperor to visit the shrine. Therefore
he stopped the enshrinement. When the chief priest died, the new chief
priest, Nagayoshi Matsudaira, who thought that the Tokyo trial was acase of victor’s justice and that the war criminals were just scapegoats,
decided to go ahead with the enshrinement.
Despite the fact that Japanese business leaders wanted Koizumi to stop
his visits to Yasukuni, feeling that they were not in line with Japan’snational interests, he still continued to worship there even at the end of
his term. I think that was a decision he reached based on whether toemphasize national interests or maintain his own popular image. He
did not want to give in to criticism from China and South Korea. If hecanceled the visits as a result of the criticism, it would mean that he had
bowed before foreign countries. His personal nationalistic emotions
did not allow that.
I believe that so far there have been three reasons for the visits by
Japanese prime ministers. One is elections. Yasukuni is supported by
the Nippon Izokukai, the association of the families of fallen soldiers,
which is a sizable organization. Naturally, with the passage of time, thesize of this association has become smaller, but in the postwar days it
was a major group. So LDP leaders wanted their votes. Koizumi had
publicly promised that once he became president of the LDP and prime
minister, he would visit the shrine. Among party members of the LDP,
about 10% have connections to the military. Second, the prime ministerhas to think about the defense of Japan. When the prime minister visits
the shrine, it enhances the morale of the SDF. The possible enshrinementof those who might be killed in the Iraq War, together with an amendmentof Article 9 and an upgrading of the SDF into a true military, are options
for enhancing the morale of the SDF. Yasukuni Shrine is a symbol
honoring the war dead of the SDF or the military in the highest possible

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way. Third, as Koizumi discovered, politicians can utilize Yasukuni byplaying on populist sentiments to maintain or increase their popularity.
MOHIUDDIN AHMAD I am not interested in Nakasone’s or
Koizumi’s visits, because these are not important to me. You gave us
two dimensions of Yasukuni, religious and political. Those people who
believed that enshrinement would bring consolation can be logicallyquestioned. But the visits of the prime minister to Yasukuni have political
logic. There was another Tokyo tribunal in 2000, the Women’s
International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery,
and there Emperor Hirohito was convicted as a war criminal. Those
people who died for the state are personified in the emperor. I havesome difficulty in understanding your logic of de-enshrining those classA war criminals. I read in the newspaper that 70% of the Japanesesupport the visits of the prime minister to Yasukuni. How could you
ignore that?
TAKAHASHI It may have been a complicated question, I am not certain
if I fully understand your question. Regarding Japanese support rates
for the prime minister’s visits to the shrine, the numbers differ dependingon which opinion poll you consider. In opinion polls, more people will
respond in the affirmative to a question asking whether the prime
minister should “refrain from visits” than one asking if they “oppose
the visits.” Immediately after Koizumi’s visits, those who said that it
was good for the prime minister to visit the shrine tended to outnumber
those who said otherwise. But when asked whether Prime Minister Abeshould visit the shrine, more people say he should refrain from visits.
As to your information that 70% support the visits, I do not know thetiming. The support rate would depend on which opinion poll it was
and when the poll was conducted. Actually when you simply ask whether
the respondent supports or opposes visits, the content of the support or
opposition are not the same. Even among those who support visits,
there are those who say it is natural to have the class-A war criminals
enshrined and to have both the prime minister and the emperor makevisits. Others say that the class-A war criminals should be removed
from the shrine. And yet others say that no visits should be made attimes when China and South Korea are upset but that the visits should
be resumed when they have calmed down. Among those against thevisits, similarly, some actually support the visits but want themdiscontinued during times of criticism. Then there are people like me
who say that even without criticism from foreign countries, no visits

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should be made because of the constitutional question. In fact, some
say that Yasukuni Shrine itself should not exist. There is thus not just a
simple split between those who are for or against the visits but a diverse
range of opinions under discussion. I think we can understand that it is
not a situation where 70% are a unified bloc in support.
You pointed out the distinction between the political and religious levels.
I also believe that there are aspects where one should separate thepolitical and religious levels in discussing this matter. As a researcher,I am focused on the religious level rather than the political. Prior to
Japan’s defeat in the war, there were hardly any criticisms of visits or
people against the shrine because of education. After the defeat, criticism
emerged regarding Yasukuni Shrine’s role in the war as well as incolonization control. Yasukuni is associated with a specific religion.
So not only Koreans and Chinese but also some Japanese bereaved
families wanted their dead relatives removed from the shrine. There
are many bereaved families who are campaigning against Yasukuni forreligious reasons; they find it unacceptable to hold belief in Yasukuni.
Against the backdrop of constitutionally protected religious diversity
and religious freedom, it is hardly proper for the government to be
associated with a specific religion in the way it is at Yasukuni.

Unmasking Identity
Maria Hartiningsih
An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which theperson faces and uses his/her experience1 (James Baldwin).
And I would like to start it from something personal….
Myself. I was a daughter of a woman, who was a daughter of a Muslim
cleric in a Javanese village. My late mother was more literate in MalayArabic than Latin. My father, who has also passed away, came from a
middle-class coastal community and used to play violin and piano.
My grandparents from both my father and mother’s side had built alittle mosque in the village where they had been raised in a rural traditionin the coastal community. Although raised within Muslim tradition,
both my parents, as far as I remember, observed more Javanese traditions
than religious rituals.2
Some of my relatives also observe rather strict Javanese traditionalcustoms,3 though they declare themselves as Muslim and non-Muslim.
1The “her” is mine.
Islam projects itself in various faces and “varieties” letting it more easily find fertile grounds
compared to others according to the time and space. It is futile to see Muslims as one heterogeneousgroup. Indonesia and Java Island in particular have been, for the last 2000 years, the junction ofmost important cultures and civilizations. Indian, Islam, Chinese, European were converging there,
being digested, developed and rejuvenated. Historians would find Java to be an excellent specimen
for research on concepts of tradition, cultural influence, ethnicity and acculturation. For further
discussion, see Denys Lombard, Le Carrefour Javanais: Essai d’histoire globale II, Les reseaux
asiatiques. Nusa Jawa: Silang Budaya, Kajian Sejarah Terpadu, Bagian II: Jaringan Asia
2

(translated edition, Gramedia, 1996). Personal note: my family’s circumstances would not serve
as reference for all Javanese families.
3
Undertaking “white fasting,” sleeping only beyond midnight and then offering prayer in one’s
own way, commemorating birthdays for children and other family members, cleaning of cemeteryprior to the fasting month, etc.

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During the month of Ramadhan, the Islamic fasting month, we often
held a gathering dinner to break fast together. On the Eid day, the biggest
celebration following the Ramadhan fasting, the whole clan gathered
to do sungkeman,4 paying respect to and asking for forgiveness fromthe elders. And yet, as far as I know, religion was never talked about.
I was the only daughter who was raised in Javanese tradition and grew
up in a catholic educational environment. The first name Maria wasadded to my original maiden name Hartiningsih after I was baptized at
the age of six. Margaretha was an additional name added between mybaptized and maiden name when I got Confirmation Sacrament at theage of fifteen.
However, in everyday life, nothing had changed since then. I joined
my mother while she delivered her wirid, the chanting of Allah’s great
names after the daily mandatory prayers, and tahajud, midnight optional
prayer, almost every night when I was still living with her. During
Ramadhan, I did fast with her. Following my mother’s ritual, I also
fasted on certain days in months other than Ramadhan.
Every week my mother woke me up for church mass. Every Christmas,
my mother bought me a new dress and waited for me coming from thechurch, then warmly kissed me and wished me Merry Christmas. My
mother even bought me a cross pendant that I still keep with me.
When I became an adult, I asked her why she allowed me to embrace areligion different from hers. And she answered, “Religion is only ageman(the Javanese word for cloak). She then brought her hands to her heart
and continued saying, “What is more important is here. It is how you
see life, how you treat others and yourself. There is no difference
between us, human beings. We breathe the same air, drink the samewater and walk on the same earth.”Those words have been my guide to live my life. For more than 35
years of my life, I could not build a sense of identity in me. The solid
sense of mutualism, politically verbalized into the word of “tolerance,” had been something that I took for granted.
Identity, or the lack of it, pricked my senses during an episode when
the Monitor, a popular tabloid in Indonesia’s early 1990s, got a libel
suit for allegedly defaming Prophet Muhammad.5 Quite out of the blue
4

“Sungkeman” to the elders on Eid-uI-fitr Festive days, to me, is closer to tradition than spiritual.

Envisioning Community-Building141

one editorial management staffer in my office inquired, “I thought you
were a Chinese.” For some moments I was dumbfounded and did notknow how to react to that. In a flash a set of characteristics of mine
constructed my identity. All of a sudden I realized that my skincomplexion is fairer than an average Javanese. My eyes are not thatlarge. And I also became conscious of my not-so-common Javanesename.
That “sense of not so clear identity” was, again, awakened when some
sub-district officials of Rawa Belong, West Jakarta, summoned me notlong after the Monitor case surfaced. The architect of my newly built
house had attempted to overcome Jakarta’s humidity by raising theroof and doing away with dividing walls. When the house wascompleted, the officials thought I had built a church amidst a Muslim
kampong community.
I could not help but feel as if I was in a “tribunal” by those local officials
and some prominent Muslim figures, who all happened to be men. An
explanation from my architect, a pious Muslim himself, could not satisfy
them. They demanded an explanation holding me responsible and settled
for nothing less.
First, they pored over my ID-Card before quizzing me on oodles ofthings that, later, I realized were pieces of my own identity: from myjob, where I work, the time I come home every night, to very personal
things such as who my husband was and how many children I had. This
last line of questioning was apparently to determine whether or not I
was married. At the end of all that, the deputy head of the district asked
me in undertone, “Are you Chinese?”
I refused to react with an answer of “yes” or “no,” as it would not bringany different consequences.
That incident opened my eyes to a novel horizon of realization. All
along I thought I was just a normal person with some “irregularities,”
5
Taking place in October 1990, when Monitor conducted a survey of who are the most popular
individuals and it yielded Muhammad at 11th rank. The Chief Editor, Arswendo Atmowiloto, wascursed, accused of inflicting pain to the 90 percent of Indonesians who are Muslem. Throughout
October – November the Kompas-Gramedia complex were subjected to demonstrations in thename of Islam. The impact was cascading: the Indonesian Journalist Association dismissed his
membership, his company stripped him from all his positions, and after he completed his jail term
he was quietly asked to resign. The court of justice, the last place he sought the ray of justice,pledged him with a five-year jail term.

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i.e., an unmarried woman in her thirties (then), speaking with a thickJavanese accent, a journalist working for a prominent Indonesian daily,
wrongly branded as being “Catholic,” coming home from work
irregularly at night, officially registered as a non-Muslim, and withfacial features of a Chinese look.
That day I realized that those characteristics created an identity in me
to be “the other” and not “one of us” in the eyes of the mainstream. I
became an “alien” who, in the eyes of any person with power at any
level of any form, is predisposed to be treated as they wish including
trampling my fundamental rights as a citizen.
This very issue of identity woke me up at night with a cold sweat when
I heard the news of mass rape of Chinese women in the riot in Jakarta
in May 1998,6 despite the fact that I was in the United States at thattime.
II
“Who am I” has become a tricky question to me.
“I” am a single subject. It bears with it an assortment of identities that
support one another, although at times refuting each other, and thus
giving the sense of a degree of complexity within the single self of me.
Amongst those identities there are some that others, who are outside
me, attached to a certain community, religion, ethnicity, tribe, group,class, or whatever color without first corroborating with me.
Albert Alejo, an anthropologist from the Philippines, brought me to anunderstanding that identity is something created, asserted, invented,
6

The May Riot took place on 13-14 May in Jakarta, but the rape of Chinese women still went on
several days afterwards. Humanitarian Voluntary Team / Tim Relawan Kemanusiaan possesses a
set of data that confirm the incidents. Even though the government of Indonesia in the UN meeting
rejected the report by the UN special reporter on violence against women, Radikha Coomaraswamy,
President Habibie formally requested apology to the people and acknowledged the rape incidents,
July 15, 1998 (Kompas, 15/7/98).
7
Albert E. Alejo, SJ (2000), Generating Energies in Mount Apo: Cultural Politics in a Contested
Environment (Manila: Ateneo University Press), and private discussion with the writer in thecourse of ALFP, Tokyo, 14 September 2006 – 14 November 2006.
8
Kompas 1 March 2006 carried a news item regarding a session in district court against two
women accused of prostitution. The rounding up of these women signified the enactment ofTangerang city ordinance No. 8/2005 prohibiting prostitution in the city’s jurisdiction. This news

Envisioning Community-Building143

constructed or generated. Rather inert identities are fluid and mobile
according to space and time. It treats itself as a sum of sharedcharacteristics but it is hidden in a twin strategy of shedding off unwanted
or disintegrated elements.7
I, for example, could not force others to accept my identity solely as ajournalist when they wanted to attach other identities to me in association
to certain characteristics. Even when, for instance, I tried to use peace
journalism as my identity while advocating for resolution of conflictwith a religious overtone, many would still identify me to be a person
belonging to one of the conflicting parties.
Let me cite the latest example. I was covering the issue of injustice anddiscrimination to women particularly associated with local ordinancesthat were loaded with Islamic Sharia.8 Such local ordinances have been
rampant in the last five years following the Bill No.22 of 1999 onregional autonomy.9 There have been 51 similar laws and local
ordinances in several localities in Indonesia that have been enacted
based on what is claimed to be “moral, ethical, and the norms of Islam.
” Ahmad Suaedy, Executive Director of the Wahid Institute, stated thatthe draft bill on anti-pornography and porno-action (RUU APP)
proposed by legislative members could not be separated from thiswas followed up with a feature write-up the day after, on the first page, on a tragic story of a
primary school teacher who was accused and later convicted jailed. On Friday, 17 March 2006,
hundreds of people calling themselves Aliansi Masyarakat Tangerang (Almakta) / Tangerang
Residents’ Alliance mobbed the Kompas editor’s office in Jakarta. They protested the news items
run on 2, 3, 4 and 8 March 2006 that were said to be unbalanced and unproportional. The mob
demanded the apology from Kompas, revision of the write-up regarding the anti-prostitution
ordinance and demanded that the Kompas journalist in Tangerang be replaced. In the hard andthreatening orations, the Kompas journalist was herself accused of being prostitute. Ms. Sulastri,
the writer, shared with methat she received malicious threats related to her religion. This release of stories on theimplementation of the anti-prostitution ordinance also resulted in Kompas to be accused of abeing Catholic newspaper that is anti-Sharia.
9
Record at the Koalisi Perempuan Indonesia (Indonesian Women’s Coalition) show that, to thisdate, 25 localities in Indonesia have implemented ordinances of this kind and six others are preparing
similar bills. At the time of this writing the city of Depok was on the verge of enacting such an
ordinance. An ordinance of the government of Aceh Darussalam enacted the Islam Sharia, effective
2005, to be applicable to all members of the general public. This includes symbolic and ritualmatters such as the muslem women clothing decorum for district civil servants, requirement for
the ability to recite AL Quran for pupils and brides-and-grooms-to-be, Malay Arabic characterson signboards, anti-prostitution and local regulations on beliefs and faith.

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phenomenon. All these policies disrespect social and cultural diversity
in Indonesia.
In a meeting with me, Prof. Jan Michiel Otto from the Van Vollenhoven
Institute for Law of Leiden University in the Netherlands said that inpractice, several states applied different interpretations of Sharia law.
There are in fact differences amongst Sharia laws in Saudi Arabia,
Turkey, Afghanistan, Malaysia, Egypt, and Morocco. Historicallyspeaking there has always been a tension between Sharia law and local
legal systems in a particular country.10 It is unfortunate that in Indonesia
this has been left unresolved both by those who oppose and those who
support it.
On 16 June 2006, as many as 56 members of the Parliament of the
Republic of Indonesia from different factions and parties officially wrote
to the House Speaker asking for the abolition of such “morality” laws,
ordinances and bills are based on Sharia. There were rallies in many
localities organized by both the groups who supported and who opposedsuch legal instruments.
Those who opposed argued that tolerance and diversity in Indonesia
are at risk. Those two things have been the very fundamental foundationof the Negara Kesatuan Republik Indonesia or the Unitary State of the
Republic of Indonesia that was proclaimed by Soekarno-Hatta on 17
August 1945.
This principle of diversity has been secured by the 1945 Constitution
and the five pillars of Pancasila as the state policy. Pancasila as ashared ideology prohibits any group to dominate others or to impose
one’s ideology or principles on other groups or parties.
Unfortunately it is not easy to restore the tainted reputation of Pancasila.
It was once misused to safeguard authoritarian power and was
manipulated to justify oppressive, malicious, arbitrary, and tyrannicalacts during the era of the New Order. And thus the word Pancasila is
10

Interview on 3 July 2006 and a paper, “Sharia and National Law: Clash or Civilization,” presented
at the 15th International Congress on Legal Pluralism, Faculty of Law of University of Indonesia,
Depok, Indonesia, 29 June-2 July 2006.
11
Darmaningtyas of Yayasan Sosial Untuk Kemanusiaan expounded in great detail in her paper,“Pendidikan Pancasila: Belajar dari Kegagalan Orde Baru” (Pancasila Education: Learning fromthe New Order’s Failure) presented in a seminar entitled “Pancasila vs the Threat of Cultural
Uniformity Imposition,” conducted by the Aliansi Bhinneka Tunggal Ika in Surabaya, 23 June
2006.

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often enough to stir horrid experience: it is a myth, an indoctrination
tool, impediment and a boring subject at school.11 Its appeal for national
tolerance and as the upholder of diverse identity is gone.
Those who supported the “morality” laws argued that those regulations
were the product of democracy in the localities emanating from a
political process of accommodating people’s aspirations involving all
fractions in the parliament. This is stated in 134 letters – also officially– submitted by members of the Parliament on 26 June 2006; but thistime it came from political parties in favor of such “moral” laws.
Meanwhile, a study by Dr. Musdah Mulia discovered that proposals
for these local ordinances on Sharia have typically been copies of similar
ordinances from other localities. In some cases even the name of thelocality was carelessly retained on the official submission.12
Research reports of various independent organizations on Formalisasi
Agama dalam Kebijakan Publik (Formalization of Religion in Public
Policy) in South Kalimantan, South Sulawesi and West Nusa Tenggara(2006)13 brought to light interesting findings. Inter-alia, proposals by
local executives to formalize religious morality contain the vested
interest to either whitewash or to cover their liabilities in issues ofcorruption, political competition, and budget irregularities.
The attempt to instate Sharia law in the Constitution has always been acontentious debate in Indonesia since independence. During the
preparatory phase of independence, this raging debate between the
Muslim bloc and the nationalist bloc was resolved amicably by theinvestiture of Pancasila. A decade later, in 1955, the debate wasresurrected in a Constituent Assembly session. The nationalist bloc
succeeded in maintaining Pancasila as the basic state policy. Four years
12
Dr. Siti Musdah Mulia, “Perda Syariat dan Peminggiran Perempuan: Ada apa dengan demokrasi
di Indonesia? (Sharia Ordinances and Marginalization of Women, What’s going on with democracy
in Indonesia?),” a paper disseminated through women’s emailing list, 10 August 2006.
13

Conducted by LK3 Kalsel (South Kalimantan), Lapar-Sulawesi Selatan (South Sulawesi) and
YPKM Nusa Tenggara Barat (West Nusa Tenggara) and supported by the TIFA Foundation.
14
Soekarno noted, “We are in the conviction that Jakarta Charter of 22 June 1945 inspirits the1945 Constitution and is part and partial with the said Constitution.”
15
Partai Bulan Bintang (the Crescent and Star Faction) and Partai Persatuan Pembangunan (theUnited Development Party) submitted a draft amendment to the 1945 Constitution art 29 para (1)into, “(Indonesian) State is based on the belief on God’s almighty with the compulsion to implement
the Islam Sharia for the believers.” The last seven words were adopted from the Jakarta Charter.

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later, on 6 July 1959, Soekarno issued a Presidential Decree that halted
the polemic.14
In 2000, the specter of Sharia law was making a comeback, but was put
down again in the debate on constitutional amendment. 15
Notwithstanding, such discriminatory elements based on religious
morality were passed as law in the National Education System (Law
20/ 2003)16 and the Law on Child Protection (Law 23/2002).17
Zuly Qadir and Novri Susan in their studies argued that the seeds ofIslamic conservatism have been planted since 1984, started by certain
groups of young people on prominent university campuses who strive
for a state and community systems based on Islamic principles.18 The
growing trend is particularly observable not only in the drafting of Sharia
law in numerous localities and the drafting of the anti-pornography
and anti-porno-action bills, but also in violence targeting groups of

16

The Government did not take any steps to implement controversial provisions of the 2003
education law that required private elementary and secondary schools to provide students withreligious instruction in their own faith. Under preceding laws, students had to choose religious
instruction from five types of classes, representing only Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism,
Buddhism, and Hinduism.
17
The Child Protection Act of 2002 makes any attempt to convert minors to a religion other thantheir own through “tricks” and/or “lies” a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. This act
was used to convict three Christian women who were convicted for allegedly trying to convert
Muslim children.
18
Zuly Qodir and Novri Susan, “Islamic Fundamentalism and Radicalism: A Study on Hizbut
Tahrir and Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia in Jogyakarta, Indonesia” in Kamarulzaman Askandar(2005), Understanding and Managing Militant Movements in Southeast Asia, Penang, Malaysia:
SEACSN Publication.
19
As cited in the Religious Freedom Report 2006, in 1980 the Indonesian Council of Ulamas(MUI) issued a “fatwa” (a non-legal, nonbinding but influential opinion issued by Islamic religious
leaders) declaring that Ahmadiyya did not form a legitimate part of Islam. In 1984 the Religious
Affairs Ministry issued a circular banning the Ahmadiyya from disseminating their teachings inIndonesia. In 2003 the Home Affairs Ministry affirmed Ahmadiyya’s legal recognition. However,on July 28, 2005, the MUI renewed the 1980 fatwa. The press quoted the Minister of Religion M.
Maftuh Basyuni in February as stating that Ahmadiyya members should either form a new religion
or come back into the fold of mainstream Islam. Some local governments banned Ahmadiyya
activities after militant groups attacked Ahmadiyya mosques, homes, and other private property.
The central Government condemned the use of violence; however, despite its jurisdiction overreligious matters, the central Government did not speak out against or formally review the bans.

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people who espouse views or schools of faith that are different fromthe religious mainstream.19 Groups claiming to represent the Muslim
community have also committed violent acts in the name of religious
morality.
Ahmad Suaedy20 contended that those cases revealed narrow-minded
observance of Islamic ways of life and demonstrated the so-called
religious illiteracy. This situation is easily aggravated by elite Muslim
politicians. Unfortunately, this has not been the case only with Islam.21
In this light, the politics of identity is moving fast to a new level ofbsurdity.
III
Journalistic work related to the whole problem has brought me to asimilar difficult situation. A group of friends who support Sharia law
accuses me of being part of the “contra-Sharia law” people. Those whoare against the law assume that I am part of a party fighting for diversity.
It is difficult for me to explain to both sides that, according to me, theproblem is not a “pro or con.” At a certain point, however, I must submitthat it is not easy to get out of those binary oppositions.22
I feel that in that situation, multiple identities are easily manipulated,
imposed and reduced to a single identity ¡ª religious identity ¡ª and
20
Ahmad Suaedy, “Agama dan Kekerasan Kolektif” (Collective Violence and Religion), a paper
presented in book review Ketika Fatwa Menjadi Penjara (When Fatwa Becomes Prisons), Jakarta,
the Wahid Institute, 2006, at PBNU Building, Jakarta, June 2006.
21
In December 2005 the World Hindu Youth Organization (WHYO) protested the film “Shinta
Obong”, a film based on a story “Ramayana,” a holy Hindu book, for deviating from the original
story. The filmmaker, Garin Nugroho, met with the Hindu community in Bali, in January 2006 to
apologize.
22
I am one of the signatories of a statement against the Anti-pornography and Anti-porno Action
Bill, organized by the Aliansi Mawar Putih under the leadership of Dr. Gadis Arivia and colleagues
from the Women’s Journal, aligned with 200 other persons. This statement was published as apaid advertisement in national dailies in Jakarta in May 2006.
23
Karlina Supelli, “Sesudah Tegangan Dua Gagasan: Syarat Kemungkinan dan Ketidakmungkinan
Indonesia” (After the Tension of Two Ideas: The Requirements of Possibilities and Impossibilities
of Indonesia), paper, presented at the Symposium Nasional tentang Restorasi Pancasila (National
Symposium on the Restoration of Pancasila), FISIP Campus, University of Indonesia, May 31,
2006

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are pitted in a confrontation. Differences are made absolute, fully
activated and politicized.
It was not out of the blue when Karlina Supelli,23 a scholar in philosophy,
quoting Richard Sennet says that, “We” (kita; you and I are inclusive inthe context of people within the group) can be a “Dangerous Pronoun.
” When differences are politicized, the “We” disappears and what isleft is reduced to only “Exclusively We” (kami). This “Exclusive We,”
Supeli went on, can be a hidden place of the hated past and, at the sametime, of the present time. “Exclusive We” becomes a protective cocoonof “us,” because “we” defines with and for what purpose we talk.
Within the “Exclusive We” the morality color of viciousness has changed
depending on whose side commits it. And thus, good and bad depend
on who commits the crime and for what side they commit it. When
one’s experience is criteria to justify a perspective, the community is
fragmented into nothing but crowds of identities, and yet still callingitself a “community.”
Identity politics has roots that can be traced back to hundreds of years
ago. One sees it in labor movements, feminist movements and in the
struggle against racism. Then it is used in a movement to fight for justicefor the groups marginalized by dominant political-social logic ranging
from race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation up to people living withHIV all those that basically fight for identity acknowledgement could
easily be shifted to the politics of recognition.24
Supelli further reminds us that when it comes to politics of recognition,
the demand is no longer just a specific identity but acknowledgment ofa status and a socio-political role in defining public institutions. Identity
politics moves from the simply cultural to the legal category. Its purposechanges to de-institutionalizing the patterns of culture that are regarded
to be weakening the group’s status and replacing it with certain patterns
that are seen as strengthening it instead.
By making differences absolute, the politics of recognition tends to be
sectarian and ethnocentric. This phenomenon of increasing strength of
acknowledgment politics centered on the religious, ethnic, and national
primordial became more prominent after the end of the cold war.
Yugoslavia is a good example of this.
24

Further reading: Franz Fanon (1968) on national culture in The Wretched of the Earth (NY:Grove Press), Kate Millet (1970) Sexual Politics (NY: Doubleday & Company) and Shulamith
Firestone (1971) on gender and class in The Dialectics of Sex (NY: Bantam).

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Supelli points to several successful cases in Indonesia where sectariangroups have launched acknowledgment politics such as the abovedescribed local ordinances, anti-pornography and anti-porno action bill,
and the Law of Educational System. The groups exploit politics throughdemocratic institutions, i.e., national and local parliaments, and optimize
this exploitation to weaken the waves of rejection.
In the politics of recognition, difference tends to be intention without aclear vision on what the target or purpose is. As Supelli stated, what isleft behind is merely differences and its accumulation. What was once
claimed to be a difference now ends up to be coercion from one party
towards the others through normative claims. In short, difference thatis being held high is, at the same time, also uniformity.
Hereby it can be understood that refuting politics of recognition byadvancing another politics of recognition actually remains on the samelevel of thought. Researcher Risa Permanadeli puts simply that the pro
and con groups both use the same platform, debating women’s body.
Those who support it are likened to the Middle-Age European
community that was dominated by religious rationality and philosophy
that loathed women’s bodies. Those who reject it represent the bodily
interest when fighting over state domination and joining forces withthe power of consumption.25
Researcher Hendro Sangkoyo 26 further dissected this issue by
examining the history of the formation of the Indonesian State. The
Dutch colonial administration constructed the diversity in the island
country to attain a “socially representative” form in the framework ofcolonial politics. At the “end game” of the colonial regime at the end of
the 1940s, the colonial ideology launched its last attempt by using amatrix of “colonial customs” through puppet entities. Unfortunately,
the political elite and religious leaders were unsuccessful at using theagenda of integration to exorcise the ghosts of colonialism from theirrespective institutions and paradigms. They ended up strengthening the
majority-minority polarity.
It is these divisions of major-minor that bind the perspectives of many
people, including nongovernmental organizations working at the grassroots. Therefore, the researcher further proposes that most energy should
25
26Maria Hartiningsih, ‘Mempersoalkan Negara’ (Questioning the State), Kompas, July 29, 2006.
Interview, through e-mail, September 29, 30 and Oct 18, 2006.

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be allocated in the attempt to resolve them at this level rather than reusing
the language or religious traps even if the pretext is of “inter-faith.”
Permanadeli also cites historical failure to be a factor that determines
the Indonesians never understanding the meaning of living together
and, therefore, continuously being trapped in the majority-minority
polarity concept. Furthermore, while Permanadeli examines theexistence of the state, Sangkoyo asserts that in the long run, state orstateness is not the sole machinery configuration or the operator of
power.27
Permanadeli reminds us about what is at stake in a diverse situationsuch as in Indonesia where more and stronger concepts could not be
used as guidance in politics of diversity. Sangkoyo added an explanationthat procedural democracy as political metabolism cannot attain its
meaning unless one comprehends the power systems of the actors.
In a micro scale, the stagnant and even transgressed regional
management following the decentralization policy in 2001 can beunderstood if we know the fibers of its overriding political processes.
If our reference is limited to a standard course of “democratization” orefficiency of state bureaucracy, or in other words, focusing only on thestate system, one would never be able to talk about meaningfulreformation.
The conundrum is that Indonesian leaders appear to be faltered by thetrap of modernity, a concept that accrued and touted varying definitionsof political systems but disregarded and denied the actual experienceof their very own populace and, consequently, forgetting the conceptof their humanity.28
27

Sangkoyo further explained that the state system is like a wagon or equipment that can beloaded by more than one interest. Conversely, real power does not always have to be played
through the state machinery. There are countless examples, e.g. church-state tension; the operationof psyche/social representation of the Javanese kingdom in the power agenda of Suharto although
the two are centuries apart; political loyalty to quasi-state systems (the Catholic church, Wahabi¡°religious¡±¡±loyalty to capitalistic power holders). State systems in the neo-capitalstyle faith, or ¡°¡±¡°lower¡±¡±level of diversity and their variants are a derivation ofliberalism nowadays have a ¡°¡±higher power systems. Power here should be read at the genotypical level, constantly exercised.
28
One example was a comment by Aburizal Bakrie, the then Coordinating Minister for Economy
and Industry, on the price hike of LPG that triggered people’s anxiety. “Quit using LPG if you
can’t afford it!” (Kompas 20/12/2004). Also the government’s attitude of blaming the people incases of forest fires, mining conflict, land and ancestral domain conflicts, and in health issues
such as dengue fever, bird flu, polio, malnourishment, TB, malaria, HIV, etc.

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151

Permanadeli raised some crucial questions: do Indonesians really know
one another under the auspices of the so-praised Indonesia diversity?
Or is it quite the opposite that the diversity is actually just the state ofperceptions, as in reality they do not really know one another?
In my journalistic work, I encountered quite a few communities in remoteislands, which do not speak Indonesian and have no idea of what isgoing on outside their small world. They just see strangers suddenly
coming along with sophisticated machines wrecking, destroying androbbing natural resources, and their source of life.
Then, why is there no apparent eagerness to resolve this issue?
IV
I have to revisit my previous issue of identity. If the whole world isindeed built out of differences, and if thinkers reject the idea of a
possibility of “similarities” like Terry Eagleton’s criticism quoted bySupelli, then no one can talk about anything that makes sense. And
thus, the encounter of “I” with “those other than I” soon causes a paradox.
The person facing “I” suddenly imposes upon “me” to acknowledge
his/her independence. What s/he demands is not how I understand her/him but my ignorance of not knowing about her/him instead. “I” as a
subject of State appears not to be possible to acknowledge “my”
ignorance – in order to respond to the diversity of population of thisarchipelago. Such acknowledgment of ignorance would mean denying
one’s own existential premise.
In order to cover up such ignorance, many usually would resort toemploying jargons such as the Constitution and its derivative legislation.
Alternately, it is just a big nonsense that most politicians say differently
in different situations depending on who the audience is. What happens
in practice is shallow and disgraceful. The diversity is completely
reduced into symbols without touching its substance by any means.29
29

Admission to diversity should have placed all cultures of the nation in equality. But even insymbolic languages there clearly transpires the domination of one upon the others. Indonesia’s
Miniature Park, for instance, positioned a Javanese Cultural Performance Hall right in the central
core of the complex, constructed large and imposing, as if reflecting the grandness of the Javanese
kingdom in its past glory, surrounded by ethnic houses of various cultural ethnic groups ofIndonesia.

Envisioning Community-Building153

One is made to be charmed by the beauty of Minahasa Island by its
traditional customs, its costume, its beautiful young ladies, but not manyspoke up when Newmont Mining Corporation reduced Buyat into dismal
villages. When people from Buyat complained of what had happened
to their health, many doubted if the condition was indeed caused by thepollution or if their poor health status has been bad all along. People
then were busy collecting evidence. Ultimately, the experiences of thevictims were rendered insignificant.
The modernity project called Negara Kesatuan Republik Indonesia(NKRI)/ Unitary State of Republic of Indonesia requires security anduniformity, conformity and generalization. And thus, according to theanalysis of Sangkoyo, the diverse ways and perspectives of life ofcommunities in the pre nation-state villages in remote islands areconfronted with an agenda of national development that demands
deconstruction and rationalization of protocols that are based on
tradition. Therefore, the military was needed to reinforce “security” inthe mantra of “unity” and “integration” in order to smoothly proceedwith the “nation-state” modernization project, and of course, capital
expansion.
The Buyat case is but one of the cases where foreign capital in themining industry defeated people’s destiny. Indonesian soil sustains open
wounds resulting from exploitation of natural resources that have truly
destroyed human and natural ecosystems. Plenty of bloody conflicts
that have religious or ethnic overtone have actually been latent strife
over natural resources as happened in Papua and Kalimantan;30 inaddition there have been those that were set against the backdrop ofsocial and political issues such as in Ambon and Poso.
This country also shoulders a heavy burden of untamed corruption in
every facet of activities. It is sad to note that the devastating hot mud
bursting from a gas exploration drilling in Sidoarjo, East Java-the mostrecent of such disasters- reflects more elements of corruption and greed
than a work of nature. Eight villages were completely submerged; morethan 20 factories were buried up to the rooftops; and some 13,000 people
have been evacuated. The mud is rising by the hour and now spewning
forth at the rate of about 170,000 cubic yards a day, or about enough tocover Central Park. And it shows no sign of stopping. The company ispart of a conglomerate controlled by Aburizal Bakrie, a cabinet member

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This country also shoulders a heavy burden of untamed corruption31 inevery facet of activities. It is sad to note that the devastating hot mud
bursting from a gas exploration drilling in Sidoarjo, East Java – themost recent of such disasters – reflects more elements of corruption
and greed than a work of nature. Eight villages were completely
submerged; more than 20 factories were buried up to the rooftops; andsome 13,000 people have been evacuated. The mud is rising by thehour and now spewning forth at the rate of about 170,000 cubic yards aday, or about enough to cover Central Park. And it shows no sign ofstopping. The company is part of a conglomerate controlled by Aburizal
Bakrie, a cabinet member and billionaire, as cited by IHT (05/10/06),
who was a major contributor to the campaign of President Soesilo
Bambang Yudhoyono.
30

The conflict in West Kalimantan, for example, goes far beyond issues of ethnicity (Dayakagainst Madurese) and religion. Also significant are problems having to do with politics, as wellas the marginalizing effect of development on the indigenous population. West Kalimantan, likeother regions on the island, has been the site of extensive development focused mainly on logging,plantation farming and gold mining. The population grew 1.5 times from 2.49 million in 1980 to
3.74 million in 2000, quite a high rate compared to the 1.38 times increase experienced by Indonesia
as a whole. The province owes its above-average population growth to immigrants coming inthrough government-sponsored transmigration programs as well as on their own. These newresidents make up a mere 3.3 percent of the total provincial population, a figure hardly highenough to excite concern if not for the loss caused to indigenous groups by the two hectares of
newly cleared land per household promised to all settlers entering under transmigration, of whomthere were 132,000 from 1970 to 1985, to give only one figure. For the Dayaks, the forest is
essential to their way of life. The Soeharto regime, however, actively encouraged logging in socalled “backward regions” such as Sumatera, Maluku, Papua and Kalimantan. The forests ofWest Kalimantan rapidly disappeared once the government began granting forestry concessions(known as HPH, short for Hak Pengusahaan Hutan) to businesses in 1968, while also encouraging
settlers from the islands of Java and Madura. In 1995, 45 companies had been licensed to clear 5.
34 millions hectares of forest. The usage on usable woodland in West Kalimantan went from 1.92
million hectares (9.2 percent of the forested area in Indonesia) to 1.43 millions hectares, a full 25
percent decrease in the 16 years from 1983 to 1999. The area of farmland meanwhile nearly
doubled, from 0.92 to 1.74 million hectares in the same period. Most of these farms are oil palm
plantations. At the same time, West Kalimantan has always had a high poverty level, with 33.8
percent of its population living below the poverty line as of 1990, as compared to a national
average of 19,9 percent. The majority of the poor are Dayaks. Murai Yoshinori, “Development,
Conflict and Refugees: Globalization and a Global Citizen’s Community, in Aglo News No.7,
November 2005.
31
The Report of Transparency International 2005 put Indonesia into five infamously corrupt
countries in the world based on the Corruption Perception Index. The Jakarta bureaucracy is themost corrupt (Kompas, 18/02/05).

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This situation answers partly the question of for whose sake are thesemodern projects, so-called “development,” while this country is
incurring the highest level of debt in the world.32 IMF’s Structural
Adjustment Program (SAP) that was imposed on Indonesia caused
suffering and destruction in every aspect of life including the bulldozingof landless and small farmers, and marking down the budget allocationof education, health and social welfare assistance.
UNICEF (2002) has warned that Indonesia is soon facing a lost
generation from malnutrition and poor health condition and the low
literacy rate of its people. Millions of people had their chance to improvetheir living snatched away from their hands because the government
has to repay debts.33
At the same time, one was shocked by the fatwa (decree) of theIndonesian Ulema Council (MUI),34 issued following the meeting of
the fatwa commission in sessions of religious deliberation (Ijtima Ulama)at the Modern Darussalam Islamic Boarding School in Gontor, East
Java, on 26 May 2006. The Council implicitly allows foreign companies
to continue the exploitation of local natural resources and gives consent
to foreign debt. In a sense, the Council takes the side of global capitalism
and neo-liberalism.
That fatwa came after the Council issued previous ones regarding
differential treatment and status for Islamic schools that, in effect, banned
pluralism, secularism, and liberalism. The fatwa went on pointing out
the importance of harmonizing the framework of thinking between
32

The Anti-Debt Coalition (KAU)a has cited that domestic and foreign debts have reached 134
billion US dollars with a debt –GDP ratio at 50-52 percent, exceeding the safe threshold of 35-42
percent. The situation in Indonesia today is no better than in poor African nations.
33
This situation is not made better because of the tsunami that struck Aceh and the earthquake thatcascaded in different parts of the country that most certainly will divert development funds into
infrastructure reconstruction, and thus almost certainly the poor will shoot up in number. The
latest data showed that the number has reached 40 million people with unemployment at 11.9
million.
34
The MUI / Indonesian Ulema Council is an organization formed by the New Order on 28 July
1995. MUI has not taken much of an opposing position against Suharto because of its financial
dependence on the regime. Each member has an equal vote including the largest Muslim
organizations such as NU and Muhammadyah. MUI’s fatwas with their extremeIslam outlook aremanifestations of Islam organizations that although smaller in size are more in total number. As
people from NU and Muhammadyah are speakers representing the MUI, the fatwas appear to besupported by Islam majority groups. Ahmad Suaedy, foreword in A. Syafii Maarif et al. (2006),
Kala Fatwa Menjadi Penjara (Jakarta: The Wahid Institute).

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religious matters and national interest as well as reinforcing theuniformity of religious thinking. The fatwa also affirms that the NKRI
framework is final but fell short in mentioning national diversity.
V
While fretting over politicized identity, we are oblivious to other aspectsof identity that are more closely related to culture, and overlook that
culture is human-induced and is always related to power regardless of
its form. One simply needs to catch sight of how advertisements
constantly attempt to stimulate people’s desires and incessantly createneeds by targeting the personal concept: the concept of self. This iswhat Permanadeli has warned of groups who reject uniformity but areforgetting such traps.
The capitalista coined a jargon, “I shop therefore I am,” from the French
Philosopher Rene Descartes, “I think, therefore I am,” to show humansuperiority in Cartesian perspective.
The real culprit is not consumerism itself, nor is it the material stuff,
but rather the giant networks of capitalistic organizations whose survival
hangs on selling more volume and ever more. Much of this material
stuff carries symbolical meanings that are created to become importantneeds of the buyers.
Through fancy advertisements, this material stuff is made for people toknow and to define “who we are.” The jargon of free choice in neoliberal capitalism actually is an illusion. That free choice could only berealized through buying.
Choosing is a crucial act in capitalism, because through this act people
are stating their individual “identity.” Although capitalism individualizes
people, yet individual image is put in social relationships, throughcommercial advertisements that always flash expectations and the glitterof life.
A new religion has been born by the politics of the market: consumerism.
Its worship places are malls and shopping centers. Very few people
could resist their temptations.35 Perhaps this is what was meant as areal revolution by the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville. Therefore,
diversity that is now popularly used as a term to rebuff uniformity also
hides another risk. As stated by Sangkoyo, in an atavistic and capitalistic
35

This explanation on consumerism is taken from Colin Barker “‘Consumerism’: I shop therefore
I am” Socialist Worker Online, 21 December 2002.

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157

political context, multiculturalism is none other than a mask to sell
identity in a more competitive market to seize access to power in thiscountry of brokers.36
Two identities that seem separate — one is formed by the sectariangroup, the other by market politics, according to Supelli, in comparison
between the ritual and performance masks. The market politics are
fascinosum (charming and seductive), while sectarian politics istremendum (frightening). Although the two appear to be enemies, inreality both are hand-in-hand. They carry the same agenda of unifying
public interest and making them subordinate to their own interests.
Those masks have camouflaged the real problems that are happening
to Indonesia. The neglect of intricacy of the diversity is not only on
those who are considered as “the other” but also on the country’s
geological condition. The Director of Jakarta’s Art Institute, Sardono
W Kusumo,37 reminds us that it is an important problem to be addressed,
as it will affect the whole social, political, and economic setting ofIndonesia.
Such is the situation of the land and sea of Indonesia after being in thedestruction of the so-called “development”; we now face a 200-year
cycle of geological peril.38 The change of soil and water properties andthe general geological situation will affect identities that ultimately will
also be united by one single identity: people’s vulnerability when facedwith nature.
36

Jusuf Kalla’s speech in a Symposium on Tourism Marketing Strategies in the Middle East at theend of June was a clear example. Kalla, as quoted by the Jakarta Post: “If there are a lot of Middle
East tourists traveling to Puncak to look for (Indonesian) widows, I think that it’s OK. The children
resulted from these relationships will have better genes. There will be more television actors andactresses from these pretty boys and girls.” Such practices not only violate Indonesian marital
regulations, but are also only a step away from trafficking of women. Women’s activists slammed
Kalla for the statement.
37
Maria Hartiningsih, Ninuk Mardiana and Bre Redana, “Tanah Air Sardono W. Kusumo”
Kompas, Sunday edition, August 13, 2006.
38
Numerous points in Indonesia are disaster-prone, mostly to earthquake, tsunami, flood, andvolcanic eruption. Indonesia is traversed and surrounded by Eurasian, Indo-Australia, and Pacificplates. At any time the plates could collide into one another and generate earthquake. When suchtectonic collision happens in the seabed its ripples trigger tsunami such as the case in Aceh, North
Sumatera and Yogyakarta earthquake. In addition, Indonesia is also traversed by the Pacific Ringof Fire with the world’s chain of active volcanoes. Indonesia has no less than 240 and almost 70of them are active. Earthquake zone and Circum Pacific volcanic chain are reknowned for inflicting
great numbers of life loss everytime they generate great earthquakes or devastating tsunami.

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However, this perspective that my mother also had asserted in simple
words could never be digested by politics of power. The actors of politics
of power tend to exploit differences to win their political games.
Therefore, it is those identities considered to be the most strategic, forthe citizens will be the ones that are manipulated and then reduced intoa single identity. That tactic is a way of miniaturizing human beings, as
it is also used by Samuel Huntington in his book, The Clash of
Civilizations (1996).
As asserted by Amartya Sen,39 individual identity is far more complex
than group identity in which an individual is an integral component
within it. My confusion over the intricacy of identity that is being
attached to me is a clear example. That complexity, however, is not
calculated when human experience is disregarded.
Perhaps, the bitter reality of ecological crises associated with land andwater would be a useful reference to resolve the issues of humanity thatare caused by politicization of identity. People in remote islands whose
villages are just unseen spots on the map of Indonesia are the final
judges of these concepts, who with their local genius could strain theseeds spread from the upstream of thoughts of scholars.
As proposed by philosopher Hannah Arendt,
Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would
never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned towander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of eachman’s lonely heart, in its contradictions and equivocalities, adarkness which only the light shed over the public realm throughthe presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one
who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel.

39
Amartya Sen (2006), Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Issues of our time), NY:
WW Norton & Company.

From Revolution to Devolution
How democracy’s “long tail” can sustain press
freedom, development and peace in Asia
Kunda Dixit
Summary
Globalism transcends national governments, and it can foster
internationalism and solidarity. It has facilitated trade, and some Asian
countries have used their access to global markets to dramatically reducepoverty. A globalized media can also reflect the world’s diversity andthe spread of the information society has shrunk distances.
But economic globalization has also concentrated wealth and power;
convergence of media ownership has brought about cultural
homogeneity. It is leaving many further and further behind, increasing
the gap between rich and poor between and within countries in theregion. This is breeding discontentment, triggering violence andextremism.
What can be done to ensure that opportunities from economic progressare equally spread? How can democracy be made more participatory
and inclusive so it can deliver development? There are many examples
across Asia of alternatives in action, of empowerment through inclusion.
The common thread running through them is devolution of decisionmaking to local units of government, to grassroots groups andcommunities.
Across Asia, these working alternatives to globalization involve politicalprocesses, culture and entertainment, media and information, fair trade,
environmental activism and alternative lifestyles. This “long tail” iswhat will ultimately wag the dog.
First the bad news…
As we look around the world today, what we see on the surface is a
sweeping monoculture.

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Economic globalization driven by advances in information technology
is wrapping the world in grey uniformity. What people buy, how theytalk, what they eat and even how they look is becoming more and more
the same whether they are in Singapore or San Francisco, in Kathmandu
or Bogotá.
This sterile homogeneity is riding a globalized media that treats
individuals across the world as consumers, not citizens. As ownershipof media is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the global cultureindustry delivers its products, mass-produced and packaged, to thewidest international audience. Culturally, this has flattened the earth.
The marketing strategy for cultural products is the same as for mcnuggets
or frappucinos, which taste the same wherever you may be in the world.
Content is entertainment-driven, packaged and sold to the lowest
common denominator. The Internet, multimedia and the convergenceof communications technology have accelerated this trend, extending
market reach.
Ten years ago, we still thought the Internet would level the playing
field and give a voice to the voiceless. But it didn’t take long forcyberspace to be also dominated by the same corporate entities that
ruled over traditional media. Television, telecommunications andcomputers came together and forced ownership to also converge with
non-media businesses. Instead of narrowing the digital divide, it widened
the gap. Globally, 90 percent of Internet use is in the industrializedcountries. Ninety percent of Internet subscribers in Nepal are within afour km radius of the centre of the capital.
Even when one can find meaningful information and wisdom on thenet, it is drowned out by the cacophony of trivia or vitriol. People insearch of information relevant and useful to them gravitate to sites thatcreate virtual communities of those who agree with each other. This, inturn, further ghettoizes them. The Internet, instead of building bridges,
erects walls between communities that are supposed to talk to eachother. This fragmentation of society leads to polarization, hardening
positions on both sides of the debate.
Perhaps we were naive to believe that somehow the Internet would be
different, that it would give equal space to everyone. But the mainstream
discourse still reflects the corporate values that controlled traditional
media. So information on the Internet has ended up being little different
than what it replaced. The owners of Internet will sacrifice freedom forEnvisioning Community-Building161

money just as multinational manufacturers did. Yahoo had no qualms
about handing over the identity of a Chinese cyber dissident withouteven being asked. Typing “Tiananmen” on a Google image search in
China will show only postcards of flowers and fountains. Rupert
Murdoch sacrificed BBC TV when it displeased the powers in Beijing.
In the euphoria over the democratizing impact of the Internet, we forgot
all about how we have squandered the power of good old-fashioned
media as a force for democracy and freedom. Technology is never valuefree, and perhaps it is not the digital divide we should be worried about,but finding ways to reduce the school divide, the health divide and theincome divide that exists globally and within our countries. And it may
not be the Internet that is leveler, but community radio and civic
journalism.
The full impact of economic globalization and a market-driven global
media has eroded cultural diversity. Languages are disappearing andso are festivals, songs and ways of life. A global consumer culture isdelivered to a worldwide audience by the internationalized media,
changing people’s eating habits and determining what they watch, how
they dress, how they talk and with whom.
And as people eat refined grains, indigenous foods disappear. Whenthey vanish, so do the livelihoods of farmers who grew millet, amaranth,or brown rice. When trawlers sweep the oceans for fish, traditional
fishermen don’t have enough catch and they migrate to live in urban
slums. Fishermen in the central Philippines used to have many different
words for various types of wind that blew over their islands. Whenthey stopped going out to sea the words also vanished.
As farmers are uprooted they lose valuable wisdom that used to passdown through generations. This software for survival hasn’t been
replaced by useful knowledge to cope with the modern globalized world.
There is corrosion of indigenous cultures, languages and humandiversity. When Nepali farmers migrate to the Gulf seeking work, theirlink with their home soil is severed and with it vanishes the knowledgeof herbs in the cloud forest, the know how for carving terraces out of
mountainsides. Modernization and movement sets off a cascade ofextinction, and we may not know what we have lost until it is all gone.
It will be wrong to only romanticize indigenous societies that live inharmony with nature, but they knew something we seem to haveforgotten. Wherever a globalized world has ‘modernized’ it hasn’t

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necessarily become more self-sufficient. China has performed themiracle of lifting 500 million people out of poverty in the past 30 years,
but at what cost to the global environment? And even after inscrutableevidence that over consumption and waste will ruin the planet; thosewith the heaviest ecological footprints are slow to change.
Now the good news…
But all is not gloom and doom. Just as the power and reach of the
global consumer economy spreads across a wired world there areexamples of resistance. Grassroots initiatives, alternative lifestyles,
community action and local media use freedom’s power to defend
democracy and diversity while helping raise living standards.
It is possible to imagine a different future guided by other basic
understandings of what development really is. There are movements
and ideas in the periphery that will grow in influence and provide
alternatives to the current world order so people can live in dignity,
ecological harmony and connectedness. Local communities around Asia
have shown that they can magnify their impact if they join hands withother institutions and actors in mutually reinforcing ways.
E F Schumacher was way ahead of his time when he wrote Small Is
Possible. Indeed, his prescription in 1975 for a healthier planet was
based on his observations of how most people in the South lived. The
working conditions of many of these subsistence farmers haven’tchanged in the last 40 years; they still rely on an intricate knowledge ofthe seasons that tells them when to plant and when to harvest. Far awayfrom the effects of globalization, they still live without destroying thenature that sustains them.
Across the world, there are many examples of communities, which haveresisted the changes or adapted them to suit local needs without giving
up what was good and wise in their traditional lifestyles. They havethrived despite government policies designed to wreck their lives, or
mis-planned ‘aid’ projects that would have wrenched them away fromthe land. The key in all these places has been empowerment at the local
level. Wherever communities are given political and economic control
with decision-making devolved from the centre, they have taken theirdestiny in their own hands.
Community radio stations and forest user groups in Nepal have changed
the rural landscape, an education campaign in Bangladesh has attained
universal girl enrolment in primary schools, locally-run biodiversity

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conservation in China or community-based eco tourism initiatives inIndonesia are other examples. We know what works, and there aresuccess stories in the most unlikely places. We just have to look, wehave to replicate them and scale-up planet wide.
From Internet blogs to community radio, local forest committees toorganic farms, peoples in Asia are trying to make alternatives work.
They may not be much organized yet and they aren’t completely
networked, but it is happening: a community of communities is being
built. Local groups and publics are now a force to be reckoned with.
And added up, this “long tail” is bigger than the spike that is made upof the few big companies that control the global marketplace.
In Asia, we looked to Japan, Taiwan and Korea as models for how
modern media and cultural preservation can go hand-in-hand. And it istrue that beneath the veneer of westernized dress codes and behavior,
media in these countries helps their audiences promote and preserve
their own traditions. East Asian pop culture may use western genres
but have developed its own local hybridization that has become
spectacularly successful worldwide. Media globalization may still havethe United States as its epicenter, but there is now decentralization andmultiple re-centering going on simultaneously.
What’s wrong with that?
Some regions of the world like South Asia have been less successful inindigenizing media content. Just because television is in a local language,
it hasn’t meant that the entertainment programming defends indigenous
culture and values. News and current affairs ape the superficial coverage
and escapism seen on global news and entertainment channels. There
are soap operas in Hindi where the storylines are almost exact copies ofAmerican TV serials and is alien to a vast majority of South Asians.
The programs homogenize thoughts and desires because the information
contained and products advertised push a certain way of thinking andadvertise consumer items for the global market. There is little attempt
to look at alternative lifestyles or advocate less wasteful consumption
in order to protect the earth’s biosphere. Whether they are in Hindi,
English or other local languages, magazines in South Asia have notime for suicides by cotton farmers or the problems of caste
discrimination. In a country where nearly one half of the children go to
bed hungry every night, the mainstream magazines and TV in India aredominated by shows on how the affluent can lose weight.

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The result of all these is that the media is not just distorting the reality
it is also directly promoting an unsustainable lifestyle. The United Stateswith two percent of the world’s population consumes 25 percent of its
resources. Suppose the whole world consumed the same amount ofenergy and resources as an American household? India would need
two earths full of energy if its 1.1 billion people lived like Americans.
Fish would disappear from the world’s oceans in a few years if China’s
1.2 billion people consumed the same amount of seafood per capita as
the Japanese. The media defines ‘rich’ and ‘affluent’ as a lifestyle toaspire for that doesn’t take into account what such consumption doesto the earth. Globalization presumes that the economy can just keep on
growing indefinitely. But there are few in media that are ringing thealarm bells.
To bring about behavior change, first there has to be awareness that
there is a problem. Only by first informing the public about what theiractions and behavior are doing to nature can they start to change. People
must think about how their consumption affects other human beings.
Does one country’s affluence keep another country poor? Media shouldbe telling people these things. It should be analyzing and interpreting
trends, but it isn’t. Yet we know that awareness through media works.
Heightened acceptance of global environmental problems in Europe
compared to America has a direct correlation with the quality of coverageof world affairs and environmental issues in the European media. Publicconcern in Europe forced politicians to take notice and legislate cutbacks
in emissions and a carbon tax. America is much slower in doing thisbecause there isn’t enough public pressure, and the reason for that is an
insular American press.
Media is asking these questions less and less in Asia too. China’s total
emission of greenhouse gases will soon overtake the United States.
There are dire warnings about pollution levels in the Asian Brown Cloud
over the subcontinent. Fish stocks worldwide are depleting so fast thatmany species may be extinct in the next 20 years. Driven by greaterpurchasing power in China, smuggling contraband tiger parts has grownso fast that the big cats have been decimated in India’s national parks,
undoing decades of conservation. There is very little coverage of theseissues in China’s controlled media environment.
There is widespread awareness and concern about environmental issues
in Japan, and conservation norms are strictly applied to preserve forests,
control pollution and preserve marine biodiversity. But there is much

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less coverage of the impact of Japan’s demand for natural resources
have on Asian countries, and indeed worldwide.
How shallow media undermines democracy
The most worrying aspect of the dumping down of media is in politics.
A media owned and controlled by big business has scant regard for
public service values. When TV, radio, newspaper and the Internet aretreated as marketing tools there is no difference between selling ahamburger and selling a newspaper. The idea is audience maximization
so that the ratings can be converted into commercials. Despite its obvious
advantages, the Internet is going down the same path in trying to turneyeballs into dollars.
Citizens exposed to escapism in media become apathetic and fatalistic.
News, when it is reported, is treated like a spectator sport and is aperpetual quarrel between today’s talking heads replying to yesterday’s
talking heads. Media has neither the time nor the inclination to go beyond
the operational strategy of politics to analyze, explain and interpret
events so citizens can understand issues and form opinions about them.
In a democracy, this is a fatal flaw. If media doesn’t inform andobjectively foster public debate, policies can’t be made. Democracy
demands participation, and participation needs a vibrant, free andpluralistic communication environment. The media is an essential partof this feedback loop that allows citizens and their rulers to know what
is happening in society and react appropriately. Without this feedback,decisions they take can be flawed, misguided, delayed, or distorted. To
preserve democracy, the channels of communication within society haveto be clean, sharp and reliable. Governments, whether they are in Sri
Lanka, Singapore or Japan must treat the media differently than othertypes of industry. The press has a higher calling; governments that
meddle with it or do not regulate it at all undermine its role. The trick is
to find that right balance so the meddling and regulation do notundermine journalistic credibility.
It is a cliché, but nonetheless true, that democracy and press freedom
are two sides of the same coin. Undermining one hurts the other. The
lesson from Asian countries in recent years is that press freedom doesn’tcome with any warranty, it has to be defended by is maximum
application even in countries with long traditions of free press. As wehave seen in Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand and Nepal, even when press
freedom is enshrined in the constitution it can easily be revoked in thename of national security.

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The threats to media freedom these days don’t just come from tyrants
and dictators, they also come from owners who see it as just anotherbusiness, from under-motivated journalists, publishers who prefertabloidization and trivialization because it is cheaper and safer thandoing serious in-depth journalism. It is the numbing effect of the market
that has done more to undermine press freedom worldwide than directcrackdowns by dictatorial regimes.
The overall effect is that commercialization leads to what John Pilger
calls ‘censorship by exclusion’—a trend that makes editors not want torock the boat and publish only the least controversial lowest common
denominator material. Such self-censorship is more insidious than overt
control where at least the readers have no illusions that what they readin the papers or see on television news is free.
From the grassroots to the canopy
Fortunately, there are groups across the world that is struggling against
the global trend of media over-commercialization. Grassroots
organizations, local communities and citizens are using networks oflocal media to promote horizontal communication so that information
not just entertains but also empowers. They are rediscovering the public
service values that allow participation in decision-making, foster publicdebate, so people can weigh their choices and allow people and theirelected leaders to interact. Especially in parts of the world where lackof affordability and accessibility have limited the Internet’s reach, these
media are a potent force on the side of democracy and pluralism.
Wherever grassroots communication has worked as it should, it has
strengthened democracy and this in turn has helped deliver development.
Wherever there is inadequate or inappropriate communications, there
is a democratic deficit at the grassroots and development has lagged
behind.
In Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia the spread of community
radio has directly empowered rural communities to gain a voice so thepeople’s opinions are heard. After Suharto, Radio 68H became apowerful new voice in freely informing people across the vastarchipelago about what was going on. In the Philippines, rural radio issuch a powerful force in combating corruption that journalists are killedby those who are exposed. But in rural northern India, where radio
news is still controlled by the state despite that country’s long traditionof democracy and television news content is dictated by the market,

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local officials are not forced to be accountable, keeping the people
underdeveloped and disenfranchised.
In Nepal, FM radio was deregulated in 1996 and a nationwide networkof community radio stations is helping empower communities. The full
impact of this was seen during the pro-democracy uprising in April
2006 when people well informed through radio news and current affairs
about what was happening poured out into the streets to oppose an
autocratic king. The radio stations also gave villagers a say in theirlives and a confidence to take control over their own destiny. This hasoften transformed their attitudes: turning them from fatalistic and passive
peasants into politically alert citizens who know and demand their rights.
Combined with political decentralization, media and democracy in Nepal
have helped support and strengthen each other.
Across Asia, there are many other examples of how devolving decisionmaking to local communities is helping change the way people decideon how to use and share natural resources. Twenty years ago, forexample, international media hyped how poverty was driving Himalayan
farmers to destroy forests, in turn causing soil erosion, landslides andunleashing floods downstream in India and Bangladesh. While this waspartly true, what the media doesn’t report now is that the Himalaya
today has seen a dramatic regeneration of forest cover. There is 15
percent more canopy cover in the mountains of Nepal than there was in
1980.
This was a direct result of the devolution of political power to village
councils, which were forced to be accountable to voters. Local politicians
then worked with forest committees to bring back traditional
conservation practices and to protect the commons. Community media
and a free information environment allowed public participation indecision-making and the check and balance so the conduct of local
officials was transparent.
Wherever else it has been tried, in India, Philippines, Bangladesh,Indonesia or Sri Lanka, decentralization of decision-making anddevolution of political power away from the centre has improved living
standards. It is no coincidence that Nepal’s two successful models ofrural development have been made possible because an elected
parliament in the 1990s legislated political and economic devolutionthat allowed local initiatives: community forests and community radio.
Environment protection and grassroots communications have therefore

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gone hand-in-hand and have in turn helped local communities acrossthe Himalaya regain their self-esteem and made them more selfsufficient. Here is an example of how democracy combined with public
service media can deliver development and conserve natural resources.
After all, this is what politics in a democracy is supposed to do: lift
living standards.
Mixed picture in Asia
Elsewhere in Asia, it is a mixed picture. The impact of media
globalization and ownership on content can be seen across the region,and it parallels worldwide trends. In addition, changes in ownership
patterns have their regional parallels in the Asia-Pacific. As
telecommunications, television and computers come ever closer so do
the companies that control content and transmission. And yet, thetechnological leaps that have made multimedia content possible andthe recent spread of pluralism and democracy have not always resulted
in a commensurate maturity, professionalism and independence ofmedia.
On the one hand, media in Asian democracies have not been able toemploy fully their public service role with meaningful journalism due
to over-commercialization. At the other end of the spectrum there arecountries in the region, which continue to be 21st century anachronisms:
Burma and North Korea where media and society exist in a time warp.
Asia isn’t one continent; it is at least four. It is a fluke of history that theregion is called “Asia”. The disparities in the region are so stark thatthe difference in living standard between the East Asian tiger economies
and South Asia actually resemble the contrasts between North Africa
and Europe. The Asia we know that stretches from the edge of theMediterranean to the Pacific coast is also uneven in terms of press
freedom, democratic norms and media professionalism. Countries range
from total state control to semi-free media, from emerging democracies
experimenting with pluralism to societies where despite constitutional
guarantees of press freedom, elected strongmen (and women) areregressing and using indirect methods to turn media content in theirfavor.
As leaders in hardware production for the information revolution, theEast Asian tigers have been at the forefront of a great leap forward in
the advancement of computers and telecommunications, which haveaffected media. Paradoxically, information content in some of theseEnvisioning Community-Building

169

countries has not kept pace with hardware. Countries which have hitched
their wagons to the IT revolution like China, Malaysia and Singapore,
keep tight restrictions on access to information by their citizens and onpolitical freedoms. It is not a coincidence that it was in the past decadethat two East Asian economies (Taiwan and South Korea) made theirtransitions to full democracy and press freedom in part because of thenature of the development of new media. They have thus been able toplay catch-up with Japan (South Korea, in fact, has overtaken Japan inbroadband access and is much further ahead than the United States)
thus leading to both hardware and software development and a morecreative use of multimedia.
The role played by the media is thus determined not just by technology
but also by the freedom to use new media (proving McLuhan’s “medium
is the message” dictum right). Singaporeans may have broadband accessthrough their computers to watch movies on demand at home, browse
the net and follow streaming television news, but the content of that
information has not changed, it’s still only what the state wants
Singaporeans to watch.
Curbs on internet use, monitoring, severe penalties for accessing
restricted sites, and crackdown on independent news portals carrying
non-official sources of information have dampened the initial euphoria
in East and Southeast Asia over the internet playing a leading role indemocratizing information.
The more things change…
The other hope was that information technology would level the playing
field and bridge the digital divide. Nowhere is this digital divide moreglaring today than within Asia. Despite India’s entry into the IT age
with the emergence of Bangalore’s silicon plateau, the region still lags
behind in phones per capita and internet connections, although mobile
telephony is increasing dramatically.
But before we stick computers into classrooms, we must first makesure classrooms have roofs, schools have electricity that there areteachers and students don’t dropout. In many parts of South Asia,
malnutrition is so widespread; schools have to double as feeding centers
for children, so they get their minimum calorie intake.
We don’t just need to leap frog technology. We need to see how media
can help bring about social and political reform needed to raise living

Envisioning Community-Building171

standards. But information technology by itself is not going to provide
answers to deep-seated structural problems of social justice and equity.
For that, there needs to be structural changes in governance at the outset.
This can be best seen in the spread of the supranational media
conglomerates riding the information technology revolution to spreadtheir reach in Asia. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, for instance, is wellon its way to capturing the gigantic 2.3 billion-strong Indian and Chinese
markets. In the subcontinent, STAR takes an Indian-centric line on news
and current affairs even though its footprint is region wide. STAR’sentertainment channels now reach up to 45 million households in East
Asia, South Asia and the Gulf. STAR’s viewership is already 40 percent
of Indian households, 65 percent of homes in Taiwan, and through theHong Kong-listed Phoenix TV Murdoch has already captured 45 million
households in China alone. News Corp is getting greater access to the
cash-rich Guangdong province in exchange for beaming state-owned
CCTV to the US market. In Japan, News Corp has partnered with JapanSky Broadcasting Company.
The international and regional patterns of Big Business-owning media
are repeated within countries. There has been a boom in television
channels in South India with a dozen new channels going satellite. The
political leadership in many countries has their own mini-Berlusconis.
This is television without borders, as Tamil and Malayalam channels
reach the Diaspora in Sri Lanka, Malaysia and the Gulf. Similar trends
can be seen with Bangla channels with regional footprints, and new
Nepali channels beaming via satellite from India to Nepal and viceversa to each other’s Nepali speaking populations.
Media is not just journalism, and satellite television is essentially an
entertainment medium. News and current affairs, for instance, do noteven come on the top ten rated programs in India and China. In times ofcrisis, such as border clashes with Pakistan, or hijackings and terrorist
attacks, 24-hour news channels carry large trans-boundary viewership.
But internationally owned channels with regional footprints, it seems,
can be as jingoistic as any nationalist media because the owners always
prioritize the main market that they target.
The center cannot hold
There are indications that globally centralized media companies are
becoming top heavy. Can they adapt to the proliferation of multimedia

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distribution? As audiences are fragmented by hundreds of cablechannels, how will the main content providers cope?
When cable television and the music channels first started broadcastingin East Asia in the late 1980s, most analysts wrote obituaries to local
music and entertainment and said they would soon be devoured by the
global monoculture of Hollywood and American pop music. Yet, 20
years down the road, we can see that the opposite has happened. AcrossThailand, Taiwan and China there has been a phenomenal increase inlocal content. Japanese pop, the Korean Wave, Taiwanese singers andChinese movies are now popular in Asia and are global hits. As US
political power wanes, it seems there are now multitudes of culture.
East Asian countries that wish to project their power in the world stage
see the potential of turning their cultural products into “soft power”,
just as the United States has tried to do.
In India’s neighborhood Bollywood songs, it was feared, would
obliterate local music. Instead, in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, andeven within India, local music, dance, drama in local languages got aboost as well.
But it is in news and current affairs that the power of television has
turned the tables. It used to be that daily newspapers set the news agenda;
it is now more and more the other way around. Newspapers andmagazines compete not with each other so much as with Internet andacross the region we see them becoming less text-heavy, more visualand graphics-rich. This trend can be seen even in the established papers
in New Delhi, Bangkok, Manila and the Gulf region. This is notnecessarily a bad thing, but the content has also been tabloidized tocompete for the reduced attention span of readers.
But it is perhaps in radio that there have been the most lost opportunities,
especially in the poorer parts of Asia. Nothing competes with radio foraccess and affordability, yet precisely because of this the lid has been
kept firmly on radio—even in bastions of democracy. In the Indian
subcontinent, radio has been used as a public address system forgovernment propaganda, and for decades its potential for development
communication has been squandered.
The paradox is that officialdom in these countries does not regulate thenewest communications technologies. No one controls private cable
companies, there is competition among cell phone operators, there is achoice of Internet service providers, FM radio is beginning to beEnvisioning Community-Building

173

privatized. And yet, the one medium that can reach the maximum numberof people is still under the grips of most governments.
But even here, things are changing. Media activists in Nepal lobbied
for five years for the government to deregulate FM licenses. Nepal
became the first country in South Asia to have a public radio service in
1996, and today has a network of community radio all over the country.
After King Gyanendra sacked an elected Prime Minister and took overpower in February 2005, his regime banned news on private FM arguingabsurdly that ‘nowhere in the world is news allowed on radio’. The
irony was that news on television was never allowed, and news continued
to be broadcast on state-owned radio. Governments that maintain strict
control of the radio waves even in vibrant democracies do it for one
reason only: it is the medium of the poor and they don’t want them toknow what is going on.
In Nepal FM radios fought back throughout 2005 with creative formsof resistance: singing the news, reading bulletins from simulated studios
set up in town squares, disguising news in studio conversations. Finally,
they went to the Supreme Court and re-won the right to broadcast news.
The achievement of Nepal’s citizens’ radio in establishing community
broadcasting and then defending it from a regime bent on taking awaythat freedom has become a role model for public radio in other parts of
the region. It looks like the message is spreading. India is now finallydebating legislation to allow community FM. Sri Lanka and Bangladesh
look set to do the same.
In India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, the press plays animportant role in covering politics. Politicians take journalists andopinion makers seriously. Whereas in India most of the mainstream
national newspapers have seen steady commercialization by owners,in the other three countries the main print media has taken the role of astaunch defender of fragile freedoms. After the 1999 coup in Pakistan,
the mainstream press has walked the thin line but always upheld its
independence and preserved professional integrity. In Bangladesh,national newspapers in Bangla and English have flourished and havebeen involved in in-depth coverage of development and social issues.
The Sri Lankan national newspapers have only now begun to recoverfrom the retrogressive nationalization of the 1970s and years of control
during the war.
In Nepal, King Gyanendra’s coup threatened to take the media back to
pre-1990 controls under absolute monarchy. Armed soldiers were posted

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at radio stations and newspaper offices where they prevented news
broadcasts and censored galleys. The press fought back by leaving whiteholes, writing absurd editorials and when told not to leave any blankspaces filled them up with gibberish. When the soldiers left, despite
strict laws on press control under a state of emergency, most of themedia defied them. Editors and reporters were detained, others were
harassed, pressure was put on publishers through advertisers, but the
Nepali media remained largely united to fulfill its role to uphold press
freedom and writing on the struggle to restore democracy. During theIndian emergency, it was said that the media was “asked to kneel, but it
crawled.” But in Nepal it was asked to kneel and it stood up.
In Southeast Asia, the media scene is patchier. At one end is Burma
where the junta controls the media completely, journalists are detained
and tortured. Then there are the authoritarian states of Vietnam, Laos,
Brunei, Singapore and Malaysia where journalists are well aware of
the limits of what they can write and hardly ever over-step the bounds.
The state has complete control over most forms of mass media, in somecases even online media. The Internet is restricted and monitored, astrict licensing policy deters publishers from taking any risks and the
media can’t take any recourse in the courts.
In Malaysia after the departure of Mahathir Mohammad there has beena slight relaxation of controls on the press and Malaysian journalists
have used the Internet to sidestep official control despite strong pressure,threats and raids by state security. Alternative news sites like
Malaysiakini have been audaciously pushing the envelope. While thecontent of these independent portals would be considered tameelsewhere, they expose official misconduct through investigative
Internet journalism. Numerous bloggers are flourishing despite official
threats of crackdowns on editors, webmasters and journalists. While
the refreshing freedoms in cyberspace are not reflected in themainstream print and broadcast, there is hope that online journalism
will open the space for the rest.
Heavy media restrictions remain in place in Singapore with no signs ofloosening up despite the city-state being the most affluent in Southeast
Asia. Any unsanctioned criticism or content in the media is dealt withharshly, and even the international media has not escaped the state’s
wrath for daring to criticize officialdom. The tactic used is to sue media
companies and journalists for defamation for astronomical sums ofmoney, and it has worked brilliantly.

Envisioning Community-Building175

At the other end of the spectrum in Southeast Asia are the Philippines
and Indonesia where the media is vibrant and rambunctious. The press
takes its adversarial role seriously and has been able to serve as a checkand balance in these democracies. New laws in all three countries now
give journalists unprecedented access to information and guarantees ofpress freedom. This has allowed journalists in all three countries unfettered access to official documents, to monitor election financing andpublic records.
One of the most vivid examples of media power was the investigationof the assets of President Joseph Estrada, which led to his impeachment trial and removal from office by a people power uprising in 2001.
Ever since the end of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986 the Philippine
media has been one of the freest in the region, and since then it has
proven experience in investigative journalism, rural radio and community media. Media freedom is not just important for journalists; theFilipino people and civil society have often demanded and struggled
for that freedom. Paradoxically, the Philippines tops the list of countries with the highest number of journalists killed including many radio
commentators in the provinces. One of the chronic problems with Philippine media has also been the fact that the main media conglomerates
in Manila are controlled by big business usually close to political figures—this vested interest has colored coverage of certain issues. Politicians have therefore often used pressure on publishers to tone down
criticism. The latest tactics of the ruling elite has been to sue reporters
for libel and defamation as an intimidation tactic, and there has been aspate of unexplained murder of journalists.
In Thailand, investigative reports also haunted Prime Minister Thaksin
Shinawatra when he was in power. Journalists who were using thatcountry’s constitutional guarantees of press freedom to expose official
attempts of hostile capture of critical newspapers and magazines aswell. The military coup in September 2006 removed Thaksin, but thearmy put its own restrictions curbing press coverage and cancelled thelicenses of community FM radios.
In Indonesia, private media in the post-Suharto era remains independent
because of its economic clout and has a strong influence in the country’s
political arena. Indonesian print and radio journalists have strong
networks, which allows them to magnify their strength when rights are
threatened. Indonesia’s achievement with provincial radio has made ita vital medium for information in this vast archipelago. The state is

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uncomfortable with criticism, however, and has used libel anddefamation provisions in the criminal law to cow down media. Affectedbusinesses have also unleashed hired goons to attack media offices.
There is now a strong civil society and media lobby to change theselaws.
Although the situation is much worse in authoritarian regimes in theregion, what Thailand, Indonesia and Philippines prove is that
constitutional provisions on press freedom are no guarantee thatgovernment won’t try to stifle media that are critical of them. Rulers
have discovered that the best pressure point is the ownership of media,
and favorable coverage can be guaranteed by putting pressure on
businessmen who publish newspapers and own broadcasting stations.
Just as Thaksin has used his cronies to pressure media owners, President
Gloria Arroyo in the Philippines has also been using underhand means
to pressure the press. These pressures have shown a lack of commitment
on the part of these leaders to democratic norms and a tendency to lookat media freedom with suspicion rather than as an effective watchdog
that can nurture and protect democracy itself. They are enamored with
the Mahathir and Lee Kuan Yew models of governance and appear
convinced that only by curtailing freedom can they achieve economic
prosperity. However, Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand have all tried
dictatorships in the past and failed.
The intertwined ownership of business and political elite in thesecountries who use their economic and political clout to pressure themedia make a formidable enemy for the defenders of press freedom.
Media is constantly being threatened with libel and defamation suits todampen criticism.
Conclusion
Despite gains in some countries that have been able to take advantage
of economic globalization, the impact on many parts of Asia is patchy.
Aside from rising income gaps, the economic growth model of themarket mantra is seriously undermining the planet’s ecosphere.
At a time when alternative lifestyles, less wasteful consumption andreducing Asia’s ecological footprint should be actively pushed by media,
it is doing just the opposite. The reason appears to be that global andregional media ownership patterns reflect the strategic interests ofcorporate players. Even the Internet, which started with so much promiseEnvisioning Community-Building177

of leveling the playing field and democratizing information, now reflects
the same ownership patterns as traditional media.
Rulers, even democratically elected leaders, tend to look at the media
as a threat. Throughout Asia, the challenge is to use to the democratic
process for service delivery, development and economic growth. Youngdemocracies are grappling with good governance but see the media notas an ally but as an adversary. The power of media must be used toforce elected leaders to be more accountable, and as an effective checkand balance. The interlinked interests of private sector media with
political elites have undermined the media’s role in many democracies,
undermining the public service role of the press—especially televisionand radio.
The answer lies in media activists and civil society keeping the space
open for the press and to struggle against attempts to control or gag it.
The Internet offers hope to bypass these controls in dictatorships andexpand participation in democracies. The technology has to be mademore accessible and affordable to bridge the digital divide.
Leapfrogging technology and bridging the digital divide, however,doesn’t make sense in countries where the potential of old-fashioned
media like radio have been squandered. Nowhere is the power of media
to empower people at the grassroots more potent than through citizens’
media and community broadcasting and there are plenty of examples
from Asian countries of where it has worked well.
The impact of media globalization has not been universally negative.
The cultural imperialism theory is giving way to a more nuanceunderstanding of the re-centering of the world. Regional powers are
creating their own multiple centers. And there are many examples ofgrassroots groups and communities that are resisting the homogeneitythat comes with a globalizing media.
When political power is decentralized and decision-making is devolved
to local communities people find their own solutions to problems. Nepal
was a case study in a functioning grassroots democracy that was
overtaken by revolution, but now has to find a way to return power tolocal communities.

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Nepal case study
From 1996 to 2006 the Nepali people were caught up in a war waged intheir name. The ‘people’s war’ is what the Maoist called their revolution,
which was appropriate because in the years that followed it was mostly
the people who died and suffered.
Nepal hadn’t seen a real conflict since the Anglo-Nepal wars of 181416. Since then, Nepal’s Gurkha soldiers have been fighting in foreign
wars, laying down their lives for countries other than their own.
This past decade has changed the face of Nepal. By February 2006,
nearly 15,000 people had been killed, most of them non-combatants.
Hundreds of thousands were widowed and orphaned; millions wereforced to abandon their homes and farms.
Nepal lost its innocence and the violence scarred the national psyche.
In the outside world, coverage of Nepal’s abject poverty, the royalmassacre of June 2001 and news reports of the violence tarnished thecountry’s image of tranquility and harmony.
To be sure, given the country’s inequality and social injustices, Nepal
has been ripe for revolution for some time. The exclusion of citizens, afeudal ruling structure with its links to the military, Kathmandu’s apathy
and neglect of the rest of the country, an expanding population forced
to share limited resources, and millions of youth without opportunities
created the objective conditions for insurrection. Add to those fecklessrulers preoccupied with greed and ambition and all you needed was aspark.
Anger ignited in the streets first in 1990 when the People’s Movement
forced King Birendra to devolve his absolute powers and allow multiparty politics. But the euphoria of freedom did not last as political parties
soon got bogged down in petty bickering and corruption. A newly free
media reported this with daily headlines, spreading cynicism in the
public, not just about politicians but made many doubt whether wewere ready for democracy.
After 1990, Kathmandu’s ruling class was partly replaced by politiciansfrom the hinterland, but a winner-takes-all electoral system still kept
out the historically marginalized from decision-making. Worse, elected
incumbents kept ruling as if no one else mattered, while the opposition
boycotted parliament or took to the streets to bring down governments
the moment they took power. Chronic instability at the centre meant
democracy was unable to live up to the development expectations ofpeople in the periphery.

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179

By February 1996 the disenchantment was reaching a climax. A factionof the Maoist party presented a list of 40 demands to the government
and launched its threatened armed struggle without waiting for the Prime
Minister to respond. The comrades were impatient; they felt that there
was no way they could come to power through a patronage-ridden
electoral system dominated by the main parties.
Yet, had they waited just a few more years, Nepal’s adolescentdemocracy might have been able to sort out its mess. After all, it had
been only six years and there were young political figures with visionand integrity, who, had there been more internal party democracy, could
have replaced the tired old faces.
Indeed, it was at the grassroots that democracy was bringing forth a
new crop of leaders who proved they could be honest and efficientmanagers to bring basic services to rural Nepal. In districts across thecountry, a new decentralization law was handing power to the people.
Villagers who finally had a say in their own destiny responded withdramatic self-confidence and forced their local leaders to be accountable.
By 1996, elected village council members knew they had to perform or
they would not get re-elected. It almost didn’t matter to which party
candidates for chairmen belonged to, as long as they had a demonstrated
ability to ensure that schools ran properly, health posts had doctors,
roads got built and bridges were repaired. Most elected district councils
also had leaders with vision and these politicians were trickling up theranks to national-level politics.
It was just when this hope for the future was beginning to spread across
Nepal that the Maoists launched their armed struggle in 1996. The firsttarget of the rebels was local government units: the newly-empowered
councils that had only just begun to prove that given the chance,
grassroots democracy could raise living standards. Over the next ten
years, the Maoists destroyed 90 percent of the 4,000 village councilbuildings all over the country, district councils were bombed and theirmembers chased out. When elections couldn’t be held because of the
spreading violence, the Prime Minister in Kathmandu decided not toextend the terms of local councils, thus creating a nationwide vacuumat the grassroots that the armed rebels ultimately filled.
The promise of a vibrant pluralistic system of representation that coulddeliver services, bring economic progress and institute social reforms
was sabotaged by a combination of left- and right-wing extremist

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violence. As the country plunged deeper into war, development wasundone and the country set back decades. King Gyanendra’s coup of
February 2005 dismantled democracy and the chance of peace. But
within 14 months, a pro-democracy movement had sidelined him andthe country was swept by a republican wave. The person who did themonarchy most harm turned out to be King Gyanendra himself.
The king said he had to take over because he needed to crush theunderground communists and restore peace. But within minutes after
his speech to the nation at 9:30 am on February 1, 2005 it was clear
who he was really after. Soldiers moved into newsrooms, arrested
politicians and hounded civil society members. The security apparatus
was being used to crush democracy instead.
Although the royal coup was unpopular, many across Nepal who were
fed up with the violence and disillusioned with politicians hoped thatthe king could deliver peace. But as the year wore on, the violence got
worse and an average of 30 people were being killed every week. The
royal government was internationally isolated, donors suspended aid
to Nepal and the army even stopped getting military assistance fromthe US, UK and India.
Initially, the political parties failed to muster spontaneous support for
their pro-democracy protests. Most people in the towns only watchedfrom the sidewalks as political cadre carrying placards chanted slogans
against the king. This changed after the signing of the 12-point
understanding between the seven-party alliance and the Maoists in New
Delhi in November 2005.
When the slogans on the streets changed from ‘democracy’ to ‘peace’,people started coming out for the rallies. Nepalese desperate for peace
appear to have understood that the agreement between the Maoists andthe parties had a greater chance of resolving the conflict than letting
the king and his army seek a military solution. While the Maoists kept
up the pressure with attacks on security bases near Kathmandu, politicalparties started staging ever-bigger rallies nationwide.
By the first week of April, the street protests had snowballed into
massive demonstrations. Community radios, TV stations and a defiantpress relayed news and printed pictures of the rallies and thegovernment’s crackdowns, keeping them fully engaged. As the curfews
grew longer, it fed the people’s frustration and they started pouring out
into the streets in open defiance of curfews.

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The king at first went halfway to hand power back. But when this did
not quell the protests, he finally heeded the army’s advice and announced
the restoration of parliament on 24 April.
What Maoist violence couldn’t achieve in ten years and with 15,000
deaths was done in a spontaneous 19-day people power uprising. To
be sure, without the tacit support of the Maoists the protests would
probably not have taken off as they did. But the People Power 2 was alesson in the moral victory of non-violence over violence, because eventhe rebels conceded this tactic was more effective than armed struggle.
More than bricks hurled at police on the streets, what ultimately forced
the king to let go was the power of ridicule. The recital of satire poetry
in front of thousands of students in Kiritpur, posters, effigies,
impersonations and open lampooning of the king proved that his time
was up. A nationwide network of community radio stations, andjournalists dedicated to defend press freedom were factors in supporting
the pro-democracy movement.
A restored parliament has been restructuring the state. Changes that inother countries may have happened only after much bloodshed havebeen legislated with the stroke of a pen: the Shah dynasty has been
stripped of traditional powers it enjoyed for 237 years, the king nolonger commands the army, royal succession will now be decided byparliament and Nepal has been declared secular.

DEMOCRACY,DEVELOPMENT AND DIVERSITY
Mohiuddin Ahmad
I. CONCEPTUAL CONSTRUCTION
Context
When I was born, the people of my country were engaged in a Bhasha
Andolon (language movement), as our mother tongue Bangla was denied
the status of a ‘State Language’ in Pakistan1 . Organizers of the
movement were accused of separatism and enemy of the state. After
nineteen years, in 1971, when I was 19, I joined Bangladesh liberation
movement to dismantle the state of Pakistan that had refused toacknowledge and respect cultural diversity and denied our right to selfdetermination. The Pakistani army committed genocide and the price
was too high for independence. Nearly all families lost something, homeand chattels and someone dear.
In November 1972, the Constituent Assembly of Bangladesh approveda ‘Constitution’ that failed to acknowledge the identity and rights ofthe ethnic minorities. This largely alienated half a million people
belonging to about 45 ethnicities2 . They were less than one percent of
the total population and they became victims of majority chauvinism.
History repeats itself. Now the victims are the victors and they imitate
their past oppressors. At this point, democracy, nationalism andchauvinism become synonymous.
Here we confront a situation of representative democracy where thelaw of the majority is the rule of the game. There is only one stream,
the mainstream. The minorities are not allowed to choose how they
like to live.
1
2

Bangla was the first language for 56 percent of the population in Pakistan.
30 ethnicities are reported in the population census.

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They are culturally at risk;
 politically discriminated; socially outcast; and economically marginalized.
These together define a context of vulnerability corresponding topowerlessness. Here lack of power is poverty. The poor are those who
cannot make a choice for themselves. Poverty eradication thus calls for
empowerment, an enabling environment, where people decide forthemselves. This is more an institutional issue that goes beyond
economics.
Poverty
An enabling environment is required for a human being to live with
dignity. Perceptions on living conditions may vary. People talk aboutbasic needs. Here comes the dominant theory of poverty that epitomizes
a situation characterized by lack of access to basic goods and services
necessary for survival.
Many Asian governments have failed to provide millions of people
with basic health and education services, clean water and sanitation.
According to a report of Oxfam International, two out of three Indianscannot afford essential medicines even as the country gears up to become
a medical tourism destination for Westerners looking for cheaper
surgery. At least a third of children in Pakistan and Nepal do not go toschool. In Bangladesh, arsenic-contaminated shallow tube-wells are
exposing an estimated 25 million people to the toxin, while 87 percent
of Afghans have no access to clean drinking water.3
It is claimed that the world produces enough to feed and cater the basic
needs of its entire population. Still more than a billion people areswinging between the poverty line and the famine line. In Asia, this is a
hard reality that we face almost everyday. Here, there are too many
vulnerable households.
Theories keep on changing. Poverty is being redefined in almost every
decade. And there comes the right-based approach and the issue ofhuman security in terms of food, health, housing, water and energy.
But these are all mundane matters. Hence we talk about right to mobility,
information and franchise. From there follows right to freedom, the3

The Daily Star, Dhaka, 20 October 2006.

Envisioning Community-Building

185

freedom of choosing conditions of existence, the way of life. Here comesthe notion of lifestyle and also of vulnerability.
Vulnerability is the lack of capacity to withstand or cope with exogenous
conditions that are difficult or impossible to control. So people feelincreasingly vulnerable because of the advent and influence of
conflicting ideas, values, doctrines and lifestyles imposed by others
against their will.
Who is poor
In development literature, households are often grouped into two broad
categories using different synonyms, such as, poor and non-poor, poorand rich, haves and have-nots, disadvantaged and privileged, proletariat
and bourgeois, and so forth. In a global context, this boils down to thenorth and the south. Once I undertook a survey in the coastal zone of
Bangladesh4 to have a sense of the perceptions the people have about
poverty. How they define poverty by themselves? Among the
respondents were farmers, fishers, farm laborers, artisans and small
traders; 50% women and 50% men. The responses are summarized in
the following table.5
These answers may not satisfy planners to take decisions for the poor,
as these do not fit the way poverty is officially defined. Poor people do
not have the sense of per capita Gross National Product (GNP), northey understand the thin line between absolute poverty and extreme
poverty. What they yearn for is ‘happiness’. Happiness corresponds toa state of mind that may not necessarily corroborate consumerism. To
them, happiness or lack of it is an indicator of poverty. When a nearlyblind old person with benign outfit sings a mystic song with ektara6 ina remote railway station or under a banyan tree in a marketplace, he
expresses himself with divine pleasure:Amar moto shukhi bhobey keoto noi(There is no one as happy as me in this world)

4

Coastal zone of Bangladesh has 19 districts with a population of 37 million as of 2001 popula-tion census.
5
Ahmad, Mohiuddin. Living in the Coast: People and Livelihoods. Program Development Officefor Integrated Coastal Zone Management Plan (PDO-ICZMP), Water Resources Planning
Organization, Government of Bangladesh, Dhaka, 2004.
6
Indigenous musical instrument made of water gourd shell and a piece of wire.

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Perceptions of the Poor

Re s pons e of poor hous e holds
Indicator
Who is poor

Who is non-poor

LandNo, poor quality

Yes, good quality

Asset

No

Yes

IncomeInsufficientSufficient

Occupation

Less diverse,day- labor

Multiple

Savings

No

Yes

Debt

Yes

No

Housing

P oor

Good

Dependent

More

Less

While undertaking a research in a village, I saw a bridge being
constructed over the river, which would threaten livelihood of many
majhi (boatman), as they were involved in ferrying passengers andmerchandize across the river. I inquired to one of them about “alternative
livelihood”. His answer was plain and simple, “Pat dichhen jini, ahar
diben tini” (God who has given me a stomach will also provide food).
I looked at the water shimmering in the late afternoon sunlight.
Boatman’s shadow was swinging in the ripples of water. He was taking
me in an endless cruise from the terrestrial world to eternity. He wassinging a folk melody that described the metaphysical world of a majhi,
who is the custodian of a mythological boat.
O the benign Messiah I call you
Protect me while I cruise
In your gracious nameI sail across the mighty river.7
The million yen question is do we have the right and the logic to bracket
him as poor and vulnerable? Under conventional yardsticks, he is poor
because he doesn’t have electricity and sanitary latrine in his house and7

Ahmad, Mohiuddin. Dream Merchant. Nabodhara, Dhaka, 2001.
Jhupri is a shanty with a ceiling less than four feet and is made of very cheap construction
materials like straw, bamboo, grass, leaves, polythene sheet, gunny bag, etc.
8

Envisioning Community-Building187

he earns less than two dollars a day. He lives in a jhupri8 . He has no
regular job. His future is uncertain. But the risk of occupational
displacement does not haunt him at all. He may not see rain piercing
through the roof; rather he imagines white clouds toddling in the sky inthe autumn afternoon; or he wonders about a black curtain with million
stars twinkling at night. He has no greed for power, no lust for assets,
no deadline for a task. His world is poles apart. While rejecting his
world in the chase for ‘development’, we tend to inflict our world on
him. We presume that he is poor, ignorant and unaware, and we have to‘educate’ him, ‘train’ him, ‘empower’ him and ‘develop’ him.
II. DIVERSITY AND DISCRIMINATION
Nationalism and chauvinism
People’s attitudes are manifested through interest-oriented coalitions
and institutions including the state. These are causes and consequencesof the collective psyche that promotes or opposes chauvinism. Whilenationalist movements are built up for autonomy against centralism,
they often fall prey to chauvinist syndromes.
About one-fourth of the world’s population lives in South Asia. The
regional bloc, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation(SAARC) has eight member countries.9 About 90 percent of them live
in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh who were part of a single politicalentity till August 1947. The region broke into pieces and majority
chauvinism was a key element in the fragmentation. That legacy still
continues. At present, Islam is the state religion in Bangladesh. India isa secular country de jure, but a Hindu state by performance. Nepal wasa Hindu Kingdom and has recently been declared a secular state bypeople’s movements. Pakistan is an Islamic Republic. Constitutionally
Sri Lanka is a Democratic Socialist Republic, but gripped in severe
ethnic conflict. Bhutan is ruled by absolute monarchy. Afghanistan isin a state of disarray and has virtually been colonized by the USA.
Maldives has a ‘life-long’ President.
Inner colonization is widespread in many parts of Asia, such as, India(Kashmir and the northeast region), China (Tibet), Sri Lanka (Jaffna),
Russia (Chechnya), Japan (Ryukyu), Philippines (Mindanao), Pakistan
9

SAARC was founded in August 1983 with seven member-countries, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India,
Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The first summit meeting was held in Dhaka in December
1985. Afghanistan joined as the 8th member in 2005.

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Communities in Action(Baluchistan), Bangladesh (Chittagong Hill Tracts), Indonesia (Aceh),
Turkey (Kurdistan) and so forth.
Indonesia was colonized by the Dutch and then by Japan. But what isIndonesia? It is a state with many nationalities. Java has been the centerand other islands groan in the periphery. What the Dutch and theJapanese did to the Javanese, the Javanese did the same to the people of
East Timor. When the people of East Timor stood up from the ravageof genocide that reminded me of our own situation three decades ago.
In my reminiscence those days peep
In the womb of time the people search
A newborn flag that unfolds fast
With tune of freedom millions march.10
Bias and bigotry
Ethnic and religious chauvinism is increasing. The state is provoking
bigotry in many respects. The Hindu-Muslim riot, Shia-Sunni skirmish,marginalization of the Dalits (lower caste, untouchable) by Brahmanism(upper caste prejudice), increasing Sinhala (Buddhist) chauvinism
against the Tamils (Hindu), persecution of ethnic Nepalese in Bhutan,
killing of Christian priests in India and Pakistan, discrimination andpersecution of the minorities by the majority community, all are
manifestations of a society, which is hardly civil.
As religion has become more and more instrumental in molding acollective hysteria, states are increasingly at loggerheads. People’s rights
are curtailed in the pretext of ‘national security’. At the same time,
there are people’s movements seeking constitutional guarantee forautonomy to independence in various parts of the region. This is reflectedin the imagination of an activist in the following verse.
Kashmir to Mindanao Belfast to Basque
Ryukyu to Kurdistan whomever I ask
They all say in their mind freedom tops the list
We are all freedom fighter not a separatist.
I am a freedom fighter to fulfill my needI fight for my people and indigenous seed
I fight for land rights raising my fist
They call me an insurgent and a terrorist.11
10
11

Ahmad, Mohiuddin. Pita Hi Paramantapa. Ekkhon, Dhaka, 1999.
Ahmad, Mohiuddin. From Jamuna to Nile. Nabodhara, Dhaka, 2006.

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Asia is the birthplace of many religions where the people from different
faiths have managed to live together for centuries. Despite its historicalrise and fall, the region has also succeeded in safeguarding some of its
secular institutions. Some of the values, beliefs and practices of suchinstitutions have made a significant contribution to human civilization.
Those days still glitter in our memory.
When the cloud of pessimism overshadows the mind, we take shelterin the words of the poet.
My world will light its hundred different lamps with the flame
And place them before the alter of thy temple.
No. I will never shut the doors of my senses.
The delights of sight and hearing and touch will bear thy light.12
Steam of life
The most profound use of the concept of unity in diversity has developedsince the last century as an integral aspect of an ecological understandingof the world. The concept is based on the knowledge that biologicaldiversity is necessary to sustain the healthy existence of ecosystems
and that the healthy progress of the planet is dependent on the diversityof such ecosystems. Scientists and environmentalists lament the loss of
species that will never be found, because the environments in which
they live are being destroyed by massive transformations. A great dealof human endeavor to address the problem is needed. The issue of wateris central to it.
Beyond water’s domestic uses, which are critical to life and livelihood,
it is associated with fertility, purity and spiritual nourishment. Its greatvalue is a deep and central element of the culture. There should be no
surprise at the strength of feeling that surrounds water issues, nor at thevehemence and deep-rooted emotions that can emerge in conflicts aboutwater.13
People’s mindset is deeply influenced by ideological perceptions ofwhich the religion plays an instrumental role. People often take guidancefrom holy scripts, what to do and what to refrain from. The point of
convergence across doctrines and dictums is the fact that water is asacred endowment from the creator of the universe. It follows naturally
12

Tagore, Rabindranath. Gitanjali. Bangla Academy, Dhaka, 1993.
ISPAN. Eastern Water Study – Strategies to Manage Flood and Drought in the GangesBrahmaputra Basin. USAID, Washington, D.C., 1989.
13

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Communities in Actionthat the humankind will use this unique gift and protect it for future
generations. For example, members of the Hindu community consider
the Ganga14 a great sacred river. Here are some quotations from the
Qur’an, the holy book of the Muslims.15
Have those who disbelieved not considered that the heavens and theearth were a joint entity, and I separated them and made from water
everything living thing (Chapter 21, Verse 30)?
And you see the earth barren, but when I send down upon it rain, it
quivers and swells and grows (something) of every beautiful kind
(Chapter 22, Verse 5).
And have you seen the water that you drink? Is it you who brought it
down from the clouds, or is it I who bring it down? If I would, I
could make it bitter, so why are you not grateful (Chapter 56, Verse
68-70)?
When things go wrong, sometimes the nature takes its toll. People suffer
and they beg the mercy of the divine spirit.
Allah megh de pani de chhaya de re tui
Allah megh de(O GodGive us cloud over our head
Give us water and bestow shade.16 )This is a very popular folk song in Bangladesh.17 It reflects the desperateurge of farmers to God for rain when crops are hit by severe drought.
Cloud, rain and river are the trinity in the life on earth, for human beings,
animals and plants. They give comfort in scorching heat; they endow
land with lush green crops; they keep watercourses traversable. They
are the lifeblood. They bring passion in the heart of the poet.
White clouds toddle in the sky
I watch them as they fly

14
15
16

River Ganges, as pronounced by the Europeans.
The Qur’an. Translated by Saheeh International. Abulqasim Publishing House, Jeddah, 1997.

Traditional Bangla song, translated by the author.
Abbas Uddin Ahmed, a noted singer of the country, was the vocalist. The Gramophone Company
of India first recorded it in the 1940s.
17

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I yearn for you and surmise
One more poem I could write.18
III. DEVELOPMENT DISASTER
The ordeal
We are in a development race. We are changing the face of the earth. So
we are heading fast towards a catastrophe. Rampant climate change
could turn 200 million people into refugees amid drought and flood.
The cost of unchecked climate change would be up to $6.98 trillion.
Unless the world acts, it would cost more than the World War-I, World
War-II and the great depression of the 1930s, while rendering large
parts of the planet uninhabitable.19
Minamata has exposed how vulnerable the people are amid the race forindiscriminate growth and modernization. Many people became sick,which was caused by years of discharge of mercury into Minamata
Bay by Chisso Corp. The number of victims is believed to be morethan 20,000. Since a Supreme Court ruling on erased criteria in 2004,
more than 4,300 people have applied for official recognition and morethan 1,100 non-certified patients have sued the central government,
Kummoto Prefecture and Chisso.20
Neo-liberal terrorism
In past years, we have witnessed a dramatic escalation of neo-liberalterrorism, taking also the form of imperialist aggression including
invasion and occupation of sovereign nations and escalation of
militarism in many parts of the world. At the same time, however, there
has been a growth in the number and scale of movements resisting war
and the spread of neo-liberal corporate globalization.21
We also observe and experience a new form of slavery, slavery of debt.
Colonization is today pursued through the neo-liberal model ofdevelopment, which has accelerated the appropriation andcommodification of natural resources in the resource-rich countries of
the South. This model forces nation-states into indebtedness and toaccept aid with harmful policy reform conditionality and widens trade
18

Ahmad, Mohiuddin. Sorrowful Yard. Ankur Prakashani, Dhaka, 2004.
Governments’ failure to act on global warming could cost up to $7 trillion. Excerpts of a reportby Sir Nicholas Stern, The Japan Times, Tokyo, 30 October 2006.
20
50 years on - Minamata disease relief still elusive. The Japan Times, 7 November 2006.
19

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imbalances. It mutilates our democratic institutions, processes andspaces. It perpetrates untold violence on our communities in the nameof national and public security. It causes continuing marginalizationand pauperization of our peoples. It fuels militarization of our polity,
legitimizes suppression by the state of peoples’ struggles for selfdetermination, and exacerbates violation of human rights. Worst affectedby these are women, children, indigenous communities, dalits and theminorities.22
For example, Bangladesh has received over US$ 22 billion as loan fromexternal sources from 1971/72 to 2003/04. This is in addition to US$
19 billion received as ‘grant’. The country has so far paid back overnine billion US$ including three billion as interest. Outstanding debt
stands at about US$ 19 billion.23 The country is still crawling as a
LDC.24 The question is, where all these money go?
Much of the debt is odious, illegitimate and immoral. The Ashuganj
Fertilizer Factory in Bangladesh is a unique example of adverse donor
conditionality, vis a vis country’s weak bargaining position led by amilitary dictatorial regime in negotiating the purchase of technology.
With a capacity of 528,000 tons of urea per year, the project wasconceived in 1975 with a cost of $242.2 million. IDA, ADB and USAID
were the major lenders. After the approval, the project underwent various
cost revisions and the latest estimate put total cost at $410 million. This
was almost double of the cost of similar projects with similar capacity
set up elsewhere. The project was unworthy of export on pricecompetition, and also uneconomic and unviable for the domestic market.
The project increased debt burden on the people. Huge subsidy isprovided to sell the product in the market. A similar project, KAFCO,
was pushed by Japan where the government has to sell natural gas at a
rate much lower than the international rate and buy the product (urea)
at a rate higher than the international price.
Every child in Bangladesh is born with a debt obligation. Per capita
debt has increased from $7 in 1973/74 to $137 in 2003/04, while per
21

Jubilee South Declaration. 2nd Global Assembly, Havana, 28 September 2005
Hyderabad Pledge. Declaration of the people’s forum during annual meeting of the Board ofGovernors of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), held in Hyderabad (India) in May 2006.
23
Ministry of Finance. Bangladesh Economic Review 2005. Government of Bangladesh, Dhaka,
June 2005.
24
Least Developed Country as categorized by the UN. There are 50 LDCs including 5 in South
Asia and 15 in Asia.
22

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193

capita GNP is only $482.25 Annual debt service payment is as much as
combined investments in education and health sectors.
The question is, why the people of the South should pay for illegitimate
debts — debts they have not benefited from, debts that financed projects
that caused displacement of the communities and damage to theenvironment, debts wasted on corruption or failed projects, debts
contracted through undemocratic and fraudulent means, debts withgrossly unfair terms and harmful conditions, odious debts incurred bydictatorships, debts contracted in the context of exploitative international
economic relations, debts for which peoples of the South have paid
many times over? So the slogan is now: we, the people of the South,
are creditors. We don’t owe we won’t pay.26
Farmers plough and they say
We don’t owe we won’t pay.
Fishers row and they say
We don’t owe we won’t pay.
Children play and they say
We don’t owe we won’t pay.
As we march we all say
We don’t owe we won’t pay.27
Anti-debt movement has been intensified. The message is very clear.
The neo-liberalism under the aegis of market fundamentalism has to beresisted.
We don’t live any more within the realm of economic growth-driven
development. Now we talk about sustainable development. The question
comes as a logical corollary whether we can sustain the earth for our
living. Can we?
And quiet flows the life
Step by step, nature has set the stage for Homo sapiens. It was not until
7,000 years ago that Neolithic man took to agriculture and began todomesticate animals. The ethereal beauty of the Himalaya and the25

Ministry of Finance. Bangladesh Economic Review 2006. Government of Bangladesh, Dhaka,
June 2006.
26
Call for global actions against International Financial Institutions at International People’s
Forum. Organized during the World Bank-IMF annual meeting at Singapore, 14-20 September
2006.
27
Composed and recited by the author at the polycentric World Social Forum held in Caracas on
26 January 2006.

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bounty of the Ganga vested them with attributes of divinity. Kalidas28
spoke for poets and philosophers alike in describing the Himalaya as
Earth’s measuring rod. Himalaya was not always there. Nature itself
has transformed the landscape. Rivers have changed course. Fauna,
flora and eco-cultures have migrated and intermingled. Nature is notunchanging. And what Man has done to change this changeful nature iswhat is to be seen.29
In the Gangetic delta, human settlement and actions are conditioned by
the water regime and land elevation. In the floodplain, village platforms
are at higher elevation. People build houses on raised earthen mounds
to protect themselves from borshar pani (monsoon water), which
drenches low-lying areas.30
Rural people follow local wisdom in everyday life. Khona is their
mentor.31 She is associated with many forecasts, known as Khonar
Vachan, about weather, astrology, crops, productivity, and so on.
Khona’s advice work as guide to farmers, telling them when to plant,
how to till the soil for different crops. She also suggested which way ahouse should face, where trees should be planted and where a pondshould be excavated. Mothers often cite her advice to children about
what and how much one should eat. “A little bit of salt, a little bit ofbitter, and always stop before you are too full”. Homestead gardens are
key to the prosperity. How did Khona express it?
Kola ruye na keto paat
Tatei kapor tatei bhat
(Planting banana tree, do not cut leaves
This will produce enough for food and clothes)In order to live comfortably, one needs to get the benefit of monsoon
wind in the summer coming from the south, and protection against cold
wave coming from the north. Khona has a wise advice for all how tobuild a house.
28

Great Indian poet of 4th century B.C.
Verghese, B.G. Waters of Hope - Himalaya-Ganga Development and Cooperation for a Billion
People. Oxford & IBH, New Delhi, 1990
30
Ahmad, Mohiuddin. Social Audit of Water Management, in Ahmad (ed), Bangladesh Towards
21st Century. CDL, Dhaka, 1999.
31
Khona, composer of nature laws. She lived between 800-1200 AD. According to one account,she belonged to village Deuli in Barasat, West Bengal (India). Her father was Acharya (teacher),and she stayed in King Chakraketu’s monastery for a considerable period.
29

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Dokshin duari ghorer raja
Purbo duari tahar proja
Uttar duarir mukhey chhai
Poshchim duarir khajna nai(South-facing house is the finest
One facing the east is the next best
A house is unpleasant facing the north
A west-facing house one shouldn’t have sought)
Dreadful damsLife flows from birth to death, as that of a river from the glacier to thesea. When it is young, it is turbulent. At the time of maturity, it
replenishes land with fertility of silt and water. At the fag end of thejourney, it joins the sea, the eternity. Then came the regime of‘development’ that shattered the fabric of the earth and of our life.
The history of ‘development’ is virtually the history of humanencroachment into rivers and other water bodies. Some people tend totame the river. They call it ‘river training’. Dykes are built, dams are
installed and spurs are constructed to contain a river. In a protest rally
against World Bank-funded big dams, once the activists put up a banner
mentioning, “Dam the World Bank, not the World’s Rivers”.32
Around the world, large dams have caused massive irreversible harm
to rivers, riverine ecosystems and the people who depend on them fortheir livelihood. Millions of people have been forcibly evicted fromtheir homes and lands to make way for large dams. Most have been left
worse off. Millions more living in the downstream has had theirlivelihoods destroyed by changes in river ecosystems. Some of theworld’s most diverse wildlife habitats and fertile farmlands have been
flooded beneath reservoirs. Entire river ecosystems have been
irreversibly harmed.
Although the rate of dam building has dropped to less than half of its
peak in the early 1970s, many projects still remain under construction
and many more have been proposed. Japan plays a key role in promoting
this development internationally.

32

Author’s personal experience of participating in a rally in Washington D.C. as a member of theThird World Network delegation at the time of World Bank-IMF annual meeting in September
1990. There were protests against the Three Gorges Dam (China) and the Narmada Dam (India).

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In September 2002, communities affected by the Koto Panjang Dam inIndonesia filed an unprecedented lawsuit. The project, supported by
the Japanese government and built by Japanese construction companies,
forcibly evicted around 20,000 people from their homes and land anddestroyed important habitat for endangered species such as elephants,
tigers, bears and monkeys. The 3,861 plaintiffs demanded that theJapanese government and the Japanese company, which designed thedam, take measures to restore the rivers destroyed by the project andpay compensation of five million yen per person.
The San Roque Dam in the Philippines is another example of a
destructive dam project funded by the Japanese government. The
affected people have repeatedly called on the Japanese government tohalt its funding of the project; yet their pleas have fallen on deaf ears.
Among those affected are the indigenous Ibaloi people who live in fearthat their land and villages would be buried in sediment backing up
behind the dam, as well as thousands of people who were forcibly
displaced to make way for the construction site and reservoir.
These two cases are perhaps the most well known in Japan, but several
more are there. Many of these projects would not have been built without
support from the Japanese government through the Japan Bank forInternational Cooperation (JBIC). It is Japanese taxpayers’ money thatis being used to subsidize these destructive projects, all in the name of“development”.33
When the Government of India commissioned the Farakka Barrage on
the Ganga River in 1975 and later in 1976 started diverting water
unilaterally to another channel Bhagirathi, vast areas in Bangladesh
became dry and many farmers were dislocated. This created a lot of
tension between the two peoples. Although a water sharing agreement
was signed between the two governments in 1996, the river had alreadybeen depleted by numerous dams and barrages in the upstream.
Accord and action
A growing people’s movement in Asia is challenging JBIC’s destructive
development model and promoting alternative methods of meeting needs
for energy, water and flood control. People’s movements to regain rights
33

Rivers Watch East and Southeast Asia (RWESA). Development Disasters: Japanese-Funded
Dam Projects in Asia. International River Network and Friends of the Earth Japan, March 2003.
Source: www.rwesa.org.

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to water, land, forest and other shared resources are expanding beyond
national borders and across regions. In July 2000, Rivers Watch Eastand Southeast Asia (RWESA), a network of NGOs and people’s
movements, was formed to stop destructive river development in Eastand Southeast Asia and to press for reparations for affected communities
and restoration of damaged ecosystems. RWESA is demanding that
JBIC adheres to its own environmental guidelines and the WCD (World
Commission on Dams) recommendations in all future planning. In
addition, RWESA is demanding that JBIC takes responsibility forrepairing the harm from existing projects, as recommended by the WCD.
34

Some civil society groups of South Asia met in Chennai (India) in August
1993 and decided to form a “South Asia People’s Commission on River
Water and Environment”. As a follow-up, three NGOs, namely CDL(Bangladesh), RRN (Nepal) and IMSE (India) joined hands in a meetingin November 1993 in Dhaka to do a study on the Ganga. Three separate
studies were done and the findings were presented in a workshop heldin Kathmandu in July 1994. There was a consensus that






Farmers across borders need water.
Rivers catchments do not necessarily follow politicalboundaries.
Water is a critical environmental resource and should be used
in a sustainable manner.
Rivers should not be engineered for short-term, narrow,commercial purposes.
Let the rivers flow.35

Some experts and activists with diverse and even conflicting ‘national’
interest have decided to work together for common good.36
At this backdrop, many of us joined together to develop a process ofpeople’s SAARC to spearhead trans-border democracy. In the people’s
agenda were uniform charter of civil rights, demilitarization, free flowof information and labor and so forth. Some civil society groups andNGOs organized solidarity actions and collaborative works to this end.
Notable among these were the founding of the South Asian Forum of
Human Rights (SAFHR), South Asian Forum against Destructive
34
35

RWESA. Op cit.
Ahmad, Mohiuddin. South Asian Perspective. Nabodhara, Dhaka, 1996.

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International Aid (SAFDIA), a peace process initiated by the PakistanIndia People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD), People’s
SAARC and South Asia Alliance for Poverty Eradication (SAAPE). A
need for convergence of the people in the region has increasingly been
felt.
IV. DEMOCRACY DOWN TO EARTH
GovernancePeople want to come together, not through forcible assimilation, but
through a process of cooperation based on shared vision. Such a processof convergence is often threatened by chauvinism and centralism. Right
to autonomy is branded as separatism and is brutally suppressed in thepretext of national security and integration. Here the states are too strong,
distant, atrocious and indifferent to the sensitivity of the communities
with distinct identity.
We live under the dictum of the state. We create states to deliver services
and they emerge as super institutions to regulate us. Governancebecomes state-centric and not people-centric.
The core issue is, however, the relationship between the state and thepeople. John Locke argued that the relationship between the government
and the governed was in the nature of a contract – the Social Contract.
By this contract, the people give their consent to be controlled by agovernment on condition that the government does not violate the naturalrights of life, liberty and property. If any of these rights is infringed,
the contract is broken and the people have a right to rebel to change thegovernment.37 Locke’s political concept of natural rights produced thedoctrine that the people as a whole should have complete control overtheir political destiny.
Locke’s ideas were demonstrated in the revolt of the American colonies.
In this context, the following words may be quoted from Jefferson’s
Declaration of Independence.
We hold the truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness.
36
After 20 years of squabble and consultation, a water sharing agreement was finally reached
between the two countries in 1996.

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199

That, to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, - That
whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.38
The issue of governance is recently being addressed in development
literature. In most Asian countries, fruits of development are often lost
due to bad governance. This is manifested through corruption,harassment, humiliation and deliberate wastage of time, lack of respect
for common people, unfriendly attitude, negligence to duties, plunderingof public resources, nepotism and violence against minorities, womenand children.
A major weakness in the governance system is lack of people’s
participation, which is in-built in public institutions dealing with
development projects. This has been well reflected in a government
document of Bangladesh.39
 The governance agenda has suffered from being insufficiently
grounded in an understanding of where the governance‘needs’ of the poor and of vulnerable groups including women
lie and of the real-life constraints impinging on the initiative
potential of political actors on governance issues.
 Burgeoning election expenditures have narrowed the field ofpolitical competition to a moneyed class and fuelled a propensity
for corrupt practices to ensure ‘recovery’ of expenditures
incurred.
 An inherited colonial system of criminal and civil justice, which
ensures ‘certainty of expense but uncertainty of results, poses
major barriers to the poor in terms of accessibility andaffordability.
 Systems loss in the process of delivery of some services appears
to be huge, making the system inefficient and ineffective.
Good governance embodies participation, transparency, accountability
and equity. It makes participation a right and hence ensures that voiceof the poor and the excluded is heard. It also calls for democratization
37

Of Civil Government (1689).
Second paragraph of “A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America inGeneral Congress Assembled”, in Heater, D.B., Political Ideas in the Modern World. George G.
Harrap & Co. Ltd., London, 1967.
39
PDO-ICZMP. State of the Coast. Water Resources Planning Organization, Government of
Bangladesh, Dhaka, 2006.
38

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Communities in Actionof national governments, the international financial institutions (IFIs)
and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the reform of the United
Nations (UN) to ensure a pro-people governance system in place.
Moreover, good governance applies both to the North in their dealings
with the South, as well as within the South itself, as the prevalent rampant
corruption only keeps the poor and the disadvantaged, again, at thereceiving end.40
Criminalization of politics
Whether we like it or not, our lives are controlled by political parties.
They are now inseparable part of our system of governance. The firststriking feature of the political parties is that these are person-oriented.
Each party has a central figure, a main leader, the Supremo. In many
countries, the main leader holds the office till her/his death. S/he cannot
be replaced.
In a society of unequal, politics is a convenient tool for a small sectionof the people to establish and perpetuate their individual and clan interest.
This is manifested in the dynastic regimes at all levels: local government,
parliamentary constituency and central leadership of the political parties.
In many Asian countries, we observe third, fourth or even fifth generationof family rule legitimized through elections.
The entire process has been criminalized. Still we observe popularparticipation in elections. The members of the electorate still go to thepolling booths with twin objectives. First, they like to exercise theirright of franchise, which in many Asian societies has been earned after
prolonged struggle and bloodshed. Secondly, the voters want a change.
However, there are many who cannot vote. Particularly the vulnerable
groups, such as, religious and ethnic minorities, the dalits and womenare not allowed to cast vote by the power elite in many areas. Women’s
participation in the political process is hardly allowed in West Asian
countries with few exceptions like Iran, Lebanon, Palestine and Israel.
Parliamentary election has become a big industry with high investments
and even higher rate of return. Money and muscle power is now sinequa non for elections. The increasing participation of the “new rich” inelections reinforces this hypothesis.
40

LDCWatch. Civil society concerns of the implementation of the Brussels Program of Action forthe decade of 2001-2010 at the high level meeting of the UN General Assembly on the mid-term
review. 18-19 September 2006, New York.

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What is the alternative? Shall we do away with the parliament, theelectoral process and political pluralism? The overhead cost of runninga state, a parliament and a government is too high. The people are very
poor. Why the poor would continue to pay for processes and institutions
that do not deliver? The enterprise named state needs to be moremeaningful and relevant. We have to find ways and means to evolve a
process that ensures accountability of those who are elected to run thegovernment. This is the task of the civil society.
Civil society role
Amidst philistine outlook, hypocrisy and feudal remnants, there arerays of hope. Civic actions take place against the prejudicial acts of thegovernments and the multilateral agencies. They are not many innumber, but are increasing. Indigenous people’s resistance against large
dams in India, garments workers’ movement for fair wage in
Bangladesh, citizens’ movement for a sovereign parliament andconstitutional democracy in Nepal, citizens’ movement for a corruptionfree and more accountable government in the Philippines and resistanceof farmers, fishers and a section of the intelligentsia across the region
and beyond against the axis of evils constituted by the World Bank, theInternational Monetary Fund (IMF) and the WTO are few such
examples.
The struggle for peace and justice is on. One commendable example is
the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military
Sexual Slavery, held in Tokyo in December 2000. The tribunal sought
to bring justice to survivors, and to end the cycle of impunity for wartime
sexual violence. It says:
Here we all take action for the future, through the global solidarityof people and not of States, with women playing a central role
alongside men.41
A poet in Okinawa still remembers in profound grief the plight of theschoolgirls in the World War-II that devastated the land of the Ryukyus.42

41
Matsui, Yayori, organizer of the tribunal. Cited in Toward a future of peace and non-violence,
Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM), Tokyo.
42
Takara, Ben. Dream Revelations.

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In a society of unequal, politics is aconvenient tool for a small section of thepeople to establish and perpetuate theirindividual and clan interest. This ismanifested in the dynastic regimes at alllevels: local government, parliamentary
constituency and central leadership of thepolitical parties. In many Asian countries, weobserve third, fourth or even fifth generationof family rule legitimized through elections.

Envisioning Community-Building

203

In the sacred grove of Hamakawa
in the shadow of the rocks on the shore,
their hair died red
lipstick moist
two island girls
white arms bared to the pit
waited,staring into the distantblue green channels of nirai kanai43
for the black-skinned, white-skinned GIs
who would come.
The vision of Minamata
How is our contemporary world? In the late 1980s, there was an attempt
to conceptualize PP21 (people’s plan for twenty-first century) in theform of an idea, a network and a movement for trans-border alliancefor grassroots democracy. It was an earnest and resolute effort to develop
an Asian regional perspective and a vision for future. It says:
The slogan at the beginning of the 20th century was progress. The
cry at the end of the 20th century is survival. The call for the next
century is hope.
The present system has begun to undermine itself by creating its
own contradictions: growth against nature, militarism against needfor collective security, uniformity against cultural diversity,
alienation against human dignity, mindless consumerism against
humankind aspiring to regain lost values.
A new internationalism is being born out of these local, nationaland regional popular struggles confronting common enemies.
The ruling powers maintain themselves by dividing the people andencouraging hostility among them.
Trans-border political actions, support and solidarity campaigns
will gradually develop a new ‘people’ that transcends existing
divisions.44
Our vision projects global democracy – trans-border participatory
democracy to counter and to finally dismantle global power centres
43
44

The other world in Okinawan cosmology.
Minamata Declaration. PP21 Assembly at Minamata (Japan), August 1989.

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and also overcome the overreaching problem of human society today– the division of the people of the world into the North and theSouth.45
The vision of Minamata has spread across continents. The World Social
Forum (WSF) has been carrying the torch of trans-border allianceforward since 2001. Many people perceive the WSF with all its
limitations as an ‘alliance of hope’ in the post-cold war era.
V. COMMUNITY CONVERGENCE
Participation and partnership
When we founded the CDL in Bangladesh46 , we were wondering how
to create an enabling environment where people from diverse culturesand backgrounds will converge for enlightenment and action. The goal
was to facilitate a process that would lead to a higher level ofparticipation. In order to prepare a society to perform a pro-active role,
people need to be well informed, aware of all options and should befree to choose some. We started organizing discussion forums and study
circles, preparing dissemination materials and developing instruments
for advocacy and lobbying. This has led us to realize some issues froma governance point of view.
Development is a right and not a privilege. People need an enabling
environment to assert their rights. An enabling environment includes aset of conditions that facilitates the performance of certain individuals
or social groups in a better way. Such an enabling environment
particularly corresponds to an institutional framework that contributes
positively toward enhancement of livelihoods of the people. This isinvariably linked to the wider aspect of how resources are managed
and how access to these resources is regulated. The functioning of thisframework is the consequence, as well as reflection, of certain processes.
These processes either accelerate the pace of enhancement, or impede
its course. Any change in these processes will change the institutional
environment and will thereby affect the livelihoods of the people andvice versa.
45
46

The Sagarmatha Declaration, PP21 Assembly, Kathmandu, March 1996.

Community Development Library (CDL) was founded in October 1980 as a center for
development learning, communication, research and advocacy. It is a non-profit organization(NPO) with 25 centers across Bangladesh.

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People need a government in terms of services it delivers and they do
not want a government to control and regulate their lives. The next
important question is where the government should be located. It is
now widely agreed that people should be empowered at the local levelto plan and manage their own affairs. At the higher level (i.e. the centrallevel), the need of the government can only be rationalized in terms of
its facilitating role.
While the aspirations of the people can find expression in anenvironment of freedom, an enabling institutional setting envisages thefollowing: Participatory local governance;
 Community management of resources; Secularism.
In the art of governance, the notion of authority has increasingly been
replaced by the concept of participation. Its connotation goes beyond
consultation process and it includes within its fold the role in decisionmaking at all stages of an intervention affecting livelihoods. Here thekey word is ‘partnership’.
Partnership evolves through meaningful interaction and convergenceof interests. This requires a facilitating mechanism that would ensure
critical balance between diverse needs and interests. It is important tonote that there are different interest groups with conflicting objectives.
In the context of an enabling environment, conflict management andconsensus building are two critical tasks that need special attention.47
These together create condition for unity in diversity. This is quite
different from ‘democratic centralism’ envisioned by the communists
for a long time. In the mid-sixties, Mao Ze-dong said, “Let hundred
flowers bloom; let thousand schools of thought flourish”. This concept
was expounded together with a slogan, “bombard the headquarters”, in
his campaign against party bureaucracy. Ultimately centralism defeateddemocracy.
Communities yearn for freedom, cry for freedom, fight for freedom
and die for freedom.

47

Ahmad, Mohiuddin. Living in the Coast - People and Institutions. PDO-ICZMP, Water Resources Planning Organization, Government of Bangladesh, Dhaka, 2005

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When I was born
Birds didn’t sing
They were in chain.
When I was born
Flowers didn’t bloom
There was no rain.
When I was born
Plants didn’t grow
There was no grain.
When I was born
Rivers didn’t flow
There was no crane.
As I roam aroundI see no home to rest
I see no one to love
Birds don’t find a nest.
O sister....O brother
Free the land, free the riverFree the sky, free the flower
Free the birds, free the mind
Free the children, free mankind.48
Language of protest
Participants in resistance movements are considered as terrorists by thestate and are hailed as freedom fighters in their own communities.
Language of the state and that of the victims are different. The question
is from whose perspective one speaks. Around the world, resistancehas become a dominant language of protest against plight andpersecution of the marginalized communities. This perhaps reinforces
the hypothesis: either resist or perish.
Protest is a manifestation of the injured mind. It indicates the extent of
injury that one suffers. If the injury is far too grave, the injured mind
may explode losing coherence and sanity. A language of remonstrationis then transformed into a language of coercion, which is often violent.
A display of this syndrome has been observed in the Israel-Palestine
conflict where “your children for our children” has surfaced as a means
48

Composed and recited by the author in the 2nd South-North consultation in Havana organizedby the Jubilee South, 30 September 2005.

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of intimidation. This is where all reasons end and forces of vengeancetriumph.49
In the ideal world of representative democracy where the state is strong
in terms of responsibilities to its citizens and weak in terms of powerover its citizens, a different language of protest is heard. In the sixties
and the seventies, anti-Vietnam war rallies symbolized the radicalizationof the youth. The Russel Tribunal was a classic example of protest of
the enlightened mind against hegemony. A similar tribunal wasorganized to seek justice for the victims of Minamata at the second
PP21 assembly in Bangkok in December 1992.
Role of a conformist is to emulate, while a rebel ponders to create. A
rebel never gives in. When Prometheus retorted to the servant of theGods, Hermes, he said:
Be sure of this, I would not change my state
Of evil fortune for your servitude,
Better to be the servant of this rockThan to be faithful boy to Father Zeus.50
Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophicalcalendar.51

49

Ahmad, Mohiuddin. Language of Protest, in Ahmad (ed), Thorny Path - essays on contemporary
issues. CDL, Dhaka, 2004.
50
Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound.
51
Marx, Karl. Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature. Doctoral
Dissertation.

Building Cultural Sustainability among
Young Communities in Asia
Janet Pillai
The Development of Cultural Collectives
While some persons fit comfortably into the textual, discursive spaceof academia, I do not. I prefer to read the stimulating theories put forthby academics and to experiment with them on the ground. I am more ofan action researcher examining the role and relevance of the arts indifferent contexts. My practice involves facilitating young people to
make art that is culturally relevant or functional in different settings orfields. My work has drawn me away from my urban tribe to touch basewith different communities. Over the last 15 years I have moved frombeing a theatre practitioner to become what may be termed a cultural
worker.
Cultural workers are usually activists or activist artists who position
themselves as development workers or non-formal educators withinsmall communities. They use the arts (performing arts in particular,
writing and visual arts,) as a participatory, exploratory or communication
tool to deliver information or to ignite social/cultural transformation.
‘Cultural collective’ is a term that might be loosely used to describe anorganization led by such activists, which promotes cultural, ideologicaland civil development.
Cultural collectives are popular in India and to an extent in Southeast
Asia (particularly in the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand). They
operate as small non-profit groups at grassroots level, engage young
1
Although some of these organizations have been criticized as ‘project culture’, i.e. dependence
on western donors, donor’s criteria and keywords, young activists prefer to work for these NGOs,
which remain independent of state administration and media, both of which predominantly promotenational propaganda. Some examples of global movements, which give policy support and fundprojects, are Save the Children UK, CARE, Asia Network, Danish Association for Cooperationand World Vision. They initiate programs via development workers to empower communities,
fund training programs for development workers and the development of materials and tools.

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university graduates as volunteers and are supported by funds
obtained from local and international foundations.1 As culture is
one of the strongest transmission tools at grassroots level, culturalcollectives often team up with local artists to devise critical culturaldevelopment programs. Cultural collectives are more popularly
known as Theatre for Development, Popular Theatre, Popular
Education, Participatory Theatre, Theater in Health Education,
Educational Theatre, and Edutainment.
PETA in the Philippines, MAYA and MAKHAMPOM in Thailand,
Young Theatre Penang in Malaysia, KUNCI in Indonesia and Alternative
Living Theatre in West Bengal are examples of cultural collectives,
each with a history spanning approximately10-25 years. Their formation
can be traced to sentiments and ideology rising from the 1970s student
movement in Asian Universities.
The political action of the student movement of the 1970s in Indonesia,
Malaysia, Thailand and India was orientated towards ideological issues
at a broader societal level. Philip Altbach2 describes such action as
having ‘value’ orientation (i.e. where action is taken around ideologicalissues such as dismantling dictatorship or elevation of corruption) and‘societal’ orientation (i.e. where issues were viewed as political,
economic or cultural in nature and were of national concern). These
particular orientations of the student movements in India and Southeast
Asia seem to have a strong impact on engaging students in civic andpolitical roles, producing the first generation of student activists3 whocarried their commitment into community work, after graduation.
Students who came out of this movement, and chose to set up social or
In analyzing the function and location of social collectives (in India),2

Altbach, Phillip. “Student Politics and Higher Education in India” Bombay, Lalvani Publishing
House, 1968, India. Altbach describes the political action of student movements as moving along
4 particular orientations; normative orientation is action taken on very specific issues while value
orientation refers to action taken around wider ideological issues. Etudialist orientation focuses
on issues limited to student or campus as a site while societal orientation refers to taking action ata national level
3
In Thailand and Philippines small but vocal political theatre movements appeared as part of thestudent democracy movement. These groups regrouped as NGOs after periods of censorship.
Despite being counter culture movements they worked within the framework of indigenous culture,
which they believed held the key to alternative development.
4
Prakash, Asseem. Is Civil Society the Panacea?, article presented in a Symposium entitled India
Shining- Gainers, Losers and Development Performance May 2004, Chennai, India.

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Aseem Prakash in his article ‘Is Civil Society a Panacea’4 observes
that social collectives “….provide a space between the family and thestate/market for translating individual consciousness into collective
cultural collecgtives can be considered to be aprt of the civil society.
consciousness. Most commentators locate civil society either as anecessary part of a democratic and secular state trying to protect theinterests of the citizens/members or as standing against and outside thestructures of state registering protest against wrong practices/policiesof the latter.”
The cultural collectives set up by students attempted to articulate apeople-orientated agenda using popular culture. It focused particularly
on communities marginalized by right-wing politics, market forces andnational policies. A checklist on characteristics of these organizations
will reveal the following:• Non-hierarchical/democraticset-up;• Emphasis on social responsibility;• Work with marginalized groups;• Activist or education approach;• Focused on transformation;• Perceive themselves as change agents ;• Against cultural imperialism and globalization;• For conservation of ‘local’ culture (values, norms, institutions andartifacts).
I am often asked if the urban intellectual (who may or may not hailfrom a privileged space) turns to cultural work as a form of resistance,
to escape institutional set-ups, to seek alternatives or to find themselves.
I suppose there are those who have a more prophetic vision of analternative reality or a transformative praxis rooted in politics or religious
ideology. Then there are those who are more pragmatic, simply making
an inquiry rooted in experiment and located in action.
Culture workers fresh from universities attempt to negotiate theory andapplication by bringing objective ways of seeing to interface withsubjective cultural ways of doing. They negotiate moving between theconfines of suburban institutions and the openness of the naturalenvironment and living culture, where peoples’ bodies retain as muchsignificance, functionally and symbolically, as their minds. They
negotiate diverse identities as urban individualist, member of a culturalcommunity, member of the larger society, region, etc.

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When such interaction occurs between the culture worker and the siteor between the culture worker and the community, cultural engagement
between the interventionist and the community is inevitable. Hijacking
a term used by Homi Bahba in his Location of Culture5 , I’d like to notethat this cultural engagement is produced ‘performatively’ in a “liminal”
creative space or a “hybrid” site, which actually witnesses the productionof new cultural meanings rather then reflecting the cultural heritage ofthe community or the cultural worker.
The most interesting aspect of this interface and exchange between
cultural collectives and communities in the region is that it produces
cultural hybridities through the complex ongoing process of negotiation.
This hybrid culture incorporates mutual and mutable recognition ofcultural differences and universal similarities between the urban
interventionist and the community. ‘Alternative’ is the term used often
to legitimize whatever transformation has occurred as a result of theinteractions and exchange between culture worker (and culturalcollective) and the community.
In this essay I look at some examples of cultural collectives in Southeast
Asia, which work predominantly with the younger sector of community.
I try to locate the liminal space within which they work, the struggle
between individual self and the collective, between aesthetics andpolitics, between theory and application, between the marginalized andthe dominant, which produces a cultural hybrid often referred to as ‘thealternative mode’. Does this alternative serve a meditative function? Is
it a transformative movement….or just another construct?
Engaging Community through the ArtsIn Asia, we can almost trace an interregional civil movement using thearts for cultural action. This movement heated up in the 1980s led byIndia and the Philippines. The use of arts by cultural collectives ranged
from adapting indigenous cultural forms of expression to carry newcontent to using modern artistic tools such as video, camera, etc. torevitalize tradition. There were practical reasons why the arts were used
to engage young people in the community.
Cultural conscientization was considered the most suitable means todevelop local place-based models of development. Artistic and culturalforms of expression are very much embedded in indigenous culture
5

Bahba, Homi (1994), The Location of Culture, London, Routledge.

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and are a part of daily life in small rural and urban communities. Artistic
expression is a safe vehicle/platform, being culturally appropriate andnon-intrusive. The arts encourage ensemble and consensus work styles,
which is crucial to community building. It gives voice and ownershipto silent sectors, allowing for diverse mediums, comfortable to all. It
produces creative and cultural energy and is thus able to mobilize people.
It can demonstrate and communicate to the masses. It can lead to
attitudinal / behavioral change. It is a perfect tool that combinessocialization, education and awareness raising with entertainment.
Cultural initiatives in Southeast Asia clearly vacillated between
implementation of artistic programs and advocacy-related programs andsometimes merged the two trajectories. In one trajectory (particularly
cultural initiatives with young people led by educators and artists), we
can see that arts-education maintains two dominant pedagogicalperspectives, the aesthetic and experiential (Sternadd 20006 ). Youngparticipants were reconnected to their environment and community
through exploratory and inquiry-orientated fieldtrips. They collectedstories, images and skills and used artistic means to organize and represent people and situations, history and tradition.
• Aesthetic – this artistic perspective concentrates on the creativityof the young participants. The aims are more orientated towards
developing creativity and sensitizing participants to appreciate andunderstand form/content and develop fluency in visual, movement,
linguistic, spatial, thinking and problem solving skills.
• Experiential – this holistic learning perspective focuses on learning
about human situations and conditions from different perspectives.
Conflicts are studied as a normal force in the development of mankind
in daily, historical and legendary events.
The Children’s Theatre Workshops (CTW) run by the Philippine
Educational Theatre Association (PETA) was responsible for igniting
the development of arts in social/cultural education in Southeast Asia
in the 1970s. Focused on young participants, the workshops combined
Freirian principles of empowerment and the liberal educational tenetsof Dewey and Rousseau with integrated-arts-education.7
6
Sternudd, M.M.F. (2000) Dramapedagogik som demokratisk fostran? Fyra dramapedagogiska
perspektiv - dramapedagogik i fyra läroplaner. (Educational Drama as a means of fostering
democratic values? Four perspectives of educational drama in four curricula) Uppsala: Acta
Universitates Uppsaliensis. Upsala Studies in Education 88, Sweden.

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PETA’s workshops used an experiential approach to help children
in small communities reflect on their local culture and environment
through creative dramatics, creative writing, music and visual arts.
Their approach of learning about locality through the arts became
the prototype of cultural work particularly with young people inSoutheast Asia.
In the 1980s, PETA’s workshop model influenced MAYA, a leading
Theatre for Development Company located in Thailand.8 MAYA canbe credited with building a sound theoretical base for educational
theatre in Southeast Asia by applying child development,
communication theory and brain theory to strengthen themethodology for place-based cultural education.
In Malaysia, the Teater Muda (TM) program run by Five Arts Center,
Kuala Lumpur (1990-2004) was inspired by PETA’s decolonization of
the arts and MAYA’s orientation towards child development. The
program evolved from integrated-arts experiments carried out in 9801990 into a methodology on ‘localizing’ arts-education for young
people. This program (run by an artists collective) focused on thedevelopment of artistic skills and aesthetic appreciation in relation to
local resources such as traditional arts, environment, and living culture.
The second trajectory of cultural collectives (led by cultural workers
from political/social science or from mass communication) was focusedmore on local issues and pressing social concerns. The objective of thissecond trajectory was the general improvement of the community inrelation to development issues. In this second trajectory of cultural work
we can discern that cultural workers directly in the field to engage thecommunity use arts and this engagement take on different pedagogicalperspectives described by Sternudd.
• Humanistic psychology – a personal development perspective thatconcentrates on group dynamics and human growth. The aims here
are more affective and therapeutic, intending to sensitize feelings
and relationships to promote emotional /psychological healing.
• Social Science - the critically liberating perspective focuses on
conscientization and advocacy for change. The aims are more
7

Philippine Educational Theater Association was begun as a cultural initiative in Manila in 1967
by Cecile Guidote. The Children’s Theatre Workshop is a culmination of work begun in 1968
when PETA offered summer programs for children and teachers in the Philippines.

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cognitive and intended to provide understanding, insight andawareness of social structures.
The orientation of the second trajectory was on using cultural processes
in advocating awareness of issues such as health, poverty, human rights,
gender equality, environmental and educational concerns etc. Culturalaction was used as value-added interventions in activities and programs
designed to advocate attitudinal or normative transformations. Popularfolk media and traditional arts were often employed to communicate
information to the community or to promote their participation inprograms. When the need was felt to reach larger audiences, radio,
television and video were resorted to as common tools.
The most significant aspect of this home grown cultural advocacy
program was its urgent agenda to conscientize local population(particularly young people) to be discerning of which aspects ofdevelopment to accept and how to adapt development to the local
context. As they were particularly concerned with the impact ofmultinational corporations on local economy and culture, this movement
strongly promoted local resources, cultural systems, practices, andvalues and strongly opposed the infiltration of alien goods and services
into the domestic and personal lifestyles of rural population.
As an example MAYA from Thailand used integrated arts to work
directly with young people through advocacy workshops and campaigns
for healthy lifestyle based on positive traditional values. Simultaneously
they staged highly popular outdoor musical comedies in traditional soapopera style criticizing the consumption of tobacco, junk food, western
medicine, purchase of irrelevant electronic equipment, etc. Negative
traditional practices also became the butt of their criticism.
8
MAYA (Arts and Cultural Institute for Development) is a cultural collective formed in the 70’s.
by Thamasat University student, Santhi Chitrachinda. MAYA dedicated in its early years todevelopment work and campaigns using integrated arts to work with school going children. From1999 it has concentrated on an innovative teacher development program to promote local capacity
in managing early education and producing localized (place-based) curriculum. Since 2002,
teachers in 14 provinces have been taught how to develop local curriculum and build local networks.
Teachers are taught how to apply integrated arts and cultural approaches to facilitate learning.
They are also trained to develop local learning units which address local problems, needs, visionand resolutions. The program has developed an experiential pedagogy where children are to besent out into the community to identify problem issues related to local resources. Solutions are
solicited, brainstormed and presented back to the community in cultural performance by thechildren.

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MAKHAMPOM worked directly with diverse communities of rural
youth groups, urban slum dwellers, factory workers, prisoners, the hilltribe villages– and refined a methodology that was adaptable to their
specific needs. With the help of a facilitator, the target group is given
the opportunity to select the social issue they wish to address; dialogue
with experts and community members affected by the problem; express
the potentially divisive issue in front of elders and peers in anonconfrontational way, using role-play, local dialect, traditional music
and dance. Outcomes are concrete and simple such as a youth grouppublishing a newsletter to educate the community about AIDS andanother group initiating a series of local radio programs that featured
interviews with elders and discussions among children about community
concerns.
As independent non-formal educators, cultural workers were often free
to adopt strategies to deal with different political/social environments
and different target audiences. In the cases mentioned above, theirarticulation of the central problem was social/economic injustice andthe core concept around which they developed their educational practice
was cultural action.
MAKHAMPOM for example, works on the assumption that injusticearises because people do not understand and/or are unable tocommunicate with the dominant system or are ignorant of the realcompeting political/economic interests of more powerful parties. In
handling such cases cultural workers emphasize the critically liberating
perspective focusing on conscientization and advocacy for change. The
aims here are more cognitive, intent on providing understanding, insightand awareness of social structures, cultural and historical contexts andequip minority groups with communication skills.9
When dealing with street children, victims of abuse or oppressed squatter
populations, PETA’s works with the assumption that victims’
9
The Makhampom Theatre Group (Grassroots Micromedia Project) was formed in 1981, less as acompany of artists, than as a group of activists. Makhampom, together with its sister organization,
Maya, provided the basis of a community-oriented, educative approach to theatre, characterized
by the term, “grassroots”. Makhampom was fundamentally an experiment in theatre within an
NGO movement that was itself an experiment in progressive social and political change. The
group formed as “an ad-hoc group of teachers, journalists, actors, and dancers”. Most volunteers
joined with the socio-political objectives of the NGO movemen.
Source: http://www.makhampom.net

Envisioning Community-Building217

experiences in life have resulted in the lack of appreciation of theirown identity, self-worth or dignity as people. As a consequence of this,they lack energy and political agency to exert their rights. In their workwith victims, PETA cultural workers use the personal development
perspective concentrating on group dynamics and human growth. The
aims here are more affective and therapeutic, intending to sensitize
feelings and relationships to promote emotional /psychological healing.
Strategies for Cultural Sustainability
While non-formal education by cultural collectives (through creativearts-based projects and activities) provided alternative perspectives andpedagogies, the impact of their work was miniscule. It became obviousthat significant change would not occur unless more established societal
structures such as local organizations, the local education system, local
government departments, etc adopted this thinking. It became necessary
for the more permanent structures in the community to adopt these
fresh strategies for reasons of sustainability as well. Cultural collectives
began forming temporary partnerships with NGOs, government agencies
or service institutions and drew up joint educational projects to engage
organized groups or institutions in cultural action for change. At thispoint the cultural communication modes developed by the collectives
found their match in issue-based NGOs.
NGOs embraced this non-formal education through the arts rather
enthusiastically. Besides making critical social/political analysis, NGOs
were interested to improve their educational programming, particularly
to find means to engage the public at a deeper level. The arts provided
a safe platform that allowed civil society to participate in critical andsensitive issues within the safety of metaphor.10
In Malaysia, Young Theater Penang (YTP), a company targeted at young
audiences, worked closely with the NGO ‘Women’s Crisis Center’ for6 years between 1994 and 2000. YTP researched, devised and toured
Theatre-in-Education as a tool to conscientize school-going children
on issues, such as child abuse, sexual safety and conflict literacy. YTP’s
10

The exploration and mapping of an issue through an experiential or “actionist process” such as

the creative arts adds more dimensions to the examination of a theme. The simulation of events
through metaphoric expression (mostly non-verbal) allows the disenfranchised especially toobjectively deconstruct a problem using indirect media. These media can further provide a safe
platform for them to rehearse and reexamine creative responses to their problem.

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programs focused on the affective and sociological perspectives applying
Boal’s participatory and forum techniques.11 YTP also worked withpediatric wards of government hospitals using art therapy andperformance to enhance mental health care for children. YTP’s activities
were not simply confined to performance, but were preceded or
accompanied by educational and awareness-raising activities.
In the Philippines, PETA also took on a new dimension in the 1990’s
where they readjusted their strategies to develop partnerships withorganized groups such as NGOs, the church and service organizations,sometimes even setting up a desk officer or planner at the partner’s
premises. In their relationship with these organizations, they used what
can be referred to as horizontal and vertical strategies.
Horizontal strategies refer to tackling a theme or issue of social concern
together with a partner organization. In such an approach PETA would
research the issue/theme with the help of the partner, design and executean experiential workshop on the target group, publish informational
brochures and culminate with a performance for the larger community
on the same theme/issue.
Vertical strategies refer to the capacity building or training structure
where PETA would work with the target group and simultaneously
lead facilitators from partner organizations (NGO or church workers)
through the training process by sharing their ‘techniques and method’with trainers, and their ‘vision’ with the directors of the partnerorganizations. They would then slowly withdraw leaving a ‘method’and a ‘philosophy’ behind for the partner organization to adopt while
they followed up with visits or consultations.12
Workers in both government and non-formal citizens’ organizations
use rather top-down strategies and lack skills to engage citizens’
participation in social development. In these partnerships, culturalcollectives try to build up the capacity of educators, social development
11

Augusto Boal is an innovative and influential Brazilian theatre director whose practice grew
alongside Paulo Frieire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In the 1970s, Boal developed a form ofparticipatory theatre that transformed spectators into “spect-actors”, not just passive audiences
but protagonists who are actively involved in developing solutions to conflict. Boal created aspace for them to act out these solutions on stage, creating a theatre, which was “a rehearsal for
life.” Today the methods are practiced with marginalized and oppressed groups in many places in
the world as a tool for self-empowerment.
12

Information from interview with graduate student Wong Oi Min in Tokyo, October 2006.

Envisioning Community-Building

219

agencies, social entrepreneurs, and community outreach workers.
Training focuses on the use of the arts as a tool to engage young people
and the use of participatory, culture-sensitive methods.
Although cultural collectives have valuable skills and knowledge toshare, personnel from formal organizations are reluctant to utilize theseskills when they return to their organizations. The socially critical stanceand empowering modes (interactive and participatory) of using the arts
as a tool are not popular with curriculum developers, government
departments or even conservative community organizations. They findthe levels of sharing, participation and empowerment awkward because
it conflicts with power-distance relationships and consensus-seeking
postures, which predominate in the government or formal community
sectors.
Since these particular cultural collectives dealt mainly with young
people, they attempted to develop sustainability by penetrating theformal education system. Until recently, the highly centralized natureof education in Asia did not permit outside input into curriculum design.
However, education reforms in Thailand, for example (instigated by
the World Bank after the 98 financial crisis), forced decentralization,
resulting in local provinces being given autonomy over educational
content and material. As provincial education departments struggledwith their new role, cultural creative such as MAYA and
MAKHAMPOM took advantage of the reform and stepped in to trainteachers to develop creative teaching techniques to integrate into their
new curriculum. MAKHAMPOM is currently forming a network withschools to infuse media literacy into the curriculum.
MAYA has taken a broader initiative to transforming education at districtlevels in several parts of Thailand. As an example, since 2004 MAYA
worked in Isaan, the southern region of Thailand, on an innovative
teacher development program. Teachers in 14 provinces have beentaught how to develop local curriculum which is ‘place-based’ and todevelop networks within the community and between teachers. Teachers
are taught to acquaint children with the socio-economic and historicalaspects of their locality, and then send the children out into thecommunity to identify problems and issues related to local resources.
Solutions are solicited, brainstormed and presented back to thecommunity through cultural performances by the children. In order toadvocate for this new curriculum, MAYA plans to organize national
level seminars for 3,000 participants from their teachers’ network in
the North and in the South.

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Over the years, cultural workers have grappled with the problem ofkeeping cultural environments and resources intact while helping
communities adjust to positive development or fight off the negative
aspects of development. The role of culture workers was to facilitate
critical, creative thinking towards development that was in tandem withlocal culture and local resources. But as physical environments began
to suffer under excessive development, they had to focus not just on
living culture, but also on natural and built heritage.
Cultural initiatives to conserve tangible and intangible capital together
can be traced to the efforts of UNESCO’s 1972 international treaty on
the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage which called forthe conservation of heritage sites, traditional crafts, performing arts,
etc., for its historical and aesthetic value. In the face of rapid
development, conservationists called for management plans, technicalassistance, public awareness, and participation of government
institutions and the local population. However, the early conservation
movement was more successful harnessing government efforts at saving
important monuments and precincts, but less successful in their call to
involve citizen’s participation in conservation and development of theircultural capital. As a result, urban conservation initiatives in heritage
cities (such as Agra, Chiang Mai and Georgetown) find themselvesmore and more relegated to the antiquity business, and peoples’
participation limited to servicing the tourism industry.
UNESCO, urban authorities, and non-profit heritage organizations cameto realize that the conservation and revitalization movement was indanger of becoming a hollow exercise where showpieces had no
relationship to the new touristic roles they were being assigned. There
was a recognition that it was as important (and more difficult) to conserveand revitalize ‘living heritage’, as cultural diversity in particular wasunder serious threat. This new problem invited cultural collectives into
the realm of ‘heritage education’, particularly their expertise in working
with cultural conservation and revitalization.
Anak-Anak Kota (AAK)13 or ‘Children of the City’ is an example of a
local initiative for young residents that began in inner-city Georgetown,
Penang, in 2001 to complement a conservation effort by heritage groups.
Anak-Anak Kota (AAK) is a heritage education program to help young
residents retrace the lost narrative of their multicultural heritage throughthe arts, and develop an appreciation for their cultural assets.

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The initiative involves young residents in urban and rural communities
to participate in mapping and documenting their history, cultural assets(performing arts, crafts, etc), built and natural environment. Participants
use the arts to interpret and to promote their living culture throughapprenticeship, performance, publication and exhibitions.
The AAK model has succeeded in different degrees to raise the levelsof awareness of young residents and the community to cultural issues
and to increase their appreciation of the value of their cultural assets.
However, much of the learning that has taken place in AAK benefits
the young individual participants on a personal level rather thenimpacting the community as a whole. In this particular area of constraint
we need to rethink innovative strategies on how to engage young people
at a broader community level and how to integrate their transformation
to impact civil society.
Integrating Disciplines and Integrating CapitalThe outstanding feature of cultural collectives is their attempt to bring
the field of culture, social justice and development to mutuallycomplement each other. Modernism, according to Ken Wilber,14 has
diffused the three fields of arts (self and group expression), moral(collective ethics, norms), and science (empirical evidence), setting themapart as disciplines. With the advent of ‘modern’ education in Asia,
more value was put on according freedom to each of these three
disciplines to pursue its own search for truth. Aesthetic and normative
experiences and the corporeal and material world are isolated for
positivist analysis. This fragmentation in learning may provide roomfor objective study but fails to pay sufficient attention to how the
integration of knowledge works within the complex layered context ofour real life.
Privileging the arts in the modern context of (as something to bedissected and researched) removes it from the realm of living culture
13
The Anak-Anak Kota program is a heritage education program begun in 2001 supported by
Penang State and corporate funds in partnership with the University Sains Malaysia School ofArts. The education program covers a wide range of interdependent subject matter such as inheritedarchitecture, ecology, human settlement, trades, craftsmanship, customs, foods, religion, values
etc. It involves the local community as well as advocates such as state and NGO sector as coparticipants as well as parties such as residents, craftsmen, historians, artists, conservationists,
and teachers etc who contribute skills, information and knowledge to the programs.
14
Wilber, Ken. A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science andSpirituality, Shamhala Publications 2001, Boston, USA.

Envisioning Community-Building

223

and bleeds the community of its collective energy. ‘Living culture’embodies both aesthetics and functionality, and generates cultural andsocial energy through everyday rituals, the crafting and use of domesticor personal artifacts, festivities and ceremonies etc. Traditionally, thisgeneration of energy was a key element in collective identity formation.
Cultural workers believe that the generation of cultural energy is aprerequisite for community action and can revitalize civil action.
Cultural collectives are realizing that a much more integrated plan isneeded for sustainable cultural conservation of communities. The
challenge to keep up with development places increasing strain on thebonds that traditionally hold a community together. Integrated
relationships and integrated economic systems begin to fall apart withchange of lifestyle resulting from new job markets, migration andmobility.
As problems in communities reach extensive scales, cultural collectives
realize that tackling single issues or problems or dealing with specificage groups is not a sustainable approach to equip the community in thelong-run. Additionally, the effort to act as interface between NGO,
government, business organizations and the community has increased
communication, but not necessarily the engagement of these groups incommunity development.
Traditional communities in urban and rural areas need dedicated partners
and mechanisms to cope with the challenges of development just as
development agencies need to be sensitized to community capital. Thus
cultural movements have to take a more encompassing approach byfacilitating the strengthening of existing natural and social capital, andintegrating governance and education into the dynamics of environmentand community. The local community and local environment should‘inform’ and ‘give meaning and function’ to development.
Nara Machizukuri Center15 is an example of an initiative that has
enlarged/expanded the concept of community by encouraging wideranging participation of citizens, government, students, scholars,
technical experts and corporate bodies voluntarily to initiate activities.
Activities include cultural activities for children, gatherings foruniversity students to workshop or conducting study or projects on Nara
Machi, seminars on restoration, concerts, lecture series, monthly meetingwith citizens, etc. The establishment of several ‘laboratory’ projects in
Nara Machi by students and conservation and culture experts serves asa platform for citizens and experts to collaborate and act on actual needs.

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Communities in Action

The peculiarity of tools, local knowledge, natural resources, skills,
materials and space in Nara Machi informs the realm of not justcommunity life but academic study, professional practice and council
policies. The setting up of a Consulting Desk for Housing and Welfare
Care for citizens and the Network for Technical Experts serves to channel
information, inquiry and requests between citizens, experts and thecouncil. This recognition of human resources, social structures andcultural practices are a powerful leverage for the sustainable
development of Nara Machi.
Cultural initiatives like KUNCI16 in Indonesia, Punjab Lok Rahs17 inPakistan and AAK in Malaysia are focused more on facilitating researchof cultures and development of cultural capacity among young people.
They view culture as the sociological dynamics, which should drive
the direction of social and economic growth and changes, by harnessing
traditional knowledge, indigenous skills, local resources, etc. The hopeis that the young generation will push for cultural revitalization,enterprise, and changes in cultural policy at community level.
Cultural collectives have thus shifted their articulation of the central
problem to the sustainability of cultural resources. The core concept
around which they now attempt to develop their educational practice isthe reintegration of cultural knowledge at community level. The
promotion of cultural diversity and cultural self-confidence will become
crucial survival issues in the long term.
Conclusion
Humans navigate through life via personal as well as collective vehicles.
Our personal profile (gender, psychological, physical, emotional andmental make up) and our cultural milieu (structure, norms andphilosophy of the collective) determine how, why and what we learn
and experience. This subjective collective intelligence that develops
15
Nara Machizukuri Center Incorporated Association is an NPO organized by citizens in Nara, a
UNESCO heritage site. It has been active for 20 years in conservation of urban area of Nara andhistoric and natural environments in Nara prefecture. It has established databases and provides alibrary as well as space facilities for citizens and experts meetings on conservation issues.
16
KUNCI Cultural Studies Center was set up in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in September 1999. KUNCICultural Studies Center in an independent initiative, studying culture, empowering young people,
and carrying out popular education with the community. Rather then view culture through indicatorssuch as aesthetics and morality, KUNCI looks at how cultural difference and practice is createdthrough social relations.

Envisioning Community-Building

225

from the relationship of people to their environment should be nurtured
and given an equal footing as objective modern education is given tonavigate learning and growth.
For this reason we see cultural collectives reinventing themselves in
the arena of cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and beginning towork towards transformative cultural reform and developing the arenaof cultural literacy for local resources, knowledge and skills. AcrossAsia we can see the development of cultural heritage education models
designed to have young people develop awareness and appreciation ofcultural assets in their locality. In the Nara Machizukuri heritage
conservation project in Nara Japan, the Penang Anak-Anak Kota Project,
the Bagio City project in the Philippines, young people have begun to
study their micro-environments to identify heritage values and concepts
embedded in indigenous resources, traditional integrated economic
systems, etc.
To be able to create a balanced learning model, institutions ideally shouldbe able to apply the knowledge it is perpetuating or disseminating to
examine itself and the local system within which it is located. To address
any change, education, practice and governance need to place
themselves within the local and engage with it so that any visualization
or innovations for the future is grounded in the complexities of a society
and environment with its own potentials and limitations.

17

Punjab Lok Rahs started as an independent alternative theater group in 1986. It started as agroup of young men and women, primarily students that were concerned with military
oppression of arts and cultural activities in Pakistan.
(Besides classical epics, street skits, foreign adaptations), Rahs stages improvisation with
community and performances at villages and urban slums… It has dealt with subjects likechild marriage and women’s right to marry of their free will and staged plays against arms
race and military dictatorship.
The group has imparted theater training to a number of civil society organizations as well. It
has supported scores of other organizations by performing for the communities with which
they work. Rah’s draws inspiration from Punjab’s indigenous theatre tradition. The groupaims to marry the tradition with modern techniques and concepts and make it an effective
tool in the hands of organizations working for social change. Rahs performs plays only in themother language of its audience – the people of Punjab.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

Toward Future which Brings Back
Our Wisdom within
Kamata Yoji
Shifting the direction of development
It is becoming clearer that the society in which we are living is notsustainable and it does not bring us happiness. Regarding the directionof ‘development’ and ‘progress,’ we may have to re-think and shift it.
The future I am propagating in Japan as a part of alternative movements
is named ‘Natsukashii Mirai.’ 1 ‘Mirai’ is ‘future.’ ‘Natsukashii’ issaid to be one of the most difficult Japanese words to translate into
English. It is the feeling when we encounter something which bringsback memories. It is the feeling of re-connecting to a place and time
where we were in the past. It is more than just sentimental feelings ofnostalgia for the good old days. It is also the feeling when we re-connect
to something essential which has been almost forgotten. So it relates tothe dimension of soul and spirit. We may be able to say it is the feelingwhen sleeping DNA of our soul, spirit and culture is switched on.
Exploring ‘Natsukashii Mirai’ is to explore the wisdom within us.
Until now modern civilization has been developed in conjunction withthe consumption of fossil fuels, especially oil. The production of oil
has been increasing but now it is said that the peak of production iscoming and gradually production will decrease though demand will
not decrease accordingly. We are living in an era of Peak Oil. So one of
our tasks is to shift the direction of development and progress in order
to avoid a catastrophe of the system and to alleviate worsening social
conflict and environmental degradation. This catastrophe is also called‘dynamism of overshoot.’ Once we exceed the limitations of the capacityof the environment, the ecological system may collapse suddenly by
the multiplier effect.
1‘Natsukashii Mirai’ is related to the concept ‘Ancient Futures’ of Helena Norberg-Hodge, aSwedish activist and the ‘Traditional Futures’ of James Clifford, an American anthropologist. See
Norberg-Hodge’s book Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, Sierra Club Books, 1992.

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Communities in Action

But toward which direction should we change the direction and how?
Somebody named such a shift as ‘From Industrial Growth Culture to
Descent Culture.’ ‘Descending’ is related to grounding to nature,community, culture and spirituality. ‘Descending’ leads us to voluntaryand ‘Elegant Simplicity.’ 2 It is the opposite direction frommodernization, which is characterized as a liberation of individual greed
and dis-embeddding from traditional norms and communities. 3 So weshould create not only a new social and political system but also a newvalue system and culture. We should be careful not to fall into the
reductionism of system theory. We need a more holistic and integrated
theory which deal not only with system but also with soul and spirit. 4
We need some map or big picture to grasp and re-think the direction ofdevelopment and progress. Below is a chart I developed in the early
1990s. I have been discussing this chart with local vision leaders inseveral countries. It is a simplified diagram but according to myexperience it is useful for discussion.
Modern civilization has brought a kind of ‘development’ and ‘progress’at the sake of environmental degradation and exploitation of the weak.
5
Now social conflicts and climate change have become worse andunendurable. We can not continue to proceed in the direction of
conventional development.
On the other hand, the so-called ‘South’ is in the process of ‘developing’in the context of modern civilization. Not having been developed means,at the same time, that what is the most valuable for humans and nature
is still preserved in the South, especially in remote areas. Based on andutilizing such resources, the South can explore new directions ofdevelopment and progress instead of following the ‘developed’
countries. We may need technological invention to proceed in the new
direction.6
If it is true that modern civilization is leading the world in the directionof catastrophe, North cannot be the model for the South. Conventional
development has promoted economic globalization. Free market
2

Satish Kumar, ‘Spiritual Imperative’.
http://www.resurgence.org/2005/kumarspirit229.htm
3Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford University Press, 1990.
4
Ken Wilber is exploring an integrated theory to go beyond the confusion and desert of postmodernism. See his Theory of Everything, Shambhala Publications, 2001.
5
This is the essence of the book Gendaishakai no Riron (A theory of contemporary society)’,
Iwanami Shinsho, 1996, by Mita Munesuke, a leading sociologist in Japan.

Development

TowardNatsukashii

Catastrophe

MIrai
Shifting the Direction

The NorthHarmony with

Exploitation of

Nature andNature andPeoplePeopleThe SouthSociety before
modernization

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Communities in Action

and spiritual development. Culture is a data base for diverse futures.
A new direction of development suggested by Norberg-Hodge is ‘From
Economic Globalization to Localization.’ Localization is to shorten the
distance between producers and consumers, circulating materials,
services, energies and money locally. Through localizing the economy,
human-scale local communities will be enhanced. People will bereconnected to nature and the community socially, culturally andspiritually. People will have feelings of belonging and feel fulfilled.
Local self-governance is also one important factor of localization. A
recent comparison study of local governments in Switzerland revealed
that the more the local people participate in the decision making andlocal governance, the more people feel happy.8
As a pioneer of the concept of localization, we may recall the conceptof Swadeshi (self-sufficiency) and Swaraj (self-governance) showed
and practiced by Mohandas Gandhi. Actually he fought not against therule of Britain but against modernization. Gandhi realized the poisonous
aspects of modernization and globalization, and explored real
alternatives to them.
It may sound paradoxical that an expansion of information and travel
range does not make people wiser. Rather it makes the power ofcompassion and responsibility for people and nature weaker. In ourlong history as human being, we have enhanced such a power throughtaking care of people and nature in and nearby the community.
Therefore ‘Think Locally, Act Locally’ will be more important in the
future. Promotion of localization instead of economic globalization will
make the society and environment healthier.
In Japan there are several emerging movements toward localization:
local currency, Jimoto-gaku (study of the localilty), Chisan-Chisho(produce locally and consume locally), local energy and Slow Life.
Jimoto-gaku started in Minamata, one of the areas most affected byenvironmental pollution caused by a company which produce chemicalfertilizer, and is prevailing throughout Japan. One of the key conceptsof the Slow Live movement in Japan is ‘Han-Nou-Han-X (Half-Farmingand Half-X)’. The ‘X’ can be any work which utilizes the talents of theindividual. Through this Slow Life movement, more and more young
8
Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer, Happiness and Economics: How the Economy and Institutions
Affect Human Well-Being, Princeton University Press, 2002.

Envisioning Community-Building

231

people are attracted to an ecological life style and working style.
The negative impact of modernization and globalization in Japan isvery severe though the connections between cause and effect are notnecessarily recognized. One of my diagnoses of the pathology ofJapanese society is ‘over-adaptation’ to the West. In 1853 the arrival of
the Black Ships of Commodore Perry shook the Japanese society andJapan was forced to open its country to the West with a fear of losing its
independence. Since then ‘to catch up the West’ is the national slogan
of Japan until the 1980s. The Japanese government systematicallydemolished the Commons (the common natural resources such as forestsand ponds), the traditional educational system such as Terakoya(“Terakoya” literally means “temple hut” in Japanese. The word refers
to the civilian-run schools popular from the 14th to 19th centuries
providing literacy and basic education to the children of the common
people), and traditional medicine known as Kanpo (“Kanpo” literallymeans Chinese medicine of the Han dynasty. It was introduced to Japan
since the 8th Century and has been Japanized). The Japanese government
systematically distorted Japanese spiritual traditions and utilized themas Institutionalized Shintoism9 which empowered the emperor as aliving god and legitimized its absolute power. The driving force towardmodernization and globalization has been more or less internalized andis exerting pressure on people and society.
One of the most negative impacts of modernization and globalizationis the increasing number of ‘hikikomori.’ (‘hikikomori’ literally means
pulling away, being confined, i.e., acute social withdrawal. It refer totheir lives.) According to estimates by psychologist Tamaki Saito, who
first coined the phrase, there may be one million hikikomori in Japan,
20 percent of all male adolescents in Japan.10
In the past, Japan was expected in the Meiji (1886-1912) and Taisho(1912-1926) eras to play the role of bridge between the East and theWest. But such expection has not been told for many years. I think if
Japan really learn from Asia to explore common spiritual traditions,Japan may be able to play that role in the future.

9

See Kazuko Tsurumi, Aspects of endogenous development in modern Japan, Research papers;
Series A-2, Sophia University, 1979.
10
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

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Communities in Action

Possible strategies and actions I have taken
Looking at the world from the perspective described in the chart, wemay be able to extract the three strategies below.
Strategy 1: To empower the local people in the South to support local
initiatives toward new direction of development.
Strategy 2: To promote deep dialogue between the ‘South’ and ‘North’and promote movement toward new directions.
Strategy 3: To raise awareness in the North of how they are destructing
and misleading the world. And also to propose alternatives.
Following Strategy 1, one of the actions I have taken is to revitalize
local health traditions. The traditional medical system is the heart of a
local cultural system. It deals with disease, aging, death and life. Throughpromoting western medicine in the South, the traditional cultural system
has been heavily dismantled.
The doctors of traditional Tibetan medicine, Amchis, have developed
altruism and treat patients as a spiritual offering. Empowering theAmchis in Himalayan countries, especially in Nepal, I expect them not
only to provide health care in very remote areas but also to strengthen
local communities.
Revitalization of traditional medicine enhances localization. Traditional
medicine utilizes at the maximum the local knowledge, local medicinal
resources, local talents and local reciprocal relationship.
I have supported Amchis in formulating their own vision and strategy.
Now I am supporting for the institutionalization of the educational
system of traditional Tibetan medicine in Nepal in order to ensure thetransmission of knowledge, skills and wisdom from generation to
generation.
A second action for Strategy 1 is to revitalize the local learning systemfor ethnic minorities and enhance cultural conservation by themselves.
I feel ethnic minorities are one of the most severely affected victims ofthe modern educational system. When the Nepalese government started
environmental education after Rio summit, the text books were basedon the assumption that ‘local people do not have environmental
consciousness nor knowledge to take care of natural resources.’234

Communities in Action

So what I supported in 1994-96 was to produce a sub-text book ofenvironmental education which contains local knowledge about theutilization and preservation of local natural resources.
Also I encouraged local people to write down their oral histories
themselves. It is their first book about themselves written by themselves.
In 2004-05, my organization, ADF, supported educational reform forethnic minorities in the Philippines based on their indigenous knowledge.
Now I am planning to organize forum in a long run for the enhancementof indigenous education in Asian countries to tackle the issues ofschooling and de-schooling, envisioning the future, identity and culturalpolitics
A third action for Strategy 1 is to empower youths to become change
agents. Youths, especially from a disadvantaged background, have apotential of the vulnerable and they can play an important role for nonviolent action for problem solving toward a new direction. Many youths
in Nepal are confused and depressed due to the failure of development
and civil war.
I organized with a local NGO a 10-day residential intensive workshop
for youths from various ethnic background to be confident of becomingchange agents. The basic curriculum of the first youth camp was asfollows.
Yoga and meditation.
Goal Setting: Life goals.
This is especially important in a society of caste discrimination.
Life Skills: what is the self, how to deal with emotion andconflicts etc.
Ancient Futures: to examine the basic assumptions of develop ment
and progress.
The KJ Method: a participatory methodology for collective
understanding and consensus building about the situation, causes
and solutions of urgent social issues. It is a methodology to bringabout break-through of the framework of perception through letting
the data speaks for themselves.
True love.
Global and local environmental issues.

Envisioning Community-Building

235

Social activities.
Cultural programme.
Integration of learning etc.
From 2007 I will expand this programme to empower youths throughpractical peace education in Nepal getting financial support from theJapanese government. ‘Peace from Within’ is the key concept of the
programme. ‘Peace from Within’ means (1)Initiatives by the People themselves, (2) Integration of Inner and Outer
Peace, (3) to approach the issue of corporal punishment and the abuseof children as a psychological cause of violence in Nepal, and (4) to rediscover the indigenous wisdom of democracy and conflict resolution.
Following Strategy 2, one of the actions I have taken is to promote
deep ecotourism in Nepal. The people of the North can learn so manythings from mountain people in Nepal.
The most impressive learning by Japanese people is that a community
is like a family. People are supporting each other quite closely andnaturally. And I used to organize a session to discuss what are realdevelopment and happiness among foreigners and local people as apart of the program. Participants record their findings on Discovery
Cards and formulated a Discovery Bank in the program. It has becomea source of information to promote indigenous education and culturalconservation because it can provide new view points for local people
to re-consider the value of local knowledge and culture. Another action
is to promote deep ecotourism in Mongolia. In 2002, the first Ecology
School in Mongolia was organized. It takes two days by mini-bus toreach the place. I was the leader of the Ecology School until the third
one in 2004 and handed over the program to MoPI, a Japanese NGO.
The Ecology School has been continued by the NGO until 2006.
A third action for Strategy 2 is to support a ‘reality tour’ in Japan. It isessential for local vision leaders to understand deeply the negative
aspects of ‘development’ in the North. And also it is very useful toknow the initiatives in the North toward a new direction. This kind of
information is usually not available in the South. That is why it is calleda ‘Reality Tour.’11
11This concept was proposed by Helena Norberg-Hodge.

236Communities in Action

Following Strategy 3, some actions I have taken in Japan are to organizea ‘Natsukashii Mirai’ Network in Japan in order to raise awareness in
the North of how they are destructing and misleading the world, totranslate and disseminate a message for Economic Literacy andresistance against economic globalization, and to translate anddisseminate a message for the renewal of societies.
Re-thinking the modernity and the traditional
Holding such a vision and strategies, I feel it is necessary to re-think
what is modernity and what is traditional. The four tables below are
aspects of the traditional in comparison with modernity. I dare tocompare the dichotomy of the traditional and the modern in order toilluminate their characters. We should not think of the traditional as a
substance. Rather the tradition in my context is a kind of direction witha mirror of modernity and an orientation of value consciousness. The
traditional is our recalled memories and imagination. And the future
will be enriched and sustainable by the diversity and vitality of cultural
traditions. The traditional and the past are not a goal to go back to. We
may evolve not linearly but spirally, approaching the process again
which we had taken. And we should go beyond the modern and the
traditional using our power of imagination and creativity for the future.

Modern Medicine

Traditional Medicine

To disregard healing power within

To attach importance to healing power within

Partial treatment

Holistic treatment

Symptomatic treatment

Fundamental and preventive treatment

Division of doctors and patients

Close relationship between doctors andpatients

Manipulation

Compassion and trust

Dependence on chemicals

Utilization of natural resources

Dependence on machines

Utilization of human sensors

To attach importance to surgery

To attach importance to inner medicine

To disregard emotion, spirituality, life history
and life style of patients

To attach importance to emotion, spirituality,
life history and life style of patients

To disregard morality and spirituality of doctors

To attach importance to morality andspirituality of doctors

To disregard healing in Altered State ofConsciousness

To attach importance to healing in ALC

To dismantle local knowledge and cultural system

To maintain and strengthen local knowledge
and cultural system

To disregard/dismantle local reciprocal
relationshipTo maintain and strengthen local reciprocal
relationship

Dependence on outer resources

Utilization of locally available natural
resources

To disregard relationship between micro andmacro cosmos

To enhance harmony of micro and macro
cosmosModern Education

Traditional Medicine

Division of generations and ages

To strengthen linkage between generations
and ages

Curriculum decided by Govt.

Curriculum decided by the people concerned

Developed by need of industrial society

Developed by the need to survival in specificenvironment

To be apart from living, working,enjoying social life

A part of living, working, enjoying social life

Compulsory

Based on the wish of elders and learners

To attach importance to cleverness

To attach importance to wisdom andcompassion

To attach importance to knowledge

To attach importance to experience andpractical skills

Mass education

Individual and group learning

Division of teachers and learners

Close relationship between teachers andlearners

Knowledge is open

Some knowledge is secret. Secret rituals are
conducted.

Disregard learning in Altered State ofConsciousness (ASC)

Attach importance to learning in ASC

To attach importance to write/script

To attach importance to oral transmission

To accelerate competition

To foster cooperation

To arouse arrogance and inferiority

To learn to live together

Systematic selection of elite

Occasional selection of elite

To dismantle local knowledge, skills andcultureTo maintain local knowledge, skills andcultureTo encourage talented learners to go tocities and foreign countries

To encourage learners to stay in the locality

To attach importance to analysis

To attach importance to holistic understandingModern Agriculture

Traditional Agriculture

To force to growTo activate the power to growDependence on chemical fertilizer

Utilization of organic manure

Dependence on pesticide

Biological prevention

Dependence on machines

Dependence on manual work and farmanimals

High input of energy

Low input of energy

Monoculture

Diversified cultivation

Mass production

Small production

Disregard sustainability

Attach importance to sustainability

Non-circulation of resources

Circulation of resourcesHigh waste

Zero waste

To seek for cash income

Based on Self-sufficiency

To disregard local culture

Unity with local culture

Dependence on outer resources

Maximum utilization of local resources

Dependence on oil

Utilization of local energy

Controlled by upper structure

Self determination

To disregard/dismantle ecology

To attach importance to ecology

Dependence on “scientific” and experts’knowledge

Utilization and enhancement of local
knowledge

To disregard vital energy of food

To attach importance to vital energy of food

Farmers are specialized in agriculture

Farmers have various skills to make cloth,build house etc.

Mondemity

Traditional

Duality of Subject and Object

Unity of Subject and Object

To manipulate from outside

To activate powers within

To disregard and dismantle locality andlocal communities

To maintain and strengthen locality andlocal communities

To attach importance to knowledge

To attach importance to wisdom

To arouse individualism and selfishness

To develop compassion and altruism

To liberate desire and greedinessTo calm down desire and greedinessTo disregard/dismantle spirituality

To attach importance to spirituality

To arouse mono-culture

To foster diversity

To disregard/dismantle sustainability

To attach importance to sustainability

To arouse loneliness and anxiety

To enhance feeling of belonging andsafetyTo disregard/dismantle harmony of micro
and macro cosmos

To enhance harmony of micro and macro
cosmosEnvisioning Community-Building

241

Toward ‘Natsukashii Mirai’ through Deep Transformation
The basic directions for a solution might be summarized as follows:
1. From Globalization to Localization
2. From GNP to GNH (Gross National Happiness)
3. To achieve real sustainability
4. To activate the power within
5. To foster a fair and horizontal relationship between the North and theSouth
6. To deepen spiritual dialogue between the East and the West
7. To unite alternative movements especially for resistance.
And it might be better to consider possible pitfalls such as:
1. Nostalgic and past-oriented attitudes.
2. Projecting romanticism onto the past and the life of the South.
3. Strengthening egoism and narcissism instead of developing the self
as a declining egocentrism.
4. Closed community.
5. Nationalism and patriotism.
6. Religious fundamentalism.
In order to explore the way toward ‘Natsukashii Mirai’ further, aconceptualization of shallowness and depth might be useful.12 Here I
propose a tentative concept of shallowness and depth in ecology,
democracy, economy, happiness, peace, healing, learning and ecotourism.

12

The concept of ‘Deep Ecology’ was developed by Arne Ness, a Norwegian philosopher. The
concept of ‘Deep Democracy’ has been mentioned by Arnold Mindell in his book Sitting in the
Fire: Large Group Transformation Using Conflict and Diversity.

Chart 5: Toward Deep Civilization
Shallow
Ecology

Human-oriented
consideration of protecting
environment

Deep
To give equal right to all beings

Democracy Majority Decision

Continuous transformation ofsociety and oneself throughinclusion of the marginalized

EconomyCompetition

Sharing

Happiness

Satisfaction of desire of self

Connectedness to something
great

Peace

No bothering within self andsurrounding

All overt and potential problems
are to be properly addressed.

Healing

Partial cure

Holistic cure

Learning

To get additional knowledge
to existing perception gridTransformation of perception gridEco-tourism

To enjoy nature as object
and try not to destroy it

To enjoy and learn nature andculture from within

NGO Initiatives in Northeast Asia
Environmental Cooperation
Cases of KFEM-Jilin, Kitakyushu-Dalian Cooperation
Seejae Lee
1. Framing Problems
East Asia is emerging as one ecological sphere. Trans-border air
pollution, sand storm from desertification, depletion of oceanic resources
and toxic waste disposal are all new environmental problems that ourgeneration began to face in the region. East Asian countries belong toan emerging market economy due to development of information
technology and communication, trading of commodities, capital
investment and labor migration. Japan and other East Asian countries
are major suppliers of manufactured goods in the world. East Asian
countries with dense population have become production bases andmassive consumption of resources and energy.
However, Asian countries are so politically divided and socially diversethat mutual cooperation and exchange within the region have relatively
been weak. Even though the market economy integrates Northeast Asian
countries more and more closely, and even though environmental
impacts of industrialization in the region are getting stronger, there is
not yet any viable environmental governance that can address regional
environmental problems. Although there are some environmental
cooperation and exchange between countries in the region, thiscooperation has not yet developed into effective governance.
Governments in this region have also perceived these trans-borderenvironmental issues as problematic since 1990s. There emerged a lotof inter-governmental cooperation and exchange frameworks to counterenvironmental problems. Bilateral agreements for environmental
cooperation were made between countries like Japan, South Korea,
China and Russia. Multilateral cooperation bodies have also been createdin the region. There have been a lot of projects that bridge between

244Communities in Action

East Asian environmental NGOs since 1980s. Generally speaking theseenvironmental cooperation have not yet developed into newenvironmental governance. It is because inter-governmental cooperation
has limits so that it cannot be free from national interests, and or because
on the part of NGOs, their resources are too limited to addressenvironmental problems.
There are also massive countermeasures to cope with desertification
within China and outside. Chinese government began to take a measure
to fence out peasants and animals from barren cultivated lands andgrassland, then to plant grass and trees in order to recuperate ecology.
In Japan and Korea, many NGOs are organized to plant trees in China
to fight against desertification. Even though these efforts to combat
desertification are made, the more rapidly lands become deserted.
Therefore, the desertification is hardly controlled.
I think we have to create a new framework by which NGOs, as well as
government and businesses, also cooperate to build up new systems toaddress trans-border environmental problems. I would like to take up a
few examples, which will show us significant possibilities that can beemulated elsewhere.
For this purpose, I would like to highlight environmental cooperation
projects that NGOs, local government, citizens’ groups and privatecompanies participate to cope with China’s environmental problems,that is, desertification and urban environmental problems.
This paper aims to highlight a unique mix of resource mobilization tocope with the problem of desertification and urbanization, a mix ofNGOs, local government, and business resources. I would like to show
how NGOs and local government initiated mobilization of resources ofgovernment and business sectors work for the environmentally goodcause.
I am one of the founding members of KFEM and had led the antidesertification project. I have been working as a board member of ananti-desertification project. Basic data I have used here are based on
my personal interview, my field notes and official documents ofcooperation.
I have also taken up the case of environmental cooperation between thecity of Kitakyushu in Japan and the city of Dalian in China, which also
demonstrated a successful resource mobilization and mix from various
sectors. This also demonstrates what local governments in twinningEnvisioning Community-Building

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relations can achieve beyond the intergovernmental relations. I visited
Kitakyushu and Dalian and interviewed persons related to mutual
cooperation between these two citie- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 2. Environmental Cooperation in Northeast Asia
2.1 Intergovernmental cooperation
In Northeast Asia, intergovernmental environmental cooperation began
to emerge in the 1990s. China’s rapid industrialization by reform andopen-door policy and introduction of market economy accelerated
environmental cooperation among Northeast Asian countries. Bilateralagreements for environmental cooperation were signed between Korea
on one hand and Japan (1992), China (1993), and Russia (1994) on theother. Japan also made agreement for environmental cooperation with
China (1994), and Russia (1991). Japan and Korea have taken initiatives
to make cooperation with China, Russia and other Northeast Asian
countries.
Between Japan and China, bilateral cooperation is remarkable. Japanrenders assistance to China in the areas of reforestation, protection of
migratory birds, development of environmental model city, networkingof environmental information, technological assistance, education andtraining. Japan’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) was used tobuild Japan-China Friendship Environmental Conservation Center in
Beijing where major Japan-China environmental cooperation is planned
and implemented. In 1997, Japanese and Chinese governments agreed
to develop environmental and development model cities in China with
ODA and technical assistance. Three cities of Chongqing, Guiyang and
Dalian were selected to improve air pollution and form sustainable social
system, and to develop measures against global warming.
Japanese government, business, local government and NGOs cooperateeach other to organize cooperation programs for China. Japanese
government use the ODA program to mobilize local governments andNGOs to help China, and Japanese business provides NGOs to send
volunteers to China for reforestation. Japanese government foundedJapan-China Fund for Greening Exchange in 1977 in order to support
NGOs to participate in reforestation projects in China. In Japan there
are other available financial sources, such as International Volunteer
Saving, Global Environmental Facility (GEF), Foreign Ministry’s NGO
support subsidies, etc. For instance, Kitakyushu helped its sister city246

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Dalian in urban planning and training technical personnel for upgrading
environment, funded from JICA (Japan International Cooperation
Agency). Aeon Group Environmental Fund provides financial assistanceto NGOs to send volunteers to China.
Besides Kitakyushu, Hiroshima, Toyama and Niigata Prefecture also
have various programs to help China for environmental improvement.
There is also multilateral inter-government cooperation within theregion. There are some significant developments in the 1990s for
multilateral cooperation among Northeast Asian countries. Northeast
Asian Conference on Environmental Cooperation (NEAC) is a good
example in this regard.
NEAC was first organized in Niigata, Japan, and it celebrated the 10th
Conference in 2001 in Incheon, Korea. In NEAC, government
representatives and local government officials from Korea, Japan, China,
Russia and Mongolia are main constituents of the NEAC. From the 9th
Conference in Ulan Bator, NGOs of participant countries were invited.
The NEAC has talked on migratory pollution, networking recyclable
resources among member countries, acid rain, national and local
environmental agenda, international transshipment of toxic waste,migratory birds, conservation of water level, environmental cooperation
among local government, actions for climate change, etc.
Meeting of senior officials on Environmental Cooperation on Northeast
Asia (NEAREP) organized by ESCAP is also another system ofintergovernmental environmental cooperation. NEAREP started in 1992,
with membership from South and North Korea, Japan, China, Russia
and Mongolia. The NEAREP has an agenda to build environmental
capacity through exchange of information, training, joint research, etc.
The third model project is currently being implemented to enhancecapacity to cope with energy and air pollution problems.
Besides these, ESCAP ministerial conferences on environment anddevelopment have been held from 1985, and the fourth conference washeld in September 2000 in Kitakyushu. Participants were not limited tonortheast Asian countries, but 47 member countries sent their ministers
of environment to the conference.
Japan’s ministry of environment organized Environmental Congress
for Asia and the Pacific, Eco-Asia. In order to prevent the oceanic
pollution, northeast Asian countries comprising South and North Korea,
Japan, China and Russia formed Northeast Pacific Action Plan.

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Most active intergovernmental cooperation is the meeting of three(Korea, Japan, China) environmental ministers (TEMM). Later,
Mongolia was also included in TEMM meeting. The third TEMM
held in Tokyo in 2000 resolved to survey long-distance migratory
pollutants, such as acid rain, to establish Northeast Asian Environmental
Data Center to implement Northeast Asian Eco-community, and to build
cooperation for environmental education.
United Nations Development Plan (UNDP) proposes and promotes
Tumin (Douman) Regional Development Plan. Tumin River has borders
with North Korea, China and Russia. UNDP made a TRADP
environmental memo so that the Tumin development project would not
destroy the ecology of the area. China, Mongolia, Russia and South
Korea are invited to carry out environmental cooperation for thispurpose. The TRADP meeting also invited NGO representatives in 2001.
In the multilateral cooperation system, there is not so much substantial
cooperation among the member nations with some exceptional cases.
2.2 NGO cooperation in East Asia
In the mid-1980s, Korean anti-nuclear activists were invited to Japan,
and Japanese scholars came to survey Japan’s export of pollution to
Korea. These moves were one of the earliest cases of Korea-Japan NGO
environmental cooperation. It was a Japanese human rights advocacy
organization that sent regularly environmental materials and books to a
Korean who became a leader in the environmental movement in Korea.
Anti-Nuke Asia Forum was organized in 1993 in Japan, where NGOs
from South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia,
India, and Thailand participated. The 2001 Forum was held in Seoul.
Anti-Nuke Asia Forum stages campaign against nuclear power plantand has supported local residents’ struggle against nuclear power plants.
When the Taiwan Electric Company made a contract with North Korea
to ship the nuclear waste to North Korea, Korean NGOs in cooperation
with Taiwanese environmental NGOs staged massive campaign in
Taiwan and Korea. The Anti-Nuke Asia Forum was a platform on whichconcrete cooperation between NGOs could be realized.
Atmosphere Action Network East Asia (ANNEA) was organized in
1995 in Seoul, where NGO representatives from Korea, Japan,
Mongolia, China, and Taiwan participated to deal with trans-border air
pollution. ANNEA regularly hold a symposium at the time of the UN
Climate Change Conference.

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Japan Environmental Council hosted Asia Pacific NGO Environmental
Conference APNEC in 1993 in Kyoto, and had meeting every alternate
year. The fifth conference was held at Agra, India in September 2000.
In 1997 and after, the APNEC published Asia Environmental White
Paper in Japanese, Korean and English. Scholars and lawyers, whosurveyed Asian countries, attend these conferences.
Leaders of Japan Environmental Council visited Korea frequently forsurvey and exchanged ideas with Korean scholars.
When the Conference of Parties (COP3) of the Climate Change
Convention was held in Kyoto in 1997, Japanese NGOs made a coalition
called Kiko Forum to have NGO conference in Kyoto. This Kiko forum
became a medium by which Asian NGOs could participate in the COP4
in Buenos Aires. Japanese Kiko forum invited Asian NGO activists to
the COP4.
Korean UNESCO made Eco-Peace Network for Northeast Asia in July
2000 after its international conference on Environment and Peace inAsia. This network met at Yanbian in 2001 for the second meeting.
In the early 1970s, a group of Japanese students and youth organized acampaign to oppose transfer of Japanese pollution chemical plants to
Korea. The chemical plants were criticized in Japan, because it emitted
toxic chrome complex. Their slogan and newsletter was ‘Don’t Let
Pollution Run Away!’ Since the pollution problem was not prioritizedin Korea, there was not substantial cooperation and exchange between
Korea and Japan.
However, when a pollution disease broke out in the mid-1980s in Onsan,
Korean environmentalists took it to public attention. Japanese activists
and scholars came to Korea to survey pollution situation in Onsan where
many Japanese chemical and nonferrous metal companies moved tooperate. Japanese environmental sociologists came to Onsan
accompanied by Korean sociologists for survey. In 1999, scholars fromJapan and Korea conducted joint research on people’s environmental
consciousness and practice of four countries, that is, Japan, Korea, China
and Indonesia.
Korea’s wetland network and Japan’s wetland network (JAWAN) havecooperated recently. Both networks conducted a joint research on the
tidal flats of Korea, because Korea’s tidal flats are major food depot forthe migratory birds. At the time of the 7th Ramsar Conference at Costa
Rica, activists from both networks had a joint workshop, and passed a
resolution.

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Japan’s Citizens’ Alliance to Save the Atmosphere and the Earth CASA
was formed in Osaka to support the victims of Amagasaki air pollution.
CASA was active to report an alternative scenario for reduction of CO2
emission in Japan. It asserted that Japanese economy could cut CO2
emission by 23% by 2010, while Japanese government cut only around
8%. CASA is also a vital member of ANNEA, but it also communicateswith Korean Federation for Environmental Movement (KFEM) on abilateral basis. KFEM and CASA had cooperation in the area of joint
action, seminar and sharing the research method and outcomes.
In the international dam conference that was organized by the KFEM
in 1999, Japanese activists came to report on Japan’s case study.
From 1998, reforestation movement became active. Movement of Forest
for Peace was launched in 1998, and sent seeds, fertilizer, and planting
machines to North Korea in order to rebuild forest there. In addition,
the Northeast Asian Forest Forum (NEAFF) also inaugurated in 1998
with an aim of preventing desertification of the Northeast Asia,
participated in making Korea-China Friendship Forest in China in April
2000.
Korean Federation for Environmental Movement invited environmental
activists from Mongolia and Indonesia to share respective activities.
As mentioned earlier, Taiwan Environmental Protection Union (TEPU)
in 1997 cooperated with KFEM and Green Korea United to oppose theshipment of nuclear waste from Taiwan to North Korea.
Japanese NGOs are active to render environmental cooperation to China.
Their activities are composed of reforestation, prevention of air
pollution, Clean Development Mechanism and Joint Implementation,
which are developed within the framework of Climate Change
Convention. There are active joint researches, symposium, and otheracademic activities.
Japanese NGOs depends on financial sources from government andbusiness environmental funds. There are a lot of fund sources thatJapanese NGOs can make use of. ODA and GEF are major government
sources. Coalition of Economic Organizations, and Aeon Group
Environmental Fund are important financial sources for Japanese NGOs
to make cooperation with Chinese counterparts.
In Japan-China cooperation, various incorporated foundations are active,
which are closely affiliated with government and business circle. Somefoundations are operated with government funds and others run by

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business organizations. It may be proper to say that Japanese governmentand business are very much interested in working with China. This
cooperation is quite different from other NGO cooperation between
Korea and Japan.
On the part of China, there are not many NGOs in a literal sense. They
are semi-official youth groups, local governments, research institutes
and universities that became counterparts of Japanese environmental
cooperation.
3. Three-Party Model for Resource Mobilization
3.1 Contextual values of resources and resource mix
Resources can be defined as any tangible or intangible thing that can bemobilized for use to realize certain objectives, such as money, labor
service, relational goods, influences, technology and skill. However,resources are always contextual. A certain resource can be valuable to acertain actor, but not always to anyone. Resource can be evaluated intheir contextual allocation. To say simply, what you have plenty andtherefore not very much valuable to you, but it can be valuable to me
because I do not have much. Thus scarcity should be contextually
defined.
In this context arises exchange of resource. Those who have plenty but‘less valuable’ resources tend to hand over what they have to others.
On the other hand, those who do not have necessary resources tend toseek from others. Some resources are exchanged for other types ofresources; for instance, economic resources for political power, or social
relations for economic resources. Those involved in exchange cannot
be so much competitive; because they tend to yield what they think isless valuable.
Here comes a strategy for resource mix. We may easily mix valuable
resources from those who consider them less valuable. We may raise
resources of power from those in power, or raise economic resourcesfrom those in control of wealth, may raise legitimacy resources fromthose in a position to give legitimacy, and mobilize influence fromthose can exert influences.
In considering the cross-sector or cross-border cooperation, it is very
important to mix various resources from various actors who can easily
yield resources with less cost.

Envisioning Community-Building

We may easily mix valuable resources fromthose who consider them less valuable. We may
raise resources of power from those in power,
or raise economic resources from those incontrol of wealth, may raise legitimacy
resources from those in a position to give
legitimacy, and mobilize influence from thosecan exert influences. In considering the crosssector or cross-border cooperation, it is very
important to mix various resources fromvarious actors who can easily yield resources
with less cost.

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3.2 Outline of project
From 2004, Korean Federation for Environmental movement (KFEM)
or a Korean environmental NGO, Jilin Province of China’s Northeast
Local Government and Hongri Group launched a joint project to plantgrass seeds in a barren desert area of Northeast China. Three parties
took up financial responsibility of 45%, 45%, and 10% respectively
and have since then planted 600 hectares of grass seeds for three years.
In addition, this project includes environmental education for local
residents and educational exchanges between Korean and Chinesecollege students. This desert land is so saline that trees cannot grow.
Jilin University researchers developed a new variety of grass that cangrow in the saline land and grass hey can be used as animal fodder,which might make this project relatively profitable.
An agreement was concluded among three parties in 2003 for five years
to plant grass on 2000 hectares. The second-five year stage is now under
examination, whether or not to continue this project or to change it into
a new one. A study is under progress to find out a possibility to use hey
as a more value-added renewable energy source instead of using it as
fodder.
A company was established to carry out this project. Hongri Group,
whose main office is located in Guangzhou, South China, is specialized
in recuperating the shattered ecology, such as planting trees and grasses.
Some specialists of Hongri Group were transferred to set up a newcompany, and its equipments were used for planting grasses. A board
was constituted to make annual plans of grass planting and reviewing
achievements.
3.3 Three actors and their resources
KFEM with its 80,000 members is the largest and one of the mostinfluential environmental NGOs in Korea. Founded in 1993, KFEM
has been addressing many environmental issues in Korea. In 2002,
KFEM became a member of the Friends of Earth, and it had sought a
positive role in the global and regional environmental issues. KFEM
has been demanded by some Asian NGOs to take a positive role incoping with Asian environmental problems. Leaders of KFEM visited
Jilin Province in 2002, and concluded an Exchange and Cooperation
Agreement with the Anti-Desertification Fund of the Jilin Government
and another Cooperation Agreement with Hongri Group in China. The
President of the group is very much concerned with the environmental

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issues and is also convinced that the key to environmental protection is
to change the political leaders’ attitude and enhance people’s
consciousness. It is Mr. Hong Hao, the President of the Group that
introduced KFEM to Jilin Province Forestry authorities. KFEM leadersvisited desert lands of the Northeast region that is one of the sources ofthe sand storm.
(a) KFEM
This project has been initiated by KFEM, setting up agendas andproviding people’s education and public awareness on environmental
protection. KFEM gives this project a global environmental nature, a
new justification or ideology in planting grass in desert land. KFEM
has staff in specializing campaign, educating people, and managing
international exchange. KFEM took a role of educating local residents
in China and promoted Korea-China college students exchange as apart of environmental education.
However, KFEM itself cannot provide enough financial resources forthis project. KFEM therefore applied for a reforestation project to theForestry Bureau of Korean Government. This Government Bureau wasalso in charge of green lottery, and should dispose the profits from thegreen lottery for environmental projection. It is the KFEM that persuaded
the Korean government agency to allocate some budget for addressing
global and regional environmental problems.
KFEM’s major functions in this project is thus to rationalize the projectand mobilize Korean government funds for anti-desertification
campaign.
(b) Jilin Province
Jilin Province set up an anti-desertification fund in 2001, because theChinese central government had already decided to reinforce the antidesertification policy in 2001. Although the fund takes a form of NGO,
the Jilin Government is responsible for staffing and funding. There wasno significant participation from non-governmental sectors before
KFEM joined anti-desertification campaign. Jilin Government
welcomed KFEM participation because this joint project could be amodel for government-NGO cooperation. It is not their major concern
to have more money from Korean NGOs; rather they are more concernedwith the form of cooperation. They are also interested to learn from
Korea in the area of reforestation and environmental policy in general.

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For leaders of Jilin Province, the prime concern is to make use of thisproject as a lever to make their political career a success. That is to say,this project can be used as a political marketing in China. The Chief ofForestry Bureau of Jilin Government has been chosen as one of the ten‘newsmen’ in 2002, and his photo was used in a commemorative stamp.
In China, if a project is chosen as a national model, the developer usually
becomes a national figure and the model is encouraged to be emulated
in other places. Therefore, local Chinese political leaders tend tomobilize all resources to produce a good model.
(c) Hongri Group
Hongri Group is basically specialized in recovering ecology by planting
grasses and trees. The Group is connected with agricultural and forestry
sector of the Chinese government. The Group is also specialized inurban landscape architecture. The major customers are the public sector
institutions, that is, local government or government agencies. The
Hongri group has two companies in Jilin Province; one planting grassin the desert land, other involved in landscape architecture in urban
areas. By nature of business, relationship with local government is very
important. A kind of commodification of political relationship can be
developed between private business and local government.
It is important for this Group to persuade the government leaders togive higher priority to the environmental policy. The more government
is concerned with the environmental problems, the more chances thisGroup has for business. Therefore, it is very ‘profitable’ to invest in
this three-party grass project. Although this Group takes over
responsibility of grass planting work, the Group does not extract direct
profit from this project. The Group’s grass company takes contract
workload from the local government more than 10 times of the threeparty project.
For this company, the relationship with government officials is very
important, and can mobilize KFEM’s environmental strategy to persuade
the Chinese government leaders. This company introduced KFEM to
Jilin Government officials. More important is that this company provides
grass planting technology and business management.

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4. Kitakyushu-Dalian Local Government Cooperation
4.1 Project process and outline
Kitakyushu city’s environmental cooperation with its twin city of Dalianin China has similar characteristics. Its uniqueness lies in the local
government’s initiatives in mobilizing resources from NGOs, both fromnational governments and the local business.
Since Kitakyushu has a history of severe pollution problems and has
successfully overcome them since 1970s, it had accumulated
experiences, measures, manpower and technology countering pollution
problems. In 1981, Kitatkyushu dispatched two experts to its twin cityof Dalian for a seminar to counter environmental problems in Dalian,
and this event led to create a program of training of Dalian officials in
Kitakyushu. In 1993, about 70 Kitakyushu government officials, local
company leaders, NGO leaders and academicians went to Dalian toattend Dalian-Kitakyushu Technical Exchange Seminar, which wasattended by some 700 Chinese people. In this Technical Exchange
Seminar, Japanese participants proposed Dalian Environmental
Demonstration Zone.
In December 1993 when Mr. Song Jian, a Chinese Minister of State,
visited Kitakyushu city, Kitakyushu’s NGO, KITA (Kitakyushu
International Techno-Cooperative Association)’s representative Mizuno
Kaoru met Chinese Minister and proposed him to designate Dalian as
an Environmental Model District. In 1994 China’s Deputy Prime
Minister Zhu Rongji visited Kitakyushu city. Mayor of Kitakyushu
city also directly requested him to help designate the Dalian city as
China’s environmental model city. In September 1994, Kitakyushu’s
Mayor visited China to meet Deputy Prime Minister Zhu Rongji andsaid that Kitakyushu would render support and cooperation to Dalian,
if the city be designated as an environmental model city.
In response to these requests from Japan, China’s National
Environmental Protection Agency designated the Dalian project as anational priority project. Chinese government requested the Japanese
government to provide its ODA loan and technical assistance to carryout the master plan of the Dalian Project. In response to China’s request,
Japanese government formally decided to use ODA to support the Dalian
Project in 1996. Chinese central government also provided massive
financial support for the project. On the part of Japanese ODA, 8.5
billion yen has been used to improve the environment.

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In formulating the master plan, Kitakyushu local government requested
Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to make a draft masterplan to drastically improve Dalian’s environment. JICA took more than
three years to draw the master plan. In March 2000, the master plan
was finalized. Kitakyushu city officials provided public environmental
inputs, such as monitoring environment and improving water treatment,
garbage disposal, etc. KITA team that was composed of professional
technicians provided technical knowledge of low-level pollution
production system.
The position of Dalian city Mayor should also be noted. Mayor Mr.
Bo Xi Lai was a second-generation revolutionary leader and was very
influential in the Chinese political arena. He was also in a favorable
position to mobilize financial and organization resources from the central
government. After his success in Dalian renewal projects, he wasappointed as Governor of Liaoning Province and was elevated as
Minister of Commerce of the central government.
When I visited Dalian in 2003, the city had already been completelytransformed. The Dalian Environmental Demonstration Zone covers
217 square kilometer and living spaces of 1.7 million people.
In implementing the project, the role of retired government officials
and private companies was very important. Through the Kitakyushu
International Techno-Cooperation Association, their know-how andmanagement knowledge was fully mobilized. Since 1980s, Kitakyushu
has trained many Chinese officials from Dalian in the field of urban
environmental management, solid waste disposal, sewage and water,
air and oceanic pollution.
By recommendation from Kitakyushu city that already won the Global
500 award in 1991, the UNEP’s environmental award, Dalian also won
the award in 2001. Dalian became the best model for Chinese urban
planning.
4.2 Kitakyushu’s resource mobilization strategy
Kitakyushu city mobilized various resources from both countries andfrom various sectors. Kitakyushu made use of city’s useful manpower,
who retired from local government and companies for international
cooperation. Retired manpower was mobilized to train personnel from
Dalian and other Asian cities, and dispatched them to Dalian to help
urban renewal.

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In proposing the Dalian Environmental Demonstration Zone in 1993,
initial actors that prepared the Dalian Project were the International
Environmental Cooperation Department of the Environmental Bureauof Kitakyushu and the Environmental Cooperation Center of theKitakyushu International Techno-Cooperative Association, in otherwords, local government in collaboration with NGO group. The project
team received continuous consultation and supports from theInternational East Asia Research Center (ICSEAD), the Global
Environmental Strategic Research Agency (IGES), the Kitakyushu
Forum on Asian Women and the city of Kitakyushu.
In the process of making the master plan, Kitakyushu used the technicalresources from JICA that has resources for international cooperation.
Kitakyushu’s strategy to mobilize resources from both national
governments should be particularly stressed. Without Kitakyushu-Dalian
initiatives to mobilize national resources for environmental cooperation,
Japanese ODA and Chinese central government’s subsidy would be
used otherwise. It is this Kitakyushu-Dalian project that ‘reoriented’
resources of both countries.
Kitakyushu-Dalian project demonstrated that local governments havea lot of resources within themselves. They have management
experiences, for example, addressing urban environmental problems.
They can also mobilize technology amassed by industries in the fieldof environmental administration (legislation, environmental education,etc.) monitoring, sewage treatment, and cleaner production. Using theseresources, Kitakyushu has taken a lead in international environmental
cooperation in East Asia.
Based on these resources, Kitakyushu could mobilize other financial
and technical resources from national governments, technical groups
and academics.
5. Resource Mix and Implications
5.1 Resource mix
In the case of KFEM’s anti-desertification project, three parties havedifferent kinds of resources and their resources are virtually notcompetitive to each other. Each party exchanges what each has plenty
for what each has not much. Jilin Government can mobilize financial
resources, and organizational power, but it has to find a decent

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cooperation model a concept, technical and managerial power. KFEM
can provide environmental ideology and environmental education, butlacks access to Chinese government and has difficulty in launchinganti-desertification campaign and technical knowledge of grass work.
On the other hand, Hongri Group has technology for grass work andbusiness management knowledge. But it needs business relationshipwith local government, wants to make access to more business chances,and needs ideological support for ecological recuperation projects. As
a result, each of the three parties needs support from one another.
To launch and promote grass planting in the Northeast desert lands,
resources from different sectors and different countries have been
mobilized. It is a particular position of Korean NGOs in the Korea’s
political context that can mobilize fund from Korean government.
NGOs’ voice in Korean politics became stronger and they are
institutionally empowered to gain bargaining power with thegovernment. It is because Korean NGOs were been born from thetradition of long democratization struggle since 1980s. Korean
governments since democratization were relatively favorable to civilsociety movement organizations. It is in this background that NGOs
could make accesses to government fund for international cooperation.
Jilin government officials are also personally satisfied with this project,because they can travel to Korea at least once a year to attend the board
meeting. They can enjoy and learn a lot from Korean environment. In
order to provide opportunity to them to look around Korea, the board
meetings have been held in many places other than the capital city,
Seoul. For Chinese partners, this sort of exposure and personal
satisfaction cannot be ignored.
To make a dent in the Chinese bureaucratic ladder, one has to show
one’s ability in a certain sector. Environmentalism is a new chance thatdemands heroes. In 2006, Chinese Government launched a socialist
new agricultural community movement in order to mitigate rural-urban
disparity. In this area too, many Chinese villages and counties compete
against each other to be selected as a ‘model’ village. Many villages
combine agricultural economy with ecological development or ecotourism. In the same way, ecological reconstruction has become a key
word in China. Government officials in Jilin have a chance to become
ecological icon if this project succeeds to produce a really viable model
for China’s anti-desertification policy. Therefore Chinese local
government resources really matter in the Chinese political system.

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Hongri Group’s CEO is not simply seeking profit in this project. He isconvinced that environmental projection is an essential condition forfurther economic development in China. For him environmentalism is
not simply an instrument to make money. Rather he is seeking
opportunities to help protecting environment from the part of businessactivities. It is also very specific to China’s political situation. Although
there are some environmental NGOs in China, their activities are verymuch limited. Hongri’s CEO thinks that it is through business activity
that he can contribute to environmental protection. His activities in thearea of environment have extensively expanded. He enrolled in thegraduate school of the China Center for Sustainable Research Center,
Peking University, and researching on the regional economic-ecologicaldevelopment. Recently he designed a regional development plan of
Cangxi County of the Sichuan Province, which combines the economic
development with ecological reconstruction. Where there are various
restrictions in civil society movements, he could participate in thisproject through his business activities. This project could succeed tosome extent by combining different sources of resources in Korea andChina, and by combining different motives of each party.
Kitakyushu-Dalian Project is also a very successful case of resource
mix. Kitakyushu city itself has a plenty of technical resources in thearea of anti-pollution measures and green production. But it needs
financial resources to help Dalian city and technical knowledge toevaluate and draw a master plan of Dalian Environmental Demonstration
Zone. Therefore it mobilizes resources from the Chinese and theJapanese government.
5.2 Implications
Northeast China’s trans-border project has some implicit goals. Jilin
Government provided barren desert land for thirty years for this project.
The project land’s grass coverage is generally less than 15%, and thegoal is to upgrade the grass coverage rate to more than 85%. This landis suitable neither for agriculture nor for stock farming.
(a) Creation of market modelThis alkaline land is apt for grass planting, not for planting trees.
Moreover grass planting is assumed to be more profitable in comparison
with tree planting, because grass planting can yield business outcome
in a couple of years. Grass can be harvested into hey and processed as
fodder. Since major investments (seeding, watering, fencing) are260

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concentrated in first one or two years, project participants are convincedthat hey production will, in the long run, become profitable. The
participants also believe that once grass production is proved successful
in yielding profit, business enterprises will eventually participate ingrass planting, that is, anti-desertification campaign. One of theimportant objectives of this project is to prove it as a successful market
model. Therefore, board meeting demands the managing company touse a commercial business accounting method, so that the data can beused to prove it as a successful market model.
In the case of Kitakyushu project, market elements are rather limited.
Some of ODA finances are used in Japan, such as JICA’s consultation
fee and purchasing Japanese equipments for Kitakyushu-Dalian project.
Kitakyushu-Dalian project has virtually no implication in terms ofmarket principle.(b) Politics of ‘model’This project also aims to produce a successful policy model in China.
This model is unique in a sense that the public sector of Jilin Government
combines with civil society initiatives of foreign NGOs and rational
management technology of the market. This can be a model not because
it could plant grass, but in the sense that a model of government, civilsociety and market forces have cooperated in a grass planting project,mobilizing resources from three sectors. Once this project can be taken
up as policy model by the Chinese government, the grass planting ortree planting work can be done much more efficiently. This kind ofmodel politics has been used for long time during socialist constructionof the economy. This three-party model is new, but still acceptable to
the Chinese government, as its resource mix can produce good results.
Kitakyushu-Dalian project has a remarkable feature of politicalmarketing. For politicians public financing for the project will not be a
big problem, because what they pursue is not market-oriented profit,
but political success. Kitakyushu’s strategy for political marketing wasvery successful to mobilize Chinese central governments’ support, andDalian case became a national model in China.
(c) NGO and local government’s strategy for resource mobilization
NGOs have very limited resources for anti-desertification program. They
have to mobilize resources from various sources. In this sense KFEM
is successful in mobilizing Korean government fund and support inplanting grass in northeast China. In three-party cooperation, KFEM

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In addressing environmental problems, it is very important to mobilize
resources from various sources. Even though Chinese environmental
problems cannot be solely solved by some NGOs or local government
efforts, the goodwill NGOs and local governments can effectively
mobilize various resources and mix them into an effort to solve
problems.
In 1980s, while Japan’s ODA was under criticism, Kanagawa
Governor proposed Minsai (inter-people) diplomacy and ‘Kanagawa
ODA’ which aimed to help foreign NGOs and individuals directlyfrom Kanagawa. Kitakyushu-Dalian project demonstrated what
national governments should follow in international environmental
cooperation. KFEM’s anti-desertification activities also demonstrated
how the business community, the government and citizens cancooperate in addressing environmental problems. That is why NGOs
and local governments, which can be considered as minor actors in
the international world, may make a breakthrough in the global
environmental problems.
References
Birkland, Thomas. A., 2001, An Introduction to the Policy Process: Theories.
Concepts, and Models of Public Policy Making, M.E, Sharpe.
Liu Haipo, 2003, China-Korea-Japan Cooperation in terms of Policy
Cooperation. http://www.kiep.go.kr
Moon Tae Hun, 1998, Towards Cooperative System for Prevention of
Diffusion of Environmental Pollution, Hanyang Urban Forum Thesis.
http://post.cauac.kr/-thmoon/paper/Network1.htm.
Kitakyushu City, 2003, Story of Environmental Friendship—Process ofEnvironmental Cooperation between Kitakyushu City And Dalian City.
Kourogi, Ichiro, 2002, Modern China in Globalized World, Iwanami Shinsho.
Watanabe, Toshio(eds.)£¬2003£¬Illustration of Modern China—from
Environmental Problems to Japan-China Relations. PHP Research Cent
Japanese Environmental Ministry homepage:www.env.go.jp/earth/coop/jcec/
Korean Federation for Environmental Movement homepage:www.kfem.or.kr

RELIGION AND CORRUPTION
Advocacy for Integrity in Philippine
Church and Society
Albert E. Alejo
I propose that we seriously examine ourselves: Do I use God to getmoney, or, do I use money to get towards God? We who so preach toothers to share, do we also share?...I dream of the time that there
would be no priest in need because we share with each other. Whether
one is in the city or in the provinces, whether one is in a big or asmall parish, we all share among us. The gap between the rich andthe poor among our people will not be bridged if among us priests,
who are configured to Jesus Christ and preach love and sharing,
have rich and poor among us.
-Bishop Broderick S. Pabillo
Uneasy Introduction
In their protest against the way the government was imposing “Charter
Change” in the Philippine Constitution, the Filipino bishops quickly
called for “Character Change” among the legislators. It was not theFundamental Law of the land that needed to be overhauled, they argued,
it’s the heart and soul of the politicians that required a radical turnaround. Equally quick, however, were letters sent to the editors of major
dailies, challenging the Church leaders to apply the same prophetic cryfor reform upon themselves: “They should first address the ‘characterchange’ message to themselves before they preach it to others.”1 It
1E.g. “I always believe that Christ wants the clergy to lead in promoting love and brotherhood.
Sadly enough, some priests, and even a few bishops, add to the chaos and misunderstanding in
Philippine society today. They even encourage the use of violence to change governments. They

should first address the ‘character change’ message to themselves before they preach it to others.
(Vitor, 2006)

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would seem that some of the most tenacious problems that we encounterin the secular arena—including corruption—are also found within thereligious temples. The sooner the Church acts on this with integrity(and that includes myself as a man of the Church), the better for boththe Philippine Church and society.
My task in this paper is to speak about the social dimension of thecentral religious worship of the Catholic Church—the Eucharist. I guessthe best statement on this theme has already been said by the Eleventh
Synod of Bishops, which adopted the title “The Eucharist, Source andSummit of the Life and Mission of the Church” (October 3 - 23, 2005).
In Proposition No. 48, the Synod describes the “social dimension of
the Eucharist” in this powerful paragraph:“Christ’s sacrifice is a mystery of liberation that calls out to us. It isin the commitment to transform unjust structures and to re-establish
the dignity of man, created in the likeness and image of God, that
the Eucharist assumes in life the significance it has in celebration.
This dynamic movement opens up to the world: it questions theprocess of globalization which not infrequently increases the gap
between rich countries and poor countries, it denounces the politicaland economic forces that dilapidate the earth’s resources, it reiterates
the grave requirements of distributive justice in the face of
inequalities that cry out to heaven, it encourages Christians tocommit themselves and to work in political life and social
activity…Those who share in the Eucharist must commit themselvesto creating peace in our world, which is marked by violence, war
and, especially today, by terrorism, economic corruption and sexual
exploitation. The conditions for building true peace are therestoration of justice, reconciliation and forgiveness.”
From the long and heavy list of concerns that call for committed action,
I highlight “corruption.” It is identified as one of the new and special
problems that confront those who would take the spirit of the Eucharist
seriously in contemporary society. And since I have been in Ehem!
Anticorruption Movement2 , I zoom in my presentation on the connection
2

Ehem! is the popular name of the Jesuit Anticorruption Program. The program offers seminars togovernment and private sector personnel, using the Ehem! A Self-Check Manual for Combating
Corruption. The program has been adopted by the Office of -the Ombudsman as its corruption
prevention strategy, and the seminars have been accredited by the Civil Service Commission for
officer’s development. Recently, Ehem! also produced the Aha! A Citizen’s Primer on
Whistleblowing, the product of long partnership with the Ombudsman’s Office.

Envisioning Community-Building265

between the Eucharist and injustice, between communion andcorruption.
I believe—no, I can clearly see—that some of the problems that we arefighting against in society are also found within the Church. And among
these problems, perhaps the most sensitive to discuss, is corruption.
This is the slant that I am going to take in this presentation.
I suggest that the profound and authentic renewal of our society requiresa corresponding renewal precisely from within our Philippine Church
institutions and communities. The scandal that rocks the Church today
is probably not so much the sexual misconduct of the clergy, but thedisconcerting fact that those who lead the faithful are as economicallyand politically divided as the society it wants to convert. The Christians
who cheat in public service as well as the victims of their cheating areprobably seatmates in the same parish Church and supposedly receiving
the same Eucharist.
There at the back of the Church, a mother is crying to the Lord, because
she cannot buy the overpriced medicines for her dying child. Here in
the front pew, a regular churchgoer praises the Lord in jubilation for agood pharmaceutical business. Somebody is making a living by literally
making a killing! What would St. Paul say to this kind of Church?
Probably the same sad and angry words he said to the Corinthians.
“But in the following instructions I do not commend you, because
when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse.
For, in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hearthat there are divisions among you. And I believe it in part, for there
must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine
among you may be recognized. When you come together, it is not
the Lord’s Supper that you eat. For in eating, each one goes ahead
with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. What! Do
you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise thechurch of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I
say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not… Whoever,therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy
manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.
Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread anddrink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning
the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.” (1 Corinthians 11:
17-29, English Standard Version)

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I hear from St. Paul that receiving the Eucharist has very serious socialand spiritual implications. The social divisions in society (‘those whohave their own meal’ and ‘those who have nothing’) are very much
reflected in the church and thereby “despise” it. In no uncertain terms,
St. Paul exhorts the believers to examine the serious implications of
this juxtaposition of social and spiritual disgrace.
Taking cue from St. Paul, I divide the rest of my presentation into two.
The first section is the social context of the Eucharist from theperspective of the problem of corruption in the Philippines. The second
portion is an attempt at a theological reflection on the issue. (Pleasetake these reflections as coming from an anthropologist, and not from a
professional theologian.) Towards the end, I will offer some prospects
for pastoral action in living out the meaning of our Eucharistic
communion amidst a society and a Church that are both challenged bycorruption.
SOCIAL CONTEXT OF A RELIGIOUS PRACTICE
A friend of mine approached me one day, crying. “Albert, I just want tobe a teacher, but I was told that my application is pressed down under
the heap of other applications.” “Why?” I asked. “You have all thecredentials necessary.” The superintendent, apparently, was demandingthat she agreed to surrender her first three months salary. And she
refused. My friend consulted her relatives and former teachers and evenher mother who went to church and received communion everyday.
They, all as if in a chorus, told her to be practical. “Give your first threemonths check, and get on with real life!” I have told this story in all myseminars on Ehem! In each time, I got confirmation that this scandal
was not at all rare. The whole society apparently suffers from this
distorted values and dysfunctional institutions.
Corruption in the Philippines
Stories about corruption find an ally with statistics. A World Bank Studyin 2000 estimated that, in 20 years, the Philippines lost US $ 48 billion
because of corruption, and this amount surpassed the entire foreign
debt of US $ 40.6 billion. The National Health Insurance Program
continues to lose as much as P300 million a year to fraudulent claims,
including those involving so-called ghost patients. The said amount is
at least 4 percent of P6.8 billion representing payments for Medicare
claims in 2000 (Philippine Health Report, 2001).

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267

Corruption has also infected schools. The latest Global Corruption
Barometer Survey (2005) of the Berlin-based Transparency International(TI) revealed an increasing incidence of corruption in many schools
and universities worldwide, including bribes to secure a student’s
admission to school or to pass university exams, or selling diplomas
and other academic credentials. The report importantly noted that suchanomalous “practices in schools and universities contradicted basic
values of integrity, equity and the public good and risked perpetuating
the problem by fostering a negative perception of authority andinstitutions.” When the students are exposed and formed to corruption
and have lost respect to campus institutions, they can easily lose respect
to the broader institutions of governance when they are brought into
the mainstream society.
According to an earlier report of the Philippine Center of Investigative
Journalism, up to 65% of textbook funds are reserved as bribe money.
The range of bribery runs from 20% to 65%. In the purchase of
medicines, books, magazines and other instructional materials, thekickbacks are distributed to supplier 40%; congressional aide 5%; headof implementing agency 10%; and legislators 45% (Parreño, 1998).
This has probably improved—but I guess not substantially—during
the past few years.
In the year 2000, a whooping 21 billion pesos of the government’s
procurement budget apparently went to the pockets of legislators. (Iwas talking to a contractor of public works. According to him, he goesto prayer sessions, but with a feeling of guilt, because in the real worldof public works, he cannot do anything to change the standard operatingprocedure. You cannot win a construction contract in the government if
you do not pay bribe.)
Now, 21 billion pesos is not an abstract thing. It is nearly half of the
DPWH’s budget and about a fourth of the DepEd. Maybe some ofthese figures could not be accurate at this point. But 21 billion pesos
have equivalents. It could mean 44,716 new classrooms, 21 million
new books, new desks and new computers. Then the backlog forclassrooms and computers could have been remedied.
News abounds—and as matter of fact, we know it from personal
experience—that fake diplomas and academic credentials are being
manufactured (cf. Philippines Daily Inquirer, 15 April 2005). If you
want to buy some fake diploma, go to Recto Avenue. I studied in theuniversity belt and I saw students submitting cannibalized papers in268

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Rizal course. Students just copied lyrics from song hits magazines, andthey got passing grades! Maybe the teachers were very tired for having
too heavy a load. This is true even of the graduate schools. I see
plagiarism being committed left and right. Some government officials,
who are trying to get a DBA or graduate degrees, simply ask theirsecretaries to do the research papers for them. If that is possible in theiracademic life, I wonder how they do in their public office.
A few years ago, the Jesuits did a cross-sectoral study of corruption in
the Philippines in 2002. We conducted twenty-five focus group
discussions from Baguio to Basilan, and the results include rampant
cheating in exams and take-home assignments, plagiarism, selling oftickets and illegal collection of fees and illegal deductions from teachers’salaries. Other anomalies that emerged from the research include illegal
use of PTCA funds (Parents-Teachers-Community Associations, illegal
use of class funds, teachers and school administrators getting‘commissions’ from suppliers of school supplies or printing press ofyearbooks and school papers, and non-remittance of teachers’ benefits
premiums (SSS).
We should also include here the recent scandal on the leakage in thenursing examinations and the Php 1 billion worth of insurance that wascollected from the lowly teachers but was not remitted to the agency. I
must also add the painful experience of many public school teachers
who were used by Marcos in tampering the ballots during the martial
law period. All these sad stories in the world of education in thePhilippines are both a product and productive of a society that has veryminimal respect for truth and dignity.
This does not, of course, mean that each individual education personnel
is corrupt. As a matter of fact, I am passionate about this advocacy
because I see so many ordinary teachers and educators who try to live
a life of integrity despite the odds. And it is very unfair to make sweeping
statements. Having said that, we still want to call for more decisive
action toward a genuine transformation.
The Church as Part of the Problem
For most of the ordinary faithful, the Eucharist—or the Mass—is not
simply a liturgical practice. It is also a social and even an economic
event. Many things happen during mass. People enter the church and“find their place”: some instinctively stay at the back, while someprominent personalities would insist on occupying the front row even

Envisioning Community-Building269

if they come late. And people see this. Parents teach their kids to besilent. People look at what other people wear. The homilist tries toconnect the readings to contemporary issues, calls for prayer for victimsof disasters, announces leadership training, denounces anomalies inelections, or at times blesses controversial projects. For some, the mass
is a simple opportunity to learn how to use the microphone or try theirsinging skills. The church then becomes a culture bearer, aside frombeing a sacrament dispenser.
On top of this, there is the circulation of money. Parishioners hear thesound of the coins and see who is donating the bigger amount into thecollection pouch. Sometimes, there is even a second collection for aconstruction project or in support of a missionary abroad. A disturbing
silence, though, is the rarity of financial report coming from the church
officials.3 The inclusion of money, among other things, places the
Eucharist and the Church in general within the context of the brewing
interrogation of poverty and corruption in the wider society: Where
does the money go?
This question is raised in a recent television special. Very respectable
TV journalist Howie Severino aims his lenses and his analysis on theuse of the faithful’s contribution to the Church. The video-documentary
originally entitled Banal na Barya or Holy Money is the first of GMA7’s
6th anniversary month-long series of hard-hitting, investigative
documentaries, and was aired on April 4, 2005. The blurb on this episodedescribes the problem:

3

This lack of transparency within the parish apparently flows from the temporal nature of the
Church itself. Bishop Leonardo Y. Medroso, explains: “The Church is not a democratic institution.
It is a hierarchical (Cf. Canons 204, §2; 336; 375; 753). In a democratic institution, the power ofthe official basically emanates from the people and is therefore accountable to the people. In ahierarchical Church, the power of the officials (the clergy) emanate from Christ who entrusted thegovernment of the Church to them in a hierarchical order. In consonance with this order pastors
are accountable to their bishops as the bishops are accountable to the Holy See or the Pope.
Hence, just as no pastor should allow his parishioners or a ‘self-appointed group’ thereof to dictatethat he submits to them the parish financial report, similarly neither the bishop should submit to
the priests the diocesan financial report. It is, however, the responsibility of the pastors to submit
the parish financial report to the Bishop (Can. 1287, §. 1) as the Bishop in turn has the responsibility
to submit to the Supreme Pontiff all matters, including financial, of how he administers them in
his diocese (cf. Can. 399).” “Transparency in the Church” Impact: Asian Magazine for Human
Transformation. Vol 40: 13-14, 22.

270Communities in Action

Few parishioners ask where their money goes. I-Witness asks thequestions for them. From collections at church masses, I-Witness
dares to follow the church money trail and learns that while priests
are sources of spiritual comfort, they do not always inspire confidence
in their financial management. Sometimes, they are accused of gasp! - stealing. Bishops frequently denounce government corruption
and social inequalities. But some priests are starting to look in the
church’s own backyard and do not like what they see. Several
thousand priests recently surveyed said that material extravagancewas the number one problem of the church. Sex scandals only camein second.
Perhaps the more controversial segment in this I-Witness episode is thecase of the Archdiocese of Manila who owns commercial buildings,
rents out its land to banks, and even runs a hotel — all of them generating
profits, but for the past several years, has refused to pay tax. Howie
Severino openly reveals that his source for this observation is Aries
Rufo’s article “The Untaxable Church” (Newsbreak October 27, 2004).
Rufo exposes many details about the expansion of the Roman Catholic
Archdiocese of Manila (RCAM) commercial properties, which,according to government officials should have been paying several
millions of local and national taxes.4 But apparently, the hotel does noteven have a proper building permit. For the record, both Bishop Oscar
Cruz and Archbishop Gaudencio Rosales admit that some of Church’s
commercial properties must be taxed, and that they have been doingthat in their own dioceses. But when we look at the trend in print andInternet opinions, this will continue to haunt the Church. While church
tax may be small compared to that of huge corporations, the stigma of
being a “tax evader” certainly weakens the Church’s prophetic role insocial transformation.

4“Church sources disclose that the center has been operating the lodging inn for years and charges
commercial rates. BIR officials say the inn, which is a commercial business, is taxable. They
explain that tax exemption covers only the income derived from religious, charitable sources.
They say that area on which the lodging inn stands should be imposed with realty tax. In 1999, thecenter opened a five-story, 74-room hotel at the back of its compound. Documents submitted to
the BIR showed the center’s gross income for 1999, 2001, and 2002 reached P32 million, P46.24
million, and P44.718 million respectively. The center did not submit its income tax return (ITR)
for 2000. For 2003, the center surprisingly declared zero income.” Aries Rufo, “The Untaxable
Church” (Newsbreak October 27, 2004).

Envisioning Community-Building271

One obvious conclusion here is that the Church, in its social existence,is also very much part of the problem. According to a familiar columnist,
Conrad de Quiros, “There’s a whole history to show that the Church,though part of the solution, is also part of the problem. As with thesociety itself, the pocket of wealth and opulence at the top is matchedby breathtaking deprivation below, a spectacular divide that doesn’tsuggest it holds on to values conducive to honesty, or indeed Christianity.”
What does the Church say to this?
The Catholic bishops very well know the ‘evil of corruption’. In 1989,
the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines condemned it in apastoral letter appropriately entitled, “Thou shalt not steal!” This wasfollowed in 1997 with CBCP’s comprehensive social treatise called“Pastoral Exhortation on Philippine Politics.” In these and otherdocuments, the bishops decry the foulness of corruption that “plucks
food from the mouth of the starving” and “weakens the moral andspiritual fiber of the people.” The Pastoral Letter on Graft and Corruption
in 2003, poetically entitled “Let Integrity Flow Like a Stream” continues
the same condemnation, but this time with a totally different tone, one
which is both confident in its condemnation of corruption as well as
repentant of its own collusion to the problem. On its third paragraph,the bishops make a public confession:
Today we once more point an accusing finger at ourselves. The entire
Church in the Philippines is suffering in great anguish as its integrity
is raked over the coals with cases as actual or alleged sexual
misconduct of some of its shepherds. We are aware, too, that in otherareas of Church life as in parish financial management, some Church
members and leaders, through loose and dishonest stewardship, strayfrom the path of righteousness and integrity and we all suffer fromthe pain when one part of the body of Christ, that is the Church,does wrong. (CBCP, “Let Integrity Flow like a Stream.” Pastoral
Exhortation on Graft and Corruption, 2003)
This confession is matched by empirical data. In 2004, as a response to
the sex scandals that hit the Philippine clergy and hierarchy two years
ago, the National Congress of the Clergy was convened. Some fourthousand priests and bishops gathered together under one roof. It was avery touching and very moving experience of renewal of commitment
to the life and mission proper to “men of the Eucharist.” Part of the
program was the conduct of a survey on the “Traits and Behaviors

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Incompatible with Priestly Ministry and Spirituality”. Out of 2,911
respondents coming from 85 dioceses of the country, 76 were bishops.
On the question of “indecent lifestyles” of the clergy, 1,363 or 46% of
the respondents identify “material attachment and extravagance” as thenumber one lifestyle that mars the image of the Filipino clergy today.
Such materialism, according to the interpretation of Msgr. Manny
Gabriel, breeds “arrogance” and “inconsiderateness,” with no sense of
sacrifice” and “discipline.” Far second is sexual relations with womenor homosexual liaisons and activities” at 26%, third is “habitual recourse
to worldly good time” at 11.6%, and fourth is “closeness to the rich andpowerful” at 9%.
As to the question on the “factors that weaken the Institutional Church,” the results are equally disturbing. The delegates gave a very high
52% on “lack of transparency and honesty in the management of Church
resources.” This “problem from within” is felt as “more disturbing.”
Again, according to the somber reading of Msgr. Gabriel:
The clergy’s inability to manage the Church resources due to plain
and simple dishonesty militates against very basic human and Gospel
values. It brings to the fore the Gospel’s battle cry against sin andcorruption, the moral imperative of honesty and truthfulness in thepresence of the Lord and His people, the demand for responsible
stewardship in the governance of the earth’s resources. And in acountry where corruption is woven into every fiber of its societal
institution, people expect the Church to lead the moral crusade, towitness to responsible governance and pastoral care. Should thisChurch be found wanting in this transparent, Gospel-inspired
stewardship of resources, because the leaders themselves have failed
to practice what it preaches, the institutional Church weakens its
moral foundation and credible leadership?
“Clerical intrigues and politics” comes second at 33% and “arroganceand abuse of power” third at 14%. The survey was conducted by thesocial research office of the Pontifical University of Santo Tomas, andpublished as part of the book called History and Grace, also publishedin 2005 by the University of Santo Tomas Press. The book contains the
speeches and the activities as well as the proposals for a renewed clergy
for a renewed Church in a renewed Philippine society.

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273

Parallel Challenge to Filipino Muslims
It is reasonable to expect that there should be some parallel self-critiqueamong the Muslim leaders in the region. Unfortunately, very little ofthis cleansing process seems to be happening among the Islamic
institutions in the Philippines.
One of the few who have openly expressed a call for correcting theprevalent corruption among Muslim officials in Mindanao is Amina
Rasul, a columnist who belongs to a political clan in Sulu. In her
courageous article, Rasul traces the malpractices in government to
extremely strong feudalistic patron-client relationship that is being
manipulated by those who are in power.
All three governors [(Zacaria Candao (1990), Liningding
Pangandaman (1993), and Nur Misuari (1996)] have been accusedof tolerating corruption, but few formal charges have been filed,and for those filed, none prospered. The grinding poverty andignorance, and the dependence of the people on informal structures
are permanent fixtures in the near-absence of governance in thearea. There is a failure to [sic] deliver basic services and a general
breakdown of government institutions. These function dismally or
not at all, or are misdirected to serve the personal interests of thosein power. Any delivery of services must go through the local kingpin.
The feudalistic patron-client relationship remains the norm.
This cultural baggage runs counter to the real tenets of Islam. Islam hasvery specific teachings against corruption. Rasul quotes a hadith thatsays,
When I appoint someone among you to public office and he puts
away by stealth a needle or someone else, that is embezzlement, andhe will be called upon to produce it on the Day of Judgment. Earning
one’s own living and making money are legitimate quests, wasting
wealth is unlawful, and spending extravagantly on lawful things is
prohibited. It is also unlawful to abuse others’ wealth. It is prohibitedto possess other people’s property illegally, which explains why thethief’s hand is amputated as a punishment. Usury is likewise
prohibited.
Rasul laments that despite the clear and forceful Islamic condemnationof corrupt practices, the “informal relationships and customs in society”
are able to “subvert” the teachings of the Prophet. This is a deeply274Communities in Action

religious problem, because “this is also true of the majority of theChristian population who is deeply religious and moral, yet constantly
turn a blind eye to practices that are clearly immoral.” (Rasul 163)
For Rasul, not everything is lost, though. Muslim missionaries andgroups like the Tableegh and the Sabbab go around at the grassroots
level, “re-educating the people on the true ways of Islam. Although thefocus of the teachers/missionaries is not specifically on corruption, theiradmonition to live according to the tenets of Islam serves as deterrent
to corrupt practices.” Rasul admits that “the fight against corruption is
not a major concern among Muslim communities; survival is. However,Muslim religious and civil society leaders in Mindanao haveacknowledged corruption as an issue, and are using the strong moral
foundation given by Islam to address it” (Rasul, 164). Instead of waxing
cynical about religion, Rasul prefers to call on a more intensified spiritual
campaign.
Given the general absence of governance where state institutions
fail to work, the only alternative is seeking remedies beyond thestate, or into the very moral fiber of the people. Religion is where
Filipinos, particularly the Muslims, can relate as it is the tie thatbinds the different ethnic groups of Filipino Muslims together. (Rasul
2003:162)5
Such a call for a faith-based politics requires a serious reality check, if
we compare with the experience of a neighboring county. According toa recent article in Jakarta Post (8 Sept 2006), “Religion has not playeda major role to date in efforts to eradicate corruption” at least if we use
the terms of the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) presented inTransparency International’s Report 2005. In the said report, “Morethan half of the bottom 10 places were occupied by Muslim countries”.
said Abdullah Badawi in a forum of the Organization of the Islamic
Conference (OIC). The best ranking Muslim country was only ranked
29 out of 158 states surveyed.
There have been substantial religious efforts addressing corruption inIndonesia. In 2002, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) Chairman Hasyim Muzadi,
then Muhammadiyah Chairman Ahmad Syafii Maarif representing
Indonesia’s two largest Islamic bodies and Partnership for Government
Reform in Indonesia signed a memorandum of understanding for joint
action against corruption. An NU congress in 2002 in Pondok Gede,5

For an account of this “impunity”, see Gemma Bagayaua. 2006. “Systems breakdown” Newsbreak,January 2 & 16, 2006. pp. 49-50.

Envisioning Community-Building275

Jakarta, even decided that officials embezzling public funds — unlessthey returned the money — would receive no prayers when they died.
This is based on the words of the Prophet that people in debt do notdeserve prayers.
Unfortunately, these initiatives coming from the religious leaders havenot served as deterrent to corrupt behavior. A former religious affairs
minister is serving a five-year prison sentence for stealing public funds.
Several people have also been tried including the case of Rp 684 billion(US$70 million) haj fund in the Religious Affairs Ministry, involving
former director general of haj management affairs Taufik Kamil andReligious Affairs Minister Said Agil al-Munawar. Following theirappeals, the Supreme Court sentenced Taufik to four years imprisonment
and Said to five years.
Why has religious reform fared badly? The Jakarta Post article offers anumber of explanations. Some Muslims apparently think that corruption
is a “minor sin” that is light enough to be easily forgiven by God. On
this point, I would rather quote the article at length, as this certainly has
parallels with both Muslims and Christians in the Philippines:
Under such circumstances, the public shows little concern overwhether or not donors’ contributions come from corrupted moneyor whether the financial management of the funds is transparent.
Furthermore, there is an understanding among embezzlers that theirsins will be lightened when their money is partially donated for theconstruction of a place of worship.
Believers, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, in expounding theirreligious tenets put greater emphasis on external, ceremonial aspects
rather than their spiritual nature, which could enhance the characterof believers to uphold the principles of justice, integrity andresponsibility. Consequently, religious communities prioritize
physical symbols like the numerous houses of worship, instead of
the quality of religious propagation.
Even NU and Muhammadiyah maintain that there is a misconception
among many Muslims that corruption is a minor sin God will forgive
if the perpetrators are consistently charitable and perform theobligatory prayers five times a day. This belief is of course in stark
contradiction to the Koran (Holy book of the God) and Hadith(Prophet’s words and deeds), because corruption is actually a majorsin, with perpetrators likely to be “sentenced to death on a cross”

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or “mutilated”, depending on the frequency of the acts and theamount of material losses caused.
The growth of corruption also results from the fact that individuals
and religious institutions such as mosque or church managementtake little initiative to eradicate corruption. They are more interested
in ritual worship rather than “social worship” like corruption
elimination and the creation of good governance.
Like Amina Rasul, the Islamic reformers in Indonesia are not dismissing
the power of values transformation as “alternative to prevent corruption,” but this has to be reinforced by the family and the school. “This move
will not succeed… unless this is reinforced by parents who also serveas role models in the home.” But where would parents and school
teachers get their good examples? From their religious leaders, we hope.
Religious leaders, both Christians and Muslims, have the task of edifying
the believers. Serious efforts toward renewal, however, must begin fromwithin their own ranks.
CALL TO SOCIO-SPIRITUAL LIBERATION
I heard that among the many speeches and homilies delivered during
the National Congress of the Clergy, probably the most moving was
the sharing of Father (now Bishop) Broderick S. Pabillo, who spokefrom his experience of being a poor priest living with the poor. One ofhis paragraphs, I think, can really take us from the sociologicalobservation and statistical computation to spiritual reflection:
I propose that we seriously examine ourselves: Do I use God to getmoney, or, do I use money to get towards God? We who so preach toothers to share, even to give tithes ... do we also share? Do we tithe
ourselves? The early Christian community in Jerusalem had no one
in need among them because those who have would sell whatever
they have and give them to those who have none (cf. Acts 4:34).
Therefore many were added to the number of believers. Their life of
sharing was a great factor to this increase. Is this also so among us,
even at least among us brothers in the priesthood? I dream of thetime that there would be no priest in need because we share witheach other. Whether one is in the city or in the provinces, whether
one is in a big or a small parish, we all share among us. The gap
between the rich and the poor among our people will not be bridged

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if among us priests, who are configured to Jesus Christ and preachlove and sharing, have rich and poor among us.
Fr. Pabillo is echoing Conrad de Quiros’ indictment of the Church, but
Fr. Pabillo transforms the social condition into a prophetic call for
conversion. Anyone who wants to be enriched spiritually by listening
to an account of ministry to the poor would better read the rest of his
sharing. What I notice in Fr. Pabillo’s sharing is that scripture passages
seem to naturally bubble from experience and then flow very gently
into new insights. The rich young man of Mark suddenly leads to Mosesof Exodus. Matthew 6:34 “Tomorrow will take care of itself” blends
easily with the anecdote on may awa ang Diyos (God will show mercy).
The issue of some people being mukhang pera (literally money-faced)becomes a jumping board for understanding the Eucharistic sharing inActs 4:34.
CORRUPTION AS BETRAYAL OF COMMUNION
Let me now go back to my main focus that is the call for internal renewal
within the Catholic Church and Philippine society. In this section, I
would like to pursue a couple of biblical reflections based on myexperience in Ehem, Anticorruption Movement. I would just like toshare with you how I “discovered” some Biblical texts that, for me atleast, have transformed my political action against corruption into a
more pastoral ministry for communion.
When I was reading the account of the institution of the Eucharist in
the Gospel of Matthew, it dawned on me that right at the very beginning,
during the Last Supper, on the first Maundy Thursday, Jesus became
the victim of bribery and extortion, as Judas secretly accepted the thirty
pieces of silver paid by the religious authorities. Imagine the pain ofJesus, sharing bread and wine with somebody who would betray him?
I am sure that a trained scripture scholar or a biblical spirituality expert
can expound on this angle in more detail and probably more poignantly.
But to me, the impact of this vision of that dark night dinner came withthe death of a whistleblower, Marlene Esperat of Tacurong, Sultan
Kudarat.
Marlene was a chemist who turned journalist. While she was monitoring
the Department of Agriculture, she uncovered many anomalies. Her
expose later on became the notorious Php 728 million fertilizer scam.

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She filed dozens of cases touching on overpricing of farm inputs,
spending millions of government funds on ghost irrigation projects,
and even smuggling of chicken wings. Marlene was aware that she was
threatening powerful people, but she was fearless. All she was thinkingof was the injustice that a handful of people were inflicting on the farmers
and the government. Her family simply had accepted and respected her
crusade for justice.
When Marlene died, her sister knew exactly what Psalm she would use
for the paraliturgy—Psalm 17. They requested me to lead the prayerthat her sister had prepared. I was astonished at the beauty and powerof the song of the righteous person seeking protection from God, andyet ultimately expressing inner joy if in the end she can simply “behold
your face in righteousness; I will be satisfied with your likeness when
I awake.”Hear a just cause, O LORD, give heed to my cry;Give ear to my prayer, which is not from deceitful lips…
Keep me as the apple of the eye;
Hide me in the shadow of Your wings
From the wicked who despoil me,
my deadly enemies who surround me…
They have now surrounded us in our steps;
they set their eyes to cast us down to the ground.
He is like a lion that is eager to tear,
And as a young lion lurking in hiding places.
Arise, O LORD, confront him, bring him low;
Deliver my soul from the wicked with your sword…
As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness;
I will be satisfied with your likeness when I awake.
Corruption is violence. Corruption kills. But what the Eucharistic
passages in the Gospel seem to imply is that corruption, moreover, is abetrayal of trust, of divine trust. The person of integrity, however, clings
to the friendship with truth—and therefore with God—even at the riskof one’s life.
Thank God, not all whistleblowers get killed, although they continue
to be persecuted through harassment and continuous death threat. Ruben
M. Manatad understands this perfectly well. He exposed the “rice-forsawdust scam” in the National Food Authority, where somebody
replaced four trucks of rice with sawdust, and threatened him when heEnvisioning Community-Building279

refused to sign the delivery receipt. His continuing struggle has inspired
him to write his own psalm, “A whistleblower’s prayer”6:Dear God, please make me strong
In the midst of threats and enticements.
Powerful people are determined to break my will
and compel me to retract my statements.
If they fail, they will see to it that my reputation
is tarnished and my credibility demolished.
I am emotionally burdened.
People close to me may be involved in this wrongdoing.
I just exposed an anomaly that is detrimental to the nation.
But I am prepared to face the consequences of my action.
Please shield me against ill motives and retaliation.
My belief is powerful. My faith is formidable.
I cannot forsake Young people whom I am sworn
to serve faithfully. Help me. Amen.
COMMUNION AS LIBERATION FROM CORRUPTION
During one of our Ehem! seminars for the regional office of the Land
Transportation Office, I had a clearer hint on what Jesus did when hevisited Zacchaeus, the notorious tax collector. The regional head had
several corruption cases filed against him. But he still arranged theseminar. He invited the group to dinner in his house. Nobody came,
except my brother Jesuit scholastic and myself. The amount of foodindicated that he was expecting a lot of visitors. Apparently, people did
not want to be seen dining with him because of his alleged anomalies.
I don’t remember what happened next, but he admitted to having thosecases looming over his head and promised to be better public servant.
I think there is need for pastoral care for those who have been involvedin corrupt activities but are now, like Zacchaeus, craning their neck, as
it were, to get a glimpse of Jesus. Jesus knew what was going on in
Zacchaeus’ heart, and out of his wisdom and compassion, Jesus usedthe very human sacrament of dining together, as an approach toconversion. Zacchaeus burst into liberation from his attachment to his
ill-gotten wealth that he promised to return more than what the law
could have demanded on him to pay. Jesus declared after the meal,“Today, salvation has come to this house” (Luke 19:1-10).
6

Mr. Ruben M. Manatad’s prayer is later printed in the Aha! A Citizen’s Primer on Whistleblowing.
Davao City: Ehem! Aha! Technical Working Group, Office of the Ombudsman and the Philippine
Province of the Society of Jesus (2006).

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Secretly, a number of people come to me saying, “Father, I am notreally a bad guy. It’s just that I was not strong enough to overcome thepressure of the office. I cannot go on with this admittedly corrupt
behavior, but I am afraid of the consequences if I expose myself to thelaw.” I had another case of surprise revelation. I was walking in the
Ateneo de Manila campus. A car stopped by me. The window opened
and I heard a voice. “Excuse me, are you Father Alejo? Are you the one
who gives Ehem seminars? Father, you should talk to me. I am attorney
so and so, graduate of Ateneo Law School, and I’m corrupt.
Right now, I have a murder case and it has just been dismissed, because
we bought the judge. When you have time, let’s have dinner or coffee.
I will gather a few others, and we will tell you how things are done.” I
wonder if I can muster the courage and the creativity, like Jesus had, toexplore talking with the alumni of our schools or parish ioners of ourchurches, at that moment when they are at the brink of conversion. I
suggested this to some sisters who were running good schools, but who,
they admit, had alumni who have become corrupt. Why don’t you visit
them, I said. “Nakakahiya!” (it’s shameful!), they answered. Why do
we feel awkward approaching our alumni in their homes to remindthem of the values that our schools stood for? And yet we are notashamed of asking money for contributions back to the school? Cometo think of it, Jesus, in the Zacchaeus liberation story, is probably
teaching us a pastoral approach to societal change—and again, throughthe Eucharistic meal?
AN URGENT ADVOCACY
As the Church begins the all-important surgical self-criticism, there arepositive signs that can give us energy to proceed with this “urgent
advocacy.” In its most recent survey on corruption, the Social Weather
Station included, for the first time, the category “local church leaders”.
The result is that local church leaders got the highest rating for sincerity
in fighting corruption, scoring higher than the Supreme Court and Social
Security System. This is not conclusive but it certainly signals bothhope and responsibility. Hope in that many people still trust the Church
as an important actor in social transformation. This also implies a great
responsibility to go beyond being part of the problem to being part ofthe solution.
Some Church groups have actually been involved in the punitive as
well as preventive aspects of anticorruption work. Bishop Dinualdo

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Gutierrez enumerated some of these initiatives during our participationin the symposium “The Fight against Corruption” convened by the
Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in the middle of 2006. The
National Secretariat for Social Action, for example, has grassroots levellifestyle check and Internal Revenue Allocation (IRA) Watch Campaign.
Along with the Presidential Anti-Graft Commission (PAGC), the Officeof the Ombudsman and civil society groups, NASSA signed amemorandum of understanding committing itself and the dioceses under
the social action network to the campaign for good governance. Many
devout Christians are in government and private agencies, trying to
introduce reforms form within their sectors.
A seriously felt need is to root this political and governmental work
onto a more solid spiritual foundation. The DILAAB movement,
developed from Cebu, is a great move to fill this need. Dilaab, whichliterally means ‘flame’ or ‘on fire’ in Visayan, is a moral-spiritual
renewal movement harnessing faith, igniting spaces of hope, andchanneling the energies of love for a transformed Filipino nation throughheroic Christian citizenship; Christ-centered leadership; and Christian(or God-centered) advocacy work.
Ehem! Movement starts from a cultural analysis of the endemic natureof corruption and offers a spirituality of integrity as it networks primarily
with government, church and school action and energy centers.
Fighting corruption and working for good governance is emerging now
as a top priority in our renewed social ministry of the Church. Thisissue, however, gains more urgency and sensitivity when we consider
Mindanao. Studies have shown that controlling corruption in postconflict countries usually looks like fighting another war. If these funds
do not land on the proper beneficiary communities, then we may haveto face another war. We know even now that corruption breeds violence.
When a court cannot give justice to a person’s cause, then he mighttake the law into his hands. When clan conflicts are settled using publicfunds as blood money, then we realize that preventing corruption is
actually working for peace and development.
What remains a gaping lacuna is the articulation of the political andeconomic reforms to the sphere of spirituality that looks at the basic
integrity and morality of every individual as a member of the politicaland economic systems. As the World Bank (2000) exhorts, there is aneed for a spiritual and ethical-based initiatives to complement thepolitical and economic reforms. Perhaps the turn to Eucharistic

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spirituality may prove enriching and enlivening, especially when we
start (and rightly so) with the reform of our own personal and communal
lives as Christians.
The National Congress of the Clergy is correct in focusing on the renewalof the clergy from the very beginning of formation of seminarians.
Perhaps a corresponding articulation of the Eucharistic spirituality ofintegrity should also be developed among the laity whose divine mission
is precisely to evangelize the secular sphere. Our discerned strategic
response is to build up women and men of integrity, equipped withappropriate expertise and solid spirituality in the moral use of power
and in the technical requirements of achieving good governance, bothin public and private sectors, but also in the Church institutions. All
this goes back to the call of the Synod of Bishops to live the spirit ofsharing one bread, and to make sure that others too have something toeat, have peace of mind, and freedom from manipulation and deceit, as
well enjoying good governance. Such is the Eucharistic vision of atransformed human community.
But then, again, the words of the Carpenter from Nazareth haunt us
who wish to induce a transformative encounter between religion andcorruption: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

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REFERENCES
Aha! A Citizen’s Primer on Whistleblowing. 2006. Davao City: Ehem!
Aha! Technical Working Group, Office of the Ombudsman and thePhilippine Province of the Society of Jesus.
Alejo, Albert E. 2004. “Popular spirituality as cultural energy.” Context
and expressions of Filipino spirituality. Lecture Series 3 on
Spirituality. Quezon City: Center for Spirituality-Manila.
Ehem! A Self-Check Manual for Combating Corruption. 3rd edition.
2006. Davao City: Philippine Province of the Society of Jesus.
History and Grace. National Congress of the Clergy. 5-9 July 2004.
World Trade Center, Metro Manila. 2004. Manila: UST Press.
Medroso, Bishop Leonardo Y. 2006. “Transparency in the Church”
Impact: Asian Magazine for Human Transformation. Vol 40: 1314, 22.
Nik Mohamed Affandi bin Nik Yusoff. 2002. Islam and Business. Ed.
Ismail Noor. Selangor, Malaysia: Pelanduk Publications (M) Sdn
Bhd.
Quiros, Conrado de. 2005. “First stone” Philippine Daily Inquirer. 8
February 2005.
Rasul, Amina. 2003. A look at corruption in the ARMM and the role offaith-based organizations in fighting corruption. In Muslim
perspective on the Mindanao conflict: The road to peace andreconciliation. Ed. Amina Rasul. Makati City: AIM Policy Center,
Asian Institute of Management.
Rufo, Aries. 2004. “The Untaxable Church.” Newsbreak. October 27,
2004.
Sen, Amartya. 2000. ‘Social choice and individual behavior.
Development as Freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Vitor, Romulo. 2006. “Priests must undergo ‘character change’ too.”
Philippines Daily Inquirer. 30 December 2006.
“Why believers do no shun corruption.” Jakarta Post. 8 September 2006

The Tokyo Tribunal 2000 and Beyond
Maria Hartiningsih
Here we will take action for the future, through global solidarity ofpeople not of state, with women playing central role alongside men.
(Yayori Matsui, 1934-2002)
Yayori Matsui’s statement above, which is memorialized in a museum,
namely the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace (WAM) in
Shinjuku, Tokyo, reminds us of the most historical event just prior to
the new millennium: the International Tribunal on War Crimes Against
Women regarding Japanese Sexual Slavery During World War II, in
Tokyo held from 8 to 12 December 2000.
The museum is very simple and modest. There is a library, a part ofwhich stores Yayori’s personal collection. Then there is a chair and atable where Yayori worked during her lifetime. Visitors are free to use
the chair, to find and read Yayori’s work on the Internet.
There is also a video booth and photographs of women victims, whobravely broke the conspiracy of silence on the war crimes against themby speaking out the truth to uphold justice. A recording of the Tribunal
is available for complete viewing there.
Yayori Matsui is a prominent figure in the Japanese organization,
Violence Against Women in War-Net (Japanese VAWW-Net) and amember of The International Organizing Committee of “the Tribunal”
in the year 2000. The verdict of the Tokyo Tribunal was presented at
the Hague in December 2001. I was present at both those very important
events, and months before, very intensively met the survivors fromIndonesia, to directly hear and witness their personal experiences andliving conditions.
WAM made my visit complete by going to the office of the Asia-Japan
Women’s Resource Center (AJWRC), which measured only
approximately five times five square meters, located in Shibuya, Tokyo.

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AJWRC was also founded by Yayori and is sort of a “struggle center”,
to repudiate injustice towards women.
The mission, which was the foundation for her entire struggle “Beyond
Borders, Action for an Alternative Future”, underlined cross-bordersolidarity, not only between women, but also amongst men, in order tostruggle hand in hand to achieve equality without violence on acontinuing basis. Hisako, whom we met at that office, explained thecenter’s activities after Yayori’s passing.
Cancer had sent Yayori to her final place of eternal rest in the earlyhours of 27 December 2002 at around 1 a.m. local time or 23.00 hours
West Indonesia time at the age of 68. Her demise has been a great loss
for women’s movements throughout Asia.
For the past ten years, Yayori had been a foremost Asian world activist,
who was outspoken in international forums on women in relation toracism, militarism, and globalization. She was also well known as apeace activist, campaigning for the struggle against human trafficking
as a result of militarization in Asia.
“She was an outstanding woman,” said Mohiuddin Ahmad, a poet,novelist and a peace activist from Bangladesh, who knew Yayori formore than 20 years. Mohi, as friends call him, confessed that it was
Yayori who introduced him to the perspective of eco feminism in theenvironmental movement. “Her spirit will continue to live with us,”continued Prof. Lee Seejae from the Catholic University of Seoul, South
Korea, who in the past also frequently met Yayori on several occasions.
In her office that afternoon, I felt her presence...
II
Yayori Matsui is a hero to all the victims whose voices were silenced
for almost half a century. She managed to attend the Final Judgment in
The Hague, the Netherlands on the 3rd and the 4th of December 2001,
where the Tribunal passed a guilty verdict to Emperor Hirohito andEmperor Showa, who between 1937 and 1945 were respectively thereigning Head of State and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forcesof the Japanese Empire. A number of high-ranking military officers
who led the war expedition to various regions of Asia were also
convicted for war crimes.

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The decision was made after the Tribune heard testimonies from 35
survivors out of 75 who attended the tribunal process in Tokyo. The
Tribune, which was thereafter known as the People’s Trials, was theanswer to the failure of the country in fulfilling its responsibility to
uphold justice for approximately 200.000 women in Asia who wereforced to become jugun-ianfu, or “comfort women” at “comfort
stations” for Japanese soldiers during World War II.
The term “comfort women” was used to legitimize criminal actions
during the war. Between 1994 and 1997, a number of high-ranking
government officials stated that comfort women were volunteers. The
statement was a systematic political effort to deny any existence of
deception, threat, coercion and kidnapping towards the victims.
In the People’s Trials in December 2000 in Tokyo, the Japanese
historians Akira Yamada and Yoshiaki Yoshimi convinced the Tribunal
that the Japanese military commando who had private access to theemperor developed the system of comfort stations properly andsystematically. This method was a response to the mass raping inNanjing in 1937.
The Japanese government had committed a violation towards its
responsibilities to the country by destroying various documents,
including documents related to the sexual slavery system during thewar.
The failure of the country to account for its criminal actions has alreadytaken place in the International Court for War Crimes for the Far Eastin Tokyo, during April of 1946 and November of 1948. The courts did
not raise the issue of cases of sex slavery by the Japanese military at all.
The entire process, which took place since 1997 until the Tokyo Tribunal
in 2000, according to the Head of the Prosecution Team from Indonesia,
Nursyahbani Katjasungkana, was a sophisticated method in compilingdata, organizing it into an international legal framework, enabling people
to take legal action in a much simpler manner, on a national as well as
an international scale.
In that process, the Indonesian team provided new information bypresenting proof of the Peace Treaty signed by the Government ofIndonesia and the Government of Japan in 1958. The treaty included
reconstruction due to physical damage during the war. However, thetreaty failed to mention anything regarding victims and survivors of
sexual slavery.

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That means that the Japanese Government did not acknowledge theoccurrence of sexual slavery conducted by its soldiers during the war.
“The Government of Indonesia who accepted the treaty as it was also
did not realize that sexual slavery was a serious violation during thewar,” exclaimed Nursyahbani.
Although it has been mentioned in the opening of the Charter, theTribunal has no power to enforce its decisions, but the process of thehearings were very seriously conducted, involving judges andprosecutors in the International War Tribune for Rwanda and former
Yugoslavia, together with expert witnesses and world renowned lawyers.
“This court has moral authority to acquire a great deal of support fromthe international community to execute the court’s verdict,” that was
the statement of Yayori Matsui, which I quoted from a report directlyfrom Tokyo. (Kompas, December 13, 2000).
Professor Fritz Kalshoven from the University of Leiden, The
Netherlands, who was an expert witness regarding the state’s
responsibility was in a way concurring to Yayori’s statement, whenanswering a question from Willy Mutunga, one of the judges, regarding
the significance of the Tribunal.
“This court has the same significance as any other international war
crime court,” stated Prof Kalshoven. All the decisions of the Tribunal,according to Prof Kalshoven, should have the support of the United
Nations, in view of the fact that some prominent UN officials were also
involved in this process.
“The Tribunal is proof of the power of civil society,” continues Prof
Kalshoven, “If countries do not react towards crimes which are carriedout systematically, the international community cannot do something
to overcome the silence.”
The Tribunal, as explained by Gay J McDougal, Special UN Envoy
and Director of the International Legal Group on Human Rights, Racism,and Sexual Violence in War, is also a positive step to end impunity on
sexual violence crimes and offer special attention towards injusticerelated to World War II.
In the meantime, the International Court on War Crimes for former
Yugoslavia and also Rwanda is an important step to disallow impunity
on war crimes and crimes against humanity related to sexual slavery
and violence in war and armed conflicts. That is why the court is staffedwith a team from law offices specifically for gender-based crimes,

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headed by Prosecuting Attorney Patricia Sellers – who in “the Tribunal”
was the lead prosecutor.
The primary motivation for conducting an International Court on War
Crimes for the former Yugoslavia is sexual violence against women in
Bosnia. More than half of the indictments were cases of violence basedon gender.
In a similar court for Rwanda, gradually the cases of sexual violence
became the main issue. The council of judges determined that rape andsexual violence conducted during the war in Rwanda was an act of
genocide, crime against humanity, and torture. It was also established,that the accused were not directly involved, they were responsible forgiving the order, intimidating, and compelling people to perform
inhumane acts.
In relation to the two international courts, the International Crime Court(ICC) is also a significant development in international human rights
laws and a campaign to end impunity. The main crimes, which the
Court focuses on, are genocide, crimes against humanity, and war
crimes.
The statutes of ICC explicitly include gender and crimes based on
gender. The statutes also acknowledges that various acts of sexual
violence including rape and sexual slavery, as crimes against humanity
and war crimes.
“The Japanese Government has confessed to the direct involvement of
the government and the military in establishing and operating the‘comfort women’ system,” said McDougal in a meeting in Manila in
April, one year before the Tokyo Tribunal.
Some documents, which were not destroyed, became solid proof, which
could not be refuted. Among these was an Operations Journal of the
Empire’s War Department, which stated that there was a spreading ofvenereal disease around Bandung, West Java, Indonesia; hence “comfort
stations” had to be built, under the strict supervision of the military.
Also, 32.1 million condoms were supplied during 1942 in China toapproximately 400 “comfort stations” built in that area. From certain
documents, it was also found that “comfort stations” were a direct
response to the mass rape in Nanjing carried out by Japanese soldiersin 1937.
Living proof came forward and testified in court, which I managed tonote, like Kaneko (80), Joshio Suzuki (80), who confessed taking part

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in raping native women in the North China region in 1942. “I felt tortured
for the rest of my life as a result of my actions,” they said.
The Japanese Government also acknowledged that many women wererecruited using force, by way of deception and threats – the number ofwomen was around 50,000 to 200,000 in the Asian countries thenoccupied by Japan. However, they did not acknowledge that the“comfort women” system was a military sexual slavery and a violationof international human rights, humanity laws, and crime.
The Japanese Government refused to take legal responsibility, because
it was of the opinion that the “comfort women” system was not slavery;
even if it was, slavery was not prohibited at that time. The Japanese
Government also stated that the problem of “comfort women” had been
resolved through peace treaties and post-war reparation.
“The Japanese Government has actually refused this issue until 1992
and stated that no claim is relevant since it occurred over 50 years ago,
” continued McDougal.
Time cannot expunge the truth. However, 50 years of denial have mademany members of society and the Japanese politicians to maintainpersistence, that “comfort stations” are places of prostitution; that
“comfort women” are those who voluntarily become prostitutes; thatthe “comfort women” system is a private affair, not operated by thegovernment and the military.
The same matter, ironically, was also persistently consented by theIndonesian community, and strengthened by the Indonesian
Government’s attitude, and as a result, the survivors experienced
humiliation and exclusion.
“I was only 13 years old when I was deceived and forced to enter therape center in Banjarmasin. I haven’t experienced my period yet. Did it
make sense that I volunteered to become a prostitute?” exclaimed
Mardiyem, survivor from Indonesia, in a press conference, answeringsuch questions.
The Japanese Government exercised all effort to erase all references
related to “comfort women” from schoolbooks. “History must be rewritten. The people must be educated,” said McDougal.

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III
But it is not easy to change a perspective, especially when it politicized.
The image of mainstream politics in Japan regarding this matter is clearlyvisible at the Yasukuni Shrine – constructed to commemorate the 2.5
million soldiers who died on the frontlines, including 41 women who“gave their lives for Emperor and country”. They died while performing
their tasks, in supporting the duties of the military.
They, as told by Prof. Tetsuya Takahashi from the University of Tokyo,
received special honors with the publishing of the book, Women of
Yasukuni (1941) by The Society to Honor the Women of Yasukuni. In
the War Museum on the Yasukuni Complex, there is no mention
whatsoever regarding “comfort women” or the countless acts of cruelty
carried out by the Japanese soldiers, only for victory and the greatnessof their Emperor.
Although it is accepted as a great historical event, which closed the lastcentury and was an opening for this century, the Tokyo Tribunal still
continues to attract controversy. Prof. Kiichi Fujiwara from the
University of Tokyo said that the Tribune is not too convincing and isacademically weak.
On the other hand, Prof. Takahashi views the Tokyo Tribunal in 2000
equivalent to the Russell Tribunal in 1967, which was created throughthe initiative of Bertrand Russell, conducted in Denmark and Sweden,
headed by the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. The Russell Tribunal
was a court of morals, to judge the aggressions and war crimes by theUnited States during the war in Vietnam.
The Tokyo Tribunal of 2000 still has a pending problem, regarding the
NHK case, a public television broadcasting station, which conducted asensor to the ETV 2001 series, Senso o Do Sabaku ka (How Should We
Adjudicate Wars). The topic discussed in this documentary was theTokyo Tribunal of 2000.
According to various sources, on 27 January 2001, or three days before
broadcasting, NHK was “visited” by 30 ultra-nationalists, arriving in a
convoy of trucks, wearing Para military uniform, demanding not tobroadcast the program, which was considered “not patriotic”.
Other sources state that NHK was “visited” by two right-winged
politicians, who conducted a sensor on the program, which was readyfor broadcast, and added to it some interviews, which were in theirpolitical interest.

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This controversy affected old problems that have not been solved,
regarding historical accountability: problems that involve Japan’s
relationship with neighboring countries in East Asia.
In the last controversy, the question is not about the contents of the
documentary, but regarding the events occurring a few days before
broadcasting: the event that was cloaked in mystery, full of claims andcounter claims. In reality, certain facts are no longer debatable.
IV
The issue of “comfort women” is not only an issue prevailing outsideof Japan. The visit to Okinawa made history that was vague, becomebright as day, when we met Suzuyo Takazato, a prominent woman figure
in Okinawa who is head of an international network, campaigning forthe repudiation of a military base on Okinawa.
I met Takazato on several occasions before. Among them was at theTokyo Tribunal in 2000, in Beijing during the Fourth World Conferenceon Women and Development in 1995. This is a woman who, for morethan half of her life, has been continuously struggling against a militarybase and violence against women.
We (Albert Alejo, a Jesuit priest, an anthropologist, a professor at the
University Ateneo de Davao, Manila, and a peace activist, and myself)
were fortunate because we were given the opportunity to meet privately
Takazato on Sunday (15/10/06), after formal meetings in our scheduleduring our stay in Okinawa.
“We do not know the meaning of peace,” said the founder of Okinawa
Women Act Against Military Violence in 1995. A 66 year old woman,a mother of two, and a grandmother of one child stated that ‘war’,particularly towards women on Okinawa is ongoing, when foreign troops
were placed in a situation categorized as “peaceful”, a situation when
there is no actual armed conflict being waged in the area.
V
Okinawa was a basis for Japan’s defense against the US and GreatBritain. During World War II, Okinawa was a “hell battlefield”. The
big battle commenced on April 1, 1945, after US battleships stormed
the island with 600,000 grenades and 1,760,000 grenades from land.

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The “storm of steel” continued for 82 days on the main island, which
had a length of 130 kilometers. The Japanese army deployed 2,400
Kamikaze pilots from Kyushu and Taiwan and hundreds of suicide ships
from the beaches of Okinawa. Around 200,000 died including 72,900
Japanese soldiers (not including natives of Okinawa recruited assoldiers).
Okinawa, which was once an independent region under the kingdom of
Ryukyu, experienced a long and complicated history before being
annexed by Japan in 1879. China did not acknowledge this and asked
that Ryukyu be divided into three.
The talks between China and Japan, which was facilitated by the US,
failed. In 1880, China, which was continuously having problems at
home, surrendered and signed a treaty with Japan. Japan, which won
the Sino-Japan war, then took control of the entire region of Ryukyu.
The Kingdom of Ryukyu has had relations with the US prior to that.
When Japan opened its doors – forced by Commodore Matthew C.
Perry in 1854, Ryukyu signed an agreement with the US, and after thatwith France. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, Okinawa came under
the control of the US and returned to Japan in 1972. “Before 1972, weused the US Dollar as our currency,” said our guide Inafuku Tsutomo
from the Peace and Anti War Network.
But the US military base was maintained. Okinawa, the size of whichis less than one percent of the entire area of Japan, with a population of
1.36 million, must forgo 10 percent of its area, and 19 percent of its
largest island for use by the US military base. Around 75 percent of its
entire area is exclusively used for US military facilities. The peace
activists are certain that the military facilities include guided missiles,
and even nuclear weapons. US military personnel stationed in the area
up to 2003 totaled 50,826.
As pointed out by Political/Military Official of the US Consulate Generalin Naha, Carmella A. Conroy, the purpose of the US military base in
Okinawa is to protect Japan from outside aggression. “If the Japanese
government wants us to leave, then we will leave. This is a matter ofalliance, which is mutually beneficial,” he said casually, answering aquestion asked by Mohiuddin Ahmad.
Carmella seems to be indifferent regarding the facts, which for decades
has been a significant problem on the lives of the people of Okinawa,
especially women.

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The sex industry in Okinawa does not thrive like other areas where US
military bases are also located, and as Takazato said, prostitution wasprohibited in 1972. But rape and rape threats by US soldiers stationed
there continues to trouble women and younger girls in Okinawa. She
told us of a tragic event in 1995, when a 12 year old girl was raped bythree US soldiers.
That is a “sign”, which, according to Prof. Katsunori Yamazato fromthe University of Ryukyu, was sent from that area to the Northern area,and made people there feel uneasy. While on the other hand, the event
reminded people of “Yaponesia”, which had decentralist connotation,
introduced by novelist Toshio Shimao in 1970.
“I think, it is presently difficult for many Japanese to not care for the
Ryukyu people, at a time when they are trying to understand the newimage about Japan or when they try to explain the meaning of becoming
a Japanese,” says Yamazato, regarding the identity and nationalism of
the people of Okinawa who are caught between the interest of the US
and the interest of Japan, with no significant voice from the people
itself.
This is the problem that still surrounds many people of Okinawa, leaving
them helpless in a feeling between “assimilation” and “dissimilation”,
as explained clearly by Oshiro Tatsuhiro, the novelist who won the
Akutagawa Award in 1967 with his novel, “The Cocktail Party”.
The tragedy of 1995 also left the people of Okinawa wondering, whatis the significance of being an Okinawan after the Cold War. Meanwhile,
in “The Cocktail Party”, Oshiro has written not only about the American
soldier who raped a little girl on Okinawa, but also wrote about a Chineseexpert on law, Mr. Sun, whose wife was raped by Japanese soldiers in
China.
The Okinawa protagonist in that story (the father of the little girl who
was raped) not only found himself marginalized amongst the Americans(when he was searching for justice), he also found a character who was
marginalized in Mr. Sun, whose character was to release the protagonist
from a narrow sense of identity. By looking at himself through Mr.
Sun, he found his personal identity on a much broader scope, in an
Asian context. He was also able to liberate himself from the feeling of
victimization and narrow sense of nationalism.
In a meeting with participants of the 2006 ALFP at the University of
Ryukyu, Oshiro said, “If Japan’s mistakes in China can be pardoned,

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what happened in Okinawa should also be forgiven. I started thinking,war cannot be absolved, and the truth is traumatic,” he stated, whilereminding, in war, violence is executed by both sides, for whateverreason.
“Not forgiven, not forgotten,” that was Oshiro’s statement on absoluteethics. Violence carried out by both sides cannot be forgotten, cannot
be forgiven. That is why he elaborated on the psychological situationof both sides, in order to find freedom.
VI
But absolute ethics is not something simple. The war is still going on,
for whatever reason. Okinawa, which is the southern most prefectureof Japan is situated midway between Tokyo and Manila and has beencalled the “keystone of the Pacific” by military planners because of its
strategic location. In 1991, the US military base there played a vitalrole in deploying troops to the Gulf War. This was also the case inefforts to intensively assault Iraq in 2004. Even Japan sent their fleet
also to the Gulf.
Before becoming a US military base, the history of violence against
women in Okinawa, which was strongly related to militarism, is very
long, in line with the region’s history as a military base.
Takazato believed that between the years 1943 and 1945, women from
Korea were brought to Okinawa by the Japanese Imperial Army andthen spread out to all the islands and were forced to sexually serve theJapanese soldiers who fought to defend the Japanese mainland. At thattime, there were 130 brothels in Okinawa. Many women of Okinawa
were also forced to become “comfort women” to serve the Japanesesoldiers.
One part of Okinawa that was returned to the US military in Septemberof 1950 was immediately turned into an area of prostitution. This wasdone in order to avoid raping by US soldiers, which occurred
continuously in the housing district and to prevent the spreading of
sexually transmitted diseases.
During the Vietnam War during 1965-1973, Okinawa became an R&R
area. Brothels strived. Women in that area were completely deprived of
their rights as human beings. They were under strict supervision,
strangled in debt, and were vulnerable to brutality by the soldiers, atJourney through Japan299

the same time vulnerable to infectious diseases. Cases of rape continued
to occur in those places.
Between 1972 and 1995, places of prostitution decreased and the numberof sexual abuse towards school children increased. At that time, Filipino
women started to enter the region, using a short-term work visa, as“entertainers” with all their vulnerability, physically, psychologically,and sexually. At that time, many cases occurred related to childbirth,the fathers of who were US soldiers.
Rape and rape threats continued to occur until this day. “Even if thecase goes to court, the most that can happen is a concession. Most of
the cases are covered up or considered closed,” said Takazato. She said
it is uncommon that a rape case is settled in a fair manner. The Japanese
government was also not firm regarding these problems. Meanwhile, asoldier who is sent back to the US because of a rape case developed a
website, supporting rapists.
Takazato also has to face various groups of people – including peace
activists – who consider rape cases “small problems” compared to the“big issues” surrounding the Japanese – US Defense Treaty.
Nevertheless, Takazato confirms that the “big problem” is but half ofthe entire problem, when not viewed from a woman’s perspective, andthe problems of violence against women and children are not taken
into consideration. The most important thing for Takazato is to put theissue in a long-term perspective. There you have it.
The Tokyo Tribunal has opened new possibilities to repudiate impunity
for those committing sexual violence by soldiers during the war. But inOkinawa, the “war” has not really ended. Behind its capes, which offer
paradise-like panorama, courteous people, friendly weather, I felt asilent restlessness…
(I dedicate this story to all my dear friends, fellow participants of ALFP
2006. Note: Some material on the Tokyo Tribunal were taken from myjournalistic works, published in Kompas.)

Discovery of Japan
Mohiuddin Ahmad
Hindi films are usually filled up with many songs and some are very
melodious. It was probably a day in the early 1960s. I was a kid and I
heard a Hindi film song. The first line was:
Mera juta hai Japanee(My shoes are made of Japan)
It says about a person wearing different nice things from footwear toheadgear, but he is still Indian by heart (fir bhi dil hai Hindustani).
Instantly I concluded that Japanese shoe might be the best. Still I don’tknow whether I was right or wrong. But that was the first time I heard
about something of Japan, and maybe about Japan.
In the school we were taught geography. We were introduced to many
countries, cities, oceans, mountains, volcanoes and rivers. I knew that
Amazon is a big river, Pacific is the largest of the oceans, Mount Everestis the highest peak in the Himalayas, Sahara is the largest desert, and soon.
I also learned some stories about Japan. It is called the land of firstsunrise. It has many volcanoes. Fujiama or Mount Fuji is a big volcano,though it is dead. Because of frequent volcanic eruptions and consequent
earthquakes, people live in cottages made of paper, and so forth.
In the school, when I started using fountain pens, I was not happy withany of those. They were very rough, not so colorful and ink used toleak and spread over my palm and often spoiled my shirt. Then camethe Japanese ‘Pilot’ pen in the market with a golden cap. I bought one
with nine taka (slightly over two dollars), spending almost two months’
scholarship money. My status got elevated. Soon a couple of Chinese
brands swept the market with similar quality but much cheaper, eachpen selling at six taka.

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In our school, we had anniversary celebration each year on third
September. We used to commemorate the day with a cultural evening.
The program started with prize giving for best academic performance.
In each grade, the school authority used to reward the three highest
scoring students with books as prize. When I was promoted from grade
five to grade six, I stood second. In the following anniversary occasion,
I was rewarded with three books. One of these was titled Japan ghureyelam (I traveled to Japan). The author was Mohammad Modabber. He
was the chief of a juvenile organization called Mukuler Mahfil (assemblyof the buds). Bagban was his pen name. It means ‘gardener’. He visited
Japan for some months under a fellowship program and this was his
travelogue.
At this time, I was fond of some writers, but not this gentleman. Even I
had never heard of him before. I was a member of another juvenileorganization, named Kochi Kanchar Ashor, bearing the same meaning
as that of the other one. Some newspaper houses patronized theseorganizations. For example, Mukuler Mahfil belonged to a vernaculardaily Azad, while Kochi Kanchar Ashor was with another daily Ittefaq.
As I started reading the book Japan ghurey elam, it fascinated me. It
gradually unfolded to me a totally different world. Bagban had collected
all the flora for me from the garden of Japan. I became familiar to a bitof the Japanese society, people, culture, family life, children, food, dress,
rituals and so on. I also picked up few words that enriched my
vocabulary, such as sayonara and mushi mushi. I learned about thetraditional dress kimono. Since then, I had been traveling to Japan in
my dream. The dream came true after more than four decades. I arrived
Tokyo on 14 September 2006 to take part in the Asia Leadership Fellow
Program (ALFP).
The early birds
I met few Japanese before coming to Japan. The first one whom I met
in 1969 was my Judoka instructor at the Japanese Consulate in Dhaka.
I forgot his name. But I still remember his strong and stout physicaloutlook. We, a batch of about 20, used to visit the Consulate on Saturdays
and Sundays in the afternoon for about a couple of hours to take Judolessons. This continued for about six months. These lessons helped melater to some extent during our war of liberation in 1971.
The second Japanese I came to know was Prof. Nakamura Hisashi. In
August 1983, I got a letter of invitation from Lawrence Surendra, theJourney through Japan303

coordinator of ARENA. It took more than a month to set my trip inmotion, as we had to depend on postal mails and telex messages forcorrespondence. It was my first trip outside the country except for 15
weeks in 1971 when I was in India, first as a refugee and then as a cadet
in a military training camp in Assam. (Though I was a freedom fighter,we were termed as separatists and insurgents by the enemy.)
The flight from Dhaka to Bangkok was delayed by six hours and when
I reached WMCA Bangkok at around seven in the evening, I was totally
exhausted. Next morning we took a bus and finally reached Hua Hin,checked in the Railway Hotel right on the beach and soon started ourbusiness.
Among the participants, perhaps I was the youngest and Prof. Nakamura
from Japan was the senior most. Incidentally or accidentally we were
put in the same room at the hotel. In the evening he told me in his usual
gentle and soft voice, “Look, I go to bed early and I am an early riser
too.” I said, “No problem.” Later I found a new meaning to his “early”.
He used to go to the bed at around eight in the evening and get up at
two o’ clock midnight. What did he do at that point in time when thewhole world was asleep? He switched on his bedside lamp and started
writing. He was very careful, so that the light won’t disturb me. He
continued this routine for the whole week and I never felt disturbed.
One day, the council meeting was over. But my relationship with
Nakamura-san continued. We met several times after that. He lost his
voice because of throat cancer. But still he is active, energetic andvibrant.
The third Japanese I could socialize with was Masaaki Ohashi. He is
almost of my age. I don’t remember when we met first, probably at the
Bangkok house of Sabur, Coordinator of ACFOD, at sometime in 1991.
Before that we knew each other by name but never had a chance tomeet. Ohashi was in Dhaka with Shapla Neer (citizen’s committee inJapan for overseas support), the lone Japanese NGO with activities in
Bangladesh since the early seventies. Ohashi worked as its CEO for
two years. He speaks good Bangla. First I used to speak English withhim and he always responded in Bangla. I understood his Logic. English
is none of our language. Either we should use Bangla or Japanese forcommunication.
Ohashi visits Bangladesh twice or thrice a year. Each time he informs
me about his schedule. Sometimes we manage to meet, sometimes not.

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On most occasions, he brings something for me, some traditional dry
food, a small souvenir, a packet of rice wine or a bottle of whisky. He
is one of the very few Japanese who has a world outlook and genuine
love for the common rural people of Bangladesh. He often complains
about the attitude of the Japanese government that gives an impressionof a ‘donor’ and not a ‘friend’.
Some years back Ohashi told me that a Japanese publisher would bringout an anthology on Bangladesh. It would be a book on Bangladesh insixty chapters, each chapter centering round an issue or a field. Different
Japanese authors would be writing different chapters. He requested mewhether I would contribute a chapter on ‘environment’. I agreed anddelivered. Ohashi got it translated in Japanese. After few months, thebook was published. During the next visit, Ohashi brought a copy ofthe book and also some royalty, fifty US dollar. I found that I was oneof the two non-Japanese writers, the other being rather a half-Japaneseliving happily in Tokyo for twelve years with a Japanese wife. Within ayear, he brought a copy of its second edition and some royalty. I told
him to keep he money for Shapla Neer; that would be my humble
contribution to their philanthropic work. Later a third edition was also
published.
The Ainu
Only after arriving Japan and spending few days in Tokyo, I realizedthat Hokkaido was Japanized several centuries ago and there lived an
ethnic community named Ainu. Now there are not many Ainu peoplein Hokkaido and many of them are living in Tokyo.
From the very beginning I was keen to visit Hokkaido to meet and talkto Ainu people. In Bangladesh, we have over thirty minority ethnic
communities about whom not many people of the ‘mainstream’
Bangalees know. Travel to Hokkaido is not easy. It’s far away and oneneeds to be there for at least one week to understand little bit of thepeople and the area. We had two weeks recess to prepare our paper andI didn’t find anyone so serious to join me. Traveling alone would bevery boring. I didn’t knew that our Korean Fellow Lee Seejae alreadymade a plan to visit Hokkaido and my son also prepared a travel plan tovisit Tokyo for about ten days during that recess period. So I had toforgo the plan of my Hokkaido trip. Our Japanese Fellow, Yoji, waskind enough to take some of us to visit the Ainu Cultural Center inTokyo where we could talk to two Ainu girls, see some of their craft
products and watch a video on Ainu culture and people.

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While reading some booklets published by the center, I came to knowthat Ainu is a precious word that means ‘human’ in Ainu language. It isalso the name of their ethnic group, and an honorific title for Ainu men
meaning a ‘manly man’ or a ‘husband’. As this term was sometimes
used to insult them, the Ainu began to use the word utari, which means‘compatriot in their language. According to some reference, they lived
in Hokkaido Island for about ten thousand years while some claim thatit could be five thousand or maybe only seven hundred years. At present,
their number in Hokkaido is about twenty-four thousands.
The Ainu people had their own language. But many of them areforgetting it because of lack of use. While talking to the two girls at theCenter, we were curiously asking them some common words in Ainu.
We found that one of them is still comfortable with the language andthe other has virtually no knowledge of it. I learned some Ainu words
from them, like kani anakne aynu ku ne (I am an Ainu), e iwanke ya(how are you), ku iwanke wa (I am fine), yayraykere (thank you), etc.
While answering a question, they mentioned that though Ainu people
feel discriminated in Hokkaido, they don’t feel like that in Tokyo. The
Government of Japan enacted a new law in May 1997 that came into
force in July in the same year, which acknowledged the Ainu as an
ethnic group.
The third world
On 24 September 2006, the Japan Times published a review (by DavidCozy) of Yoshihori Tatsumi’s book Abandon the Old in Tokyo that gavea vivid description of the plight of the Japanese ageing generation. Itsays that an old man is reduced by the debt that has ruined him to
performing like a dog (“Why don’t you spin around three times andbark?”). He later finds relief performing with a dog. A younger man
consumes an eel that, until captured, had swum free in the city’s sewers.
A woman, face and breasts destroyed by botched cosmetic surgery,gets revenge on the men she had hoped to please with her alteredfeatures. A man who works among the consumer goods that urban
Japanese have discarded hears a co-worker say, “People get rid ofanything old,” before going home to his aged and incontinent mother.
A pet monkey is murdered when thrown together with his fellow
primates at the zoo.
“Economic development was considered more important than the way
people actually lived their lives,” Tatsumi remembers of that time, andthis goes a long way toward explaining his view of the world.

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According to a data of 2005, 21 percent of the Japanese population is
65 years and above. There are 4.49 million households with ageing
population and 3.86 million of them live alone. On the other hand,
population is falling. In Japan, population below 15 years is less than
14 percent, while this proportion is as high as 39 percent in Bangladesh.
One afternoon, some of us made a trip together to the Meiji Shrine.
After that everybody left except Yoji, Janet and I. We wanted to visit
some homeless people. So we went to the adjoining Yoyogi Park. We
saw some makeshift tents made of polythene sheets occupied by thehomeless. They are old people. Each of them has their own ‘household
demarcation’ with a rope around the tent. They use the nearby public
toilet. They are called the ‘homeless’. Yoji told that there were many
more in some other parts of Tokyo including Shinjuku.
Then Yoji guided us to a special tent where we met a young couple.
They were in their thirties, very handsome and lively. They quickly
fixed a table; some chairs and we started our conversation.
The man is Tetsuo Ogawa, a painter. The woman’s name is Misako
Ichimura. She is a poet. While we were talking, Tetsuo was making asketch of us swiftly with a pencil. Misako prepared fruit-flavored tea.
The conversation went on.
There are quite many homeless in Japan. Most of them are old people,
who do not have a fixed address and are not entitled to government
benefits. Their children whom they raised with their blood and sweat
have abandoned them. There is a mystic poem in Bangla that says:
Dara putro poribar
Tumi kar ke tomar(Spouse, son and the family
Whom do you belong and who belongs to you?)
But what does this young couple do here? The man is living there forlast three years. She joined him after six months. They run a cafe forthe homeless. The couple is homeless by choice. They are from Japanese
middleclass background but want desperately to taste a different life,
far away from that of a careerist. They also practice a very innovativemode of exchange. They don’t take any currency for the goods theysell. But they accept anything else, a toy or some snacks or a painting
or a book and so forth. They mentioned that it’s their protest against
consumerism.

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Misako told us that her first book of poem would be published in thefollowing week. There would be a launching ceremony and the media
would cover it. She was worried whether her mother would locate her
and would drag her back home.
Yoyogi Park reminds me of the fact that there is a first world in thethird world and there is indeed a third world in the first world. A country
is not rich or poor. There are rich people everywhere, so also there arepoor people.
While returning back we heard a familiar sound of music and found ayoung Japanese with Bangalee outfit playing sitar. He was alone. We
sat in front of him without making any noise. He played sitar for anotherhalf an hour. Then we started conversation. The man stayed in India forsix years to learn sitar. Each year he visits India and stays there forseveral months. He would be going to Kolkata again on the following
week.
Chandra Bose
When I was a student, I read a book on Subhas Chandra Bose, the great
Indian Nationalist leader from Bengal. The title of the book was In
Search of the Mystery of Netaji. (Chandra Bose was popularly called
Netaji, meaning the honorable leader). There I read that he died in aplane crash in Taiwan and ashes of his body had been kept in a casket at
the Renkoji Temple in Tokyo. While staying at the I-House, once I
informed Yoji of my intention to visit the temple and he agreed to guideme there.
By the time we reached the temple at around seven in the evening, it
was closed. We almost decided to return. Suddenly an Indian Embassy
car arrived and two gentlemen got down. A monk of the temple received
them. We realized that they were members of Indian Parliament andthey had a prior appointment to visit the temple. One of them was a
Bangalee representing a constituency of the Island of Andaman.
Andaman was infamous for deportation of political prisoners by the
British colonial government. Most of the prisoners were Bangalees.
Later, many of them married natives and settled there. As the MPs
entered the temple, we followed them.
Whenever Indian VVIPs visit Tokyo, usually they pay a visit to thistemple to pay respect to Chandra Bose. I saw photographs of someformer heads of the state and the government of India along with theirmessages kept on a cupboard. They include President Rajendraprasad

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and Prime Ministers Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Vajpayee. Incidentallyall except Nehru mentioned about Chandra Bose with much respect. In
the message of Nehru, there was no mention of Chandra Bose. On 15
October 1957, he wrote, “May the Buddha’s message bring peace tomankind.” Nehru and Chandra Bose were political rivals and Nehru
was highly patronized by Gandhi, the father figure in the Indian National
Congress, while Chandra Bose was a rebel and defied Gandhi on various
occasions. He wanted to free India through armed resistance movement,
while Gandhi was preaching non-violence. In the council meeting of
the Congress in 1929, Chandra Bose defeated the candidate nominatedby Gandhi to become the President of the Congress for a consecutive
second term. This outraged Gandhi and he went to self-exile in his
village home. Frustrated by the role of the ‘big brothers’ of Congress
led by Gandhi, in one fine morning Chandra Bose disappeared from his
house in Kolkata and ultimately arrived Tokyo.
Ras Bihari Bose, another senior leader of Congress who was in exile inTokyo for some years, introduced him to the Japanese imperial
government. Chandra Bose negotiated with the Japanese government,
freed all Indian prisoners of war fighting for the British army and withthem raised his famous Indian National Army (INA). A section of theCongress leadership and the Communist Party of India termed Chandra
Bose a traitor and an agent of the fascists, while; many Indians and the
majority in Bengal admire him as a hero till today. Recently, the‘Marxist’ government of West Bengal changed their position on Chandra
Bose and renamed Kolkata Airport as Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose
International Airport.
Chandra Bose is one of the enduring mysteries of India’s freedom
struggle, but a long awaited report on the fate of this charismatic leader
has failed to solve the riddle of his disappearance more than 60 years
ago. After a six-year investigation, a report published last year said
Bose was dead but was not killed in a plane crash as widely believed.
But the report said it could not say how he died, and the government,
which backed the plane crash theory, contradicted its conclusions. The
investigation also said that the ashes in a temple in Japan were not thatof Bose — again rejected by the government.
Earlier, official reports said Bose died in a Japanese air crash in Taiwan
in August 1945 at the age of 48 and his cremated remains were sent toJapan. But Taiwanese authorities denied this, saying there was no recordof an air crash at the time, boosting the claim of those who believe
Bose faked the crash to escape secretly to the former Soviet Union.

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309

The debate raged for decades until New Delhi set up a panel headed byformer Supreme Court judge M.K. Mukherjee in 1999 to investigate
his mysterious disappearance and report his whereabouts if he was still
alive. The panel submitted its report to the government in November
2006 and it was tabled in parliament along with the government’s
response.
Bose remains an iconic figure in the eastern state of West Bengal, hishome state, and his role in India’s freedom movement is taught in schools
across the country where his statues have been erected.
Those who believe Bose was not killed in the air crash say he returned
to India from the Soviet Union after World War Two and lived in his
homeland in the guise of a Hindu monk and died eventually in 1985.
But no one has been able to explain why he kept his identity a secret if
he did return to India. According to another ‘report’, Stalin sent him toa concentration camp in Siberia and later he died there.
According to one source, when the Japanese authorities made a generalrequest to all to asking someone to volunteer to keep his ashes, allrefused except the authority of the Renkoji Temple.
Before leaving the temple, I wrote a few words on a visitors’ book. I
Wrote, “I pay homage to this great nationalist leader who inspired me
to fight against the Pakistani occupation army in 1971 for the liberationof Bangladesh.” I wrote the message both in Bangla and English.
However, after visiting some war museums in Okinawa, Nagasaki andTokyo, I started rethinking about Chandra Bose. I have been wondering
whether his famous theory “enemy’s enemy is friend” is at all palatable.
Tokyo Shure
As we started knowing Japan, we have been informed that Japanese
education system is of high quality, as well as coercive. Many students
cannot really cope with this. It’s too hard, too professional and toocompetitive. There are dropouts and even cases of suicide. One major
reason behind suicide is unbearable bulling. I saw one report in theJapan Times that five kids wrote letters to the Minister of Education
threatening to commit suicide. One letter was postmarked Machida andanother Seijo, both in Tokyo, and a third was mailed from AmagasakiKita in Hyogo Prefecture. The ministry officials mentioned the young
people said such things as “I’ve been bullied” and “I’m going to killmyself.” So there emerged a need for alternative schools to look after
those ‘school refusals’.

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The term ‘alternative’ often becomes a buzzword for many of us. Someof us wanted to visit one such ‘alternative’ institution. We asked Yoji toarrange it and he happily did it. So we visited Shure University one
day, talked to one teacher, Mr. Kageki Asakura, also talked to one student
named Takeshi Nagai, and then left.
Shure University of Tokyo is one such institution that was founded in
April 1999 to address the educational need of those special students
who have talents but are misfit under conventional systems. It haspresently forty students from Tokyo, Hokkaido and Kyushu area, ages
ranging from 18 to 20s. The institution is financed from tuition fees ofthe students. It cannot afford many teachers. It has six fulltime teachers
and it also pulls many volunteer teachers.
Students, in consultation with their teachers, choose their own subjectof study, class timing, vacation, and so forth. They say,We all have something we want to do or something we want to know
about. On the other hand, we sometimes find it difficult to keep having
our interests and wills. Now and then, we have to repress our feelings
or deny our possibilities for some reason. And it is not a very goodthing to lose those feelings or interests. We think we want to pursue
something that interests us or something we want to know more
about in a way that fits us. We want to make a study place byourselves. This is why we founded Shure University. We learned theprinciple of this university through interactions with children andyoung adults who don’t go to conventional schools. We have learned
the joy of creating something on our own and the importance of
doing it in our own way.
I was not so happy with this short visit, as I wanted to interact with thestudents spending more time with them. So I requested Yoji to informthem that I would volunteer to take one class. If they agree, then I
would feel obliged and happy. After few days Yoji informed me that
the Shure University happily accepted my offer and they would likeme to give a talk on ‘Poetry’. In one afternoon, I, together with Maria,
went to the University. Maria had a similar feeling like me and when I
informed her of my wish, she happily joined me. She remembered thelocation and with her help we found the place.
Mr. Asakura and about ten students were waiting for us. The stage wasset ready for the talk on poetry. And I started unfolding myself. But it
was just not a lecture. I didn’t prepare anything. It was purely anJourney through Japan311

extempore talk. Mr. Asakura and other students participated in thediscussion. Maria also participated, but she was also taking photographs.
Takeshi recited the following poem titled The Night, which he composed
Shure teacher Mr. Asakura translated it the. He literally enthralled us.
How can I deal with this night?
At the frozen night.
I feel no one can reach me tonight.
How can I deal with this night?
I can’t help loving people.
I look for smiles in people and myself,
Even though I hardly find it.
I have frozen something in myself.
I want to meet that,
Then I pour alcohol into my throat
And call someone again
I stare at my hands.
These are tiny.
My eyes can see various things.
I put too many things on my hands.
If that heaviness smashes my hand and bone,
Can I be myself?
The poison and my blood flow out
From my smashed hands.
How can I deal with this night?
How can I deal with this night?
Before this pain kills me.
Before I kill myself.
These hands are not myself.
These eyes are not myself.
Even though I have to cut or smash these,
I am eager to be myself.
I am gazing at the flame of the candle.
The flame blinks.
My heart shakes.
My brain is being soaked in the alcohol.
Soon, I fall asleep.
I probably forget this pain next morning
Again, I’ll kill myself.
I’ll kill someone.

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Now, I want to tell you.
I want to tell myself(Translated by Kageki Asakura)
After that, I also recited part of my poem From Jamuna to Nile. Mr.
Asakura translated it for the students. Then I left one copy of the bookfor their library.
We found that the students are not only unique in terms of temperament,
they have talent and interest in creative art and literature. Three of themwrite poem, two are painters, one loves to write play and so forth. One
girl, who was a painter, was so naive in describing her experience andlessons learnt, suddenly her eyes became full with tears. Her name was
Nanako Sakamoto. She was crying without making any sound. She
was perhaps expressing her suppressed deep emotion and anger, as well
as joy, finding a favorable environment.
Social distance
Lee Seejae was our Fellow from Korea. He was also our ‘official’interpreter for his knowledge of Japan and Japanese language. He wasalso our ‘official’ photographer, as he had two good cameras and loved
to take photographs that could make stories of their own. He madealmost all of us his ‘model’. One of his famous photographs was that ofMaria and I taken from behind while we were walking. Seejae smelled
a sense of intimacy between us while maintaining some distance ofabout half a meter while walking and talking. He captioned the photoas ‘social distance’.
Seejae had been too helpful to all of us. Once he suggested tol sop
bibim pap (a Korean rice and vegetable dish served in a stone pot) forme and I enjoyed it very much. I promised him that if I ever write abiography, I would write at least one paragraph about him. On anotheroccasion, I pledged to him, “I owe you a poem.” So I thought that I
should write a poem and dedicate it to him.
In May 2006, I was in Kampala to attend a civil society meeting of the
LDCs. Suddenly a theme erupted in my mind and I decided to write
something in the form of some questions. While returning to the Entebbe
Airport from the city, I was trying to play with some words that
ultimately boiled down to a poem. But it was incomplete. It holds only
man’s view and might be perceived biased against women. I wanted tomake it fairer. Then I put my pen, hand and heart together in Room 326

Journey through Japan313

of I-House where I was staying and captured a different version. On thefollowing day, I circulated the poem to all and mentioned that it had
been dedicated to Seejae. It was the only poem I could write in my twomonths stay in the I-House. Its title was Gender Analysis. After returning
to Bangladesh, I composed the third and final part.
Man’s view
Like Moses in Mount Sinai
I shall climb the peak to find
The God who dwells on the top
I have three questions in mind
As you have created men
Why didn’t you stop there
Why did you crafted women
And made the world unfair
Even though you created them
Why they’re made so cute
Although they are beautiful
Why did you make them rude
I have been roving all the years
I haven’t rested for a while
To seek out answer to all these
I will go up thousands mile
God’s view
Man, you don’t know
Nobody knows what I know
Have those who disbelieved
That the heavens and the earth were joined indeed
And I separated them for living
And made from water every living thing
Don’t you know what have you seen
All that is beautiful is feminine
All beautiful rivers have feminine name
Ganga and Kaveri or Rhine and Hamme
And all the flowers are feminine too
I bestowed them with seed
While men hunt for greed
The world without women
Is like the body without vein

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Like the cloud without rain
And there grows no grain
I created women to give birth
Through children they sustain the earth
And those rude women
They’re more masculine than men
Do not follow me but the Pope
They live in despair than hope
When women become men in fact
I’ll perform the penultimate act
I’ll bring doomsday if there is no eve
Men you can defer it if you believe
Our planet will remain alive
On condition that women survive
Woman’s view
I want love
I want to love
Nowhere there is love
Unforgettable Yayori
When I met her first? Sometimes memory fails. I am not very organized.
I never keep diary. I have a lovely daughter who keeps family
photographs in her safe custody. While digging her treasure, I found
two photographs that reminded me of the past.
In one photo, I was sitting beside Yayori. It was October 1986. We
were attending a conference on “Forestry resources crisis in the third
world” in Penang organized by Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM), a sisterorganization of the Consumer Association of Penang (CAP). The annual
assembly of the Friends of the Earth International followed theconference. It was my first ever exposure to a gathering dominated by‘environmentalists’. Vandana Shiba was one of the participants. I heard
from her about the Chipko movement of India and about Sundarlal
Bahuguna who masterminded the movement through a Long Marchfrom Kashmir to Mizoram.
The second photograph reminds me of another occasion. We were having
a “river cruise”. With an invitation from SKEPHI and WALHI(Indonesia), we assembled at Banjarmasin in South Kalimantan in
December 1986. Yayori was also there. We traveled together, crossedJourney through Japan

315

several hills and rivers on foot to visit a “Manglikin” village, a habitatof an indigenous community. There we met Sundarlal Bahuguna. We
had a long conversation with him and Yayori was taking notes. Later
she told me that she was not “impressed” by Sundarlal.
On way back to Jakarta, we stayed at Banjarmasin for a couple of days.
In an informal session, Yayori was discussing environmental issues withsome Indonesian participants. I joined the discussion and soon foundmyself in a hot debate with her. Yayori was emphasizing that theindigenous people should be left alone to decide their affairs and nothingshould be imposed on them from outside in the name of development.
My contention was simple. The indigenous people should be given
options. And if they are aware of options, they may change their attitude
and lifestyles, as we did. The conversation ended there and we agreed
to disagree.
Probably Yayori was right. Probably not. We are caught in the illusionof “development”. Are we happy? Are we progressing? Or what isprogress? We may not have an answer in our lifetime.
Since then we met on few more occasions. But I still remember her
dissenting me, “Mohiuddin, you are wrong. Don’t impose your ideas.
Let them live their life.”
Yayori died in 2002. She won’t be debating any more. She lived inaccordance with her conviction. She was a “friend of the earth.”
On 8 October 2006, I visited WAM (Women’s Active Museum on War
and Peace) in Tokyo founded by Yayori. I saw her empty chair. There
was a framed portrait of Yayori on her desk. I saw a brochure that
contained a statement of Yayori:
Here we will take action for the future, through the global solidarityof people and not of states, with women playing a central role
alongside men.
I do not want to mourn for her. She is not around. But I hear her voice.
In the words of Rabindranath Tagore, she still whispers to me:
I have got my leave.
Bid me farewell, my brothers!
I bow to you all and take my departure.
Here I give back the keys of my door
And I give up all claims to my house.

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I only ask for last kind words from you.
We were neighbors for long,
But I received more than I could give.
Now the day has dawned
And the lamp that lit my dark corner is out.
A summons has comeAnd I am ready for my journey.
Paradise on earth
We had a week out during our stay for ALFP and the Secretariat
organized a five-day trip for us to Okinawa. As the trip would end with
two-days weekend, almost all of us decided to stay back and spend
those two days on our own. So hectic alignment and realignment among
us went on, how to spend those days, where to go, whom to group with,etc. I had been chasing Yoji to make a special program, something thatwould be remembered for a long time. I wanted to spend the time in aquite place outside the mundane world. Yoji then contacted his friends
and prepared a program for two of us. Accordingly we started
implementing our plan.
In the first morning, we took a bus and at around noon joined an antiUS base group in the middle of Okinawa Island. In front of the barbed
wire of the Futema Base, I met Ayumi, an under-graduate student ofSophia University. She briefed me about the whole program. Incidentally
I came to know that she was a student of Prof. Murai, a friend of mine
and an ARENA Fellow. We met another group of thirty activists from
Europe, North America and Australia who came all the way from
Hokkaido riding bicycle. It took three months for them. Then we took
part in an ‘earth run’. We were six persons in two cars and each of us
ran or walked for two to three kilometers one by one. It was arranged ina nice way. We were dropped at certain points and almost simultaneously
we covered about 20 kilometers or more. We spent the night together inthe house of Mika, one of the organizers of the earth run, at Chatan.
In the following afternoon we took a ferry from the port. It took about
thirty minutes to reach Kudaka Island. As we were getting down to the
jetty, the sun was leaning closer to the blue water of the Pacific. Overthe horizon, the Mountain of Okinawa Island was clearly visible.
We walked toward the hotel, a Japanese-style two-storied building
having guest rooms with tatami bed. Still some daylight was left andwe went out to walk around. The day slowly passed into the dark of theJourney through Japan

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night and we lost our way to the hotel. However, we found it at last.
Then we got out again to find some food. We went to a restaurant. Yoji
ordered soup with sea snake and I asked for fish soup. We talked tosome people there and learned about the island.
Kudaka is a sacred island, an island of God, where all women are God’s
envoys and men are people of the sea. The island is very small with anarea of 3km by 7km. Men go to far away places in the ocean to catch
fish and women take care of the land and the children. They have theirown religion, own rituals and own community life. All lands belong to
the community where farmers are allocated land to farm. There are tworestaurants, three hotels and one utility store, all owned by thecommunity. There are only 400 people living in the island, mostly old
and children. Young people work outside. There is one high schoolwith residential facilities where many ‘school refusals’ from Okinawa
and even from Tokyo have been enrolled. The community elects one
woman, called Noro, once in every twelve years on a full moon day of
November to lead the island in all its social and religious aspects.
However, there has not been any election since 1978, as none was found‘suitable’.
While we were sitting beside a table and drinking beer, suddenly a manin his mid- seventies came to me and started shaking my hand, then mywhole body and embraced me with all his physical might andenthusiasm. He was speaking Japanese and I could not understand asingle word. Then Yoji had to intervene and I was rescued. The story
goes like this. While fishing in the ocean in the past he had friendshipwith one Indonesian fisherman. Incidentally I looked like him. He
thought as if he met his old friend after many years. When he understood
his mistake, he didn’t cool down. He forced us to drink one more bottleof beer, which he paid. He also wanted to pay for our dinner, which wepolitely refused. I was really moved by the friendship the man stillcherishes in his memory for his Indonesian fiend.
His name is Sotoma Aeiko, a native of Kudaka. He visited Indonesia
twelve years ago and stayed there for two months. Now he has given
up fishing. He now works as an ‘architect’, counseling people to build
houses. While talking to him, I understood that he was a very lonelyman. His children left him. His wife also deserted him. He spends theevenings drinking and looking for people to talk to.

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319

The man, who used to cruise from the coast of Australia to Cape town
and pulled with ease tuna from the net weighing 50-60 kg or more withbare hands, is now completely fallen, abandoned and retched. Is it thedestiny he deserved?
While returning to the hotel after dinner, we were passing through alonely road. On the top was a dark canopy with twinkling stars. On
both sides was dense shrubbery with million insects making noise. I
could never imagine that darkness could be so deep, so divine and so
beautiful. I was walking and thinking.
You always long for the light
I care no more than shadow
Under the sky in a cool winterI look for a deep sacred night.
You want to win all the fight
There is no harm if I lose
Through the fog to the end
Yet I like to walk upright.
We left the island on the following day. One night’s stay was not enough.
But it is better to live with unmet happiness. While cruising throughthe Pacific once again I was trying to recollect the verse of a Persian
poet of the Middle Ages, who, after visiting the Mughal palace at
Fatehpur Sikri (India), commented:
Agar ferdous bar rui jaminast
O haminast o haminast o haminast(If there is any paradise on earth
It’s here, it’s here, and it’s here.)
Hibakusha
Through the courtesy of Albert Alejo, I could make a trip to Kyushu.
One day Albert told me that he had been invited to give a talk at the
Kyushu University in Fukuoka. He told me that there was one moreslot and, if I wish, I could join him. I accepted the offer happily. Then
started a series of correspondence with Reiko Ogawa, who teaches at
the Kyushu University Asia Center and was known to Albert for someyears. Our task is very simple. We shall make separate presentations in
the university. Then we shall make a tour to Nagasaki and stay there
for one night. Reiko arranged everything as we requested for.

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When we arrived Fukuoka Airport, Reiko was waiting to receive us.
When we visited the campus, we saw all the walls were full with posters
that included not only the notice of our seminar, but also ourphotographs. The audience in the afternoon was reasonably big and theseminar it was more than satisfactory.
Next morning we took a bus to Nagasaki. We visited one NGO center
that had been running educational program for children in the field ofcreative art. They have several publications. Michiko Fukuda, an
executive of the center, gave me a book with a note: Welcome toNagasaki. The book is in Japanese but contains many photographs andpaintings drawn by children. She was with us all the time during our
tour of Nagasaki.
Later we visited Nagasaki peace memorial park and some other places.
In the evening we had a session with a group known as Hibakusha.
They are the radiation victim survivors of 1945. They were all in theirseventies. They have formed an “Organizing Committee of Nagasaki
Global Citizens’ Assembly for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons”.
Mr. Masahito Hirose, who was 15 years old at that time, is its Secretary
General. He welcomed us. One after another, they were telling theirtales. Perhaps they had already narrated it several hundred times tothousands of people. But when I was listening to them, I thought, as if
I am the first person hearing their ballad of the fateful August 9. I waswondering, how much patience, courage, and love for life one needs tosurvive after such an ordeal. One of them was Mr. Fukhura, aged twelve
years at that time. He narrated his story how he lost his elder brother,younger brother, younger sister, mother, aunt and uncle, one after
another, in a span of only one week or two.
Mr. Hirose gave me copy of a booklet titled A Journey to Nagasaki
published by their society. While reading it, I was moved by the poemsof the Nagasaki bombing by Matsuo Atsuyuki written in the form of adiary.
August 10: I find my wounded wife at the roadside with the bodies of
two of our children. She tells me how they died (one was 4 years old
and the other 1).
In his mother’s arms he smiles one last time
The smile he had only just learned
Left alone on the barren ground
Flies swarm around the childJourney through Japan321

In his final moments he chews a branch saying,“This is good. It’s a sugarcane.”
My oldest son (1st year Junior High School) dies in the bomb shelter.
Under the blazing sun I search for water
For my son’s last drink
Crawling over to his mother, he smiles
And draws a final breathe
At his mother’s side he passes from this world
The moonlight touches his face
The moon draws over all three of them,
One in the shelter and two outside
August 11: Alone I gather wood for the cremating of my children.
A dragonfly lands
On three small bodies from one family
Flames reach two bodies
Pressed up against the other brotherAugust 12: As day breaks, I collect the bones.
In the early morning mist
The bones take on the forms of my children
Bones like flower petals
A life of seven months.
August 13: My wife dies (she was 36).
“There is a tomato for Hiro-chan in my sleeve”
My wife’s last words
August 15: I cremated my wife. The surrender is announced.
These hands that have lost everything
Now hold four atomic bomb death certificates
Rising from the summer grass I stoke the fire
Cremating my wife
As the imperial order for surrender is issued
The flames of my wife rage
(From Genbaku Kushu)
Mr. Hirose informed us that the Americans have been collecting samplesof blood and photo from the survivors from September 1945, but nevercared for their treatment. He had a son. An American doctor used tocome to collect blood sample from him. Probably they use the radiation

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victims as raw materials for research. This was very painful for him
and his wife. “We were very much shocked by their attitude andbehavior,” Mr. Hirose lamented.
Reiko was with us all the way and ultimately bid farewell to us at the
Fukuoka Airport. Se was so nice, so friendly, and so passionate thatmade me very difficult to forget her. I requested her to contribute anarticle for our next publication on “women’s life stories” to be publishedby my organization, CDL (Bangladesh). She agreed and also promised
to collect few more essays for the book. (She kept her promise and thebook was published in February 2007).
As we passed through security check at the airport, Reiko was waving
her hands and so also I. She told me that she had a feeling as if we knew
each other for many years. I also had a similar feeling.
Rissho Kosei-kai
I met Shogo Nakano, a staff of Niwano Peace Foundation (NPF), in
Dhaka. One day he came to I-house to take me to his office located in
Suginami-ku. Shogo had been my guide in Tokyo on some occasions
and had been very helpful.
We first went to visit the sacred hall of Rissho Kosei-kai, a sociallyoriented Japanese Buddhist movement. A statue of Buddha has beenenshrined there. Unlike in most Buddhist temples, this is a standing
Buddha, 3.2 meters tall. The height from the pedestal to the highest
point of the nimbus surrounding the statue is seven meters.
There are more than 240 Rissho Kosei-kai establishments across Japanand overseas preaching a mission of creating a peaceful and happy
world. Its peace activities are based on the teachings in its basic scripture,
the Lotus Sutra:
Truth is universal and all religions are manifestations of it. All life
springs from the same source, and thus all people are related andbelong to one family.
One of its activities is the Donate a Meal campaign. Members forgo
one meal a day on particular days each month and contribute the money
saved to the Rissho Kosei-kai Peace Fund through their local units.
Donations are pooled to fund various aid and peace projects and serve
as a driving force for its other peace activities. A chunk of the fund isprovided to NPF, which spends the money for its South Asia Program

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for poverty eradication. This year they have selected two partner NGOs
in Bangladesh and would spend the money for capacity developmentof the indigenous people through these two partners. They have also
programs in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Afghanistan.
At the fag end of my stay in Japan, I was invited by NPF to give a
presentation on social movements and NGOs in South Asia together
with an Indian Gandhian Mr. Manabendra Mandal. I know him quite
well and we met few times before. On the day of presentation, I was
introduced to Rev Nichiko Niwano, President of Rissho Kosei-kai and
NPF. He is the son of the founder of Rissho Kosei-kai, Rev Nikkyo
Niwano.
In that afternoon, many people gathered and listened to our presentations.
I was wondering, how millions of people in Japan get the inspiration tocollect contributions through this innovative “donate one meal”
campaign and spend it for poor people in remote villages of South Asia.
It’s a paradox that Buddha was born in South Asia to preach the message
of non-violence, while South Asian governments spend billions ofdollars in militarization and nuclearization to kill their own people.
Integrity
It was all over in I-House. I was ready to check out. I had to pay some
telephone bill. I paid a thousand Yen note. I was waiting at the lobby of
I-House. It was about seven o’clock in the morning. The restaurant was
not yet open. The man at the front-desk told me that a taxi would cometo drop me to a nearby ANA hotel from where I would get on a limousine
bus bound for Narita Airport. Then the taxi arrived. A lady on duty at
the front-desk handed over a packet to me and smiled, “Here is somepastry for your breakfast. Please take it”. They helped me to get on
board with my luggage. I left the I-House with so many sweet memories
where I spent almost two months. I arrived at the hotel and checked in
my suitcase for the bus and then was waiting in the hotel lobby. Suddenly
I found the front-desk man of the I-House. He looked very tired, as if
he was running after my cab. Then he put his hand inside the pocket of
his trousers and took out a coin of 500 Yen. “I am extremely sorry Sir.
I beg your pardon. I forgot to give the change.” I was not only surprised,
I was overwhelmed.
“Had you been running?”“No Sir, I took a taxi.”

324Communities in Action“How much have you paid?”“One thousand Yen, Sir.”“And you will pay another thousand Yen to go back”.
“That’s right, Sir. It was my fault. But I am happy that I could return
you 500 Yen.”
I shook hand with the man and wished him Godspeed. As he left, I waswondering how I should characterize this incidence. I found only one
word to explain it, ‘integrity’. I wrote down his name on a piece of
paper. His name is Mihura. I remember him almost everyday and takeinspiration from him to live a life with integrity.
Forget me not
I-House has been lost from my daily routine. I don’t know whether
anybody is using the breakfast table discovered by Janet at the corridor
outside the restaurant. She also taught me at an Okinawa restaurant
how to dance. Seejae who invented the theory of social distance had
been my neighbour in the gym on a treadmill. I miss him. I miss Maria
who used to call me Pak or Bapu and often happily mentioned how
many grams of weight she had lost in the past twenty-four hours. I missKunda who introduced a new Nepal to me that I didn’t know. Yoji was
my window through which I could see a glimpse of Japan. Albert was
the first Fellow to greet me on the first morning inside the I-House
restaurant after I arrived. He was the also last man to bid me farewell at
the lobby of I-House, and still I see him waving his hands.
Naoko, Mayuko, Sonoda, Ono all now belong to a fairytale world, which
I still yearn to locate. Still I yearn for someone to call me “Babu-chan”.
I hear Prof. Lee Jong Won whispering to me, “Mohi-san, do you still
feel like what you had been in the past, an angry young man?” I see
Prof. Masaaki Ohashi driving me along the road through the Tokyo
Bay, as if he is steering a mythological boat to the weird land. In response
to my greetings to Oono, “Hi Sarar bap” (father of Sara), he says, “HiKittyr bap (father of Kitty)? I yearn for that green turf and the bonsai
forest in the I-House compound, those silver ripples of the Pacific on
the shoreline of Kudaka Island, those golden rice fields along the railway
to Ogawamachi, those big trees in the Yoyogi Park that survived fromgeneration to generation. Like Poet Jivanananda Das, I want to have a
dip in the days of yore.

Journey through JapanI will come back again,
To this Isikari riverside
Maybe not as a man
But as a blackbird or white chest kite;
Or a dawn crow maybe,
New-rice time, in misty flight
To the jackfruit-tree-shade
One autumn day will glide;
Or a duck – a girl owns it on its red feet
Small bells are tied in seaweed-smell
Now the whole day floats by till night
I will come back in a loving daylight.

325

Japan Diary
Seejae Lee
Introduction
In autumn 2006, I stayed in Japan for more than two months as aparticipant of the Asian Leadership Fellow Program (ALFP). Although
I stayed for seven years studying in the graduate school from 1974, I
could not make trips that much during my student time. I enjoyed thisoccasion to find Japan again in my age of late 50s. As ALFP group, we
visited Okinawa and also made a tour to an island, stayed idly in thebeach, catching shells and sea cucumbers. I also traveled to Hokkaido,
Northeast Japan and ‘back-Japan’ rural regions. I watched the disputed
islands of Kunashiri and saw wild animals in the Shiretoko peninsula. I
enjoyed staying at Uonomachi and Niigata, watching brilliant yellow
and red leaves over the mountains, and eating wild mushrooms andfish. I was struck by Munagata Shiko’s woodprint works in Aomori
and movingly read Ishikawa Takuboku’s poem at Hakotate Takuboku
Memorial Center. After finishing ALFP, I traveled again to Kyoto andShiga Prefecture to research on environmental movements there,changing waste vegetable oil into biodiesel, and visited several placesof workers’ collectives in Tokyo and its suburban areas.
Tokyo’s autumn is culturally rich, and has a best weather. We visited
my exhibitions and cultural fairs and attended good lectures. I think I
may not have a better opportunity than I had in autumn 2006. I appreciate
staff of International House of Japan, Japan Foundation, and our fellows
from Asia for this memorable exposure to Japan. I like to share a bit of
my experience in Japan.1
Modern Prophets of Japan
Prophets of ancient Israel are not simple fortuneteller of the future, but
critics of the socio-political problems of the time. They were entrusted
1

I originally wrote for my Chinese blog (http://360.yahoo.com/seejaelee).

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with the voice of God that cares the destiny of the nations andcommunity. Since they were entrusted with the wisdom of God that
could foresee the crisis of the nations, they could not keep silent, butraised voice to criticize the secular and sacred power holders of thetime. Therefore they dared to criticize kings and were even put to death.
Our contemporary prophets, who have sensed the crisis of thiscivilization, have never raised noisy voices, but through their silent
practice, give inspirations to ordinary people. They think thatenvironmental degradation and depletion of resources on this earth willdefinitely bring forth the gravest crisis on humankind. Due to excessive
consumption of energy sources and resources, the future generation
will not enjoy economic development any more. Unless we change ourmode of development, global crisis will in the near future come up. For
this reason many conscious individuals, organizations, and states makeefforts for environmental protection and resource conservation. ALFP
prepared a program to visit environmental model town of Ogawa in
Saitama Prefecture. I would like to introduce some Japanese cases forrealization of ‘junkan’ (recycling) society. They operate on a very small
scale, but its implication is really far-reaching.
Mr. Kuwabara (born in 1958) finished his study at the graduate schoolof the University of Tokyo and worked as a specialist on water resource
management and renewable energy for Japanese Government
developmental aid activities. He promoted the use of livestock andhuman excrement to produce biogas in developing countries, such as
Nepal and China. After returning to Japan, he settled down in Ogawa
town. He cultivates two hectares for rice production and one hectare
for other vegetables, and also produces fruits and honey. With his town
people, he led a study group to address energy problems and developed
local energy sources. In 1992, he himself organized an NPO called
Ogawa Town Foodo Use Center (Foodo in short), and started naturalenergy production. Even though a small town with a population of 3700,
he analyzed that it had a good condition for material circulation between
farming and non-faming households.
Ogawa’s food waste has until been incinerated, never been recycled.
He proposed local government to transfer to Foodo the incineration
costs; then he could use the money to transform the food waste into
biogas and liquid fertilizer. Ogawa town government accepted his
proposal. He had to persuade local farmers and non-farming citizens,
because farmers should participate in the material circulation program,as local citizens should take over the responsibility to separate foodJourney through Japan329

wastes and local farmers should understand the benefits of liquid
fertilizer.
Local government pays annually 3000 yen per household to Foodo,
which is almost equivalent to the incineration cost. NPO Foodo
distributes this money in a form of ‘local currency’ to each householdthat participates in separating the household food waste. The biogas,
thus produced, is provided to local residents for heating bath water orfor heating the neighborhood center. Some residents use this biogas forcooking. On the other hand, liquid fertilizer, as a byproduct of thisprocess, is distributed for free to local organic farm households. All
local residents and farmers get benefit from this project and they are all
happy with it. Local currency that the local residents received forseparating food waste activities can be used to purchase vegetables andfruits from the organic farms, and the farmer can convert this local
currency into Japanese Yen.
For a few years, 100 households participated in Kuwabara’s NPO Foodo.
As more households want to participate in the program, he is now
constructing a new food waste processing plant that can process foodwastes from 600 households. Farmers, local residents and local
government authorities all are convinced of the possibility of ‘Junkan’society through using local natural energy sources.
We also visited Mr. Kaneko Mito’s organic farm in Ogawa Town. He
had a farm of three hectares including farmland and forests. This farm’s
energy supply is almost self-reliant. He pulls out underground water byusing solar power, cooks food by using biogas that he produces andheats rooms by used wood blocks. His farming machines are all poweredby 100% biodiesel. Mr. Kaneko mentioned that he suffered from farming
chemicals 20 years ago, and changed his production system into anorganic faming. He is almost completely self-reliant in terms of energy
and food supply.
Ogawa’s Foodo has a vision to regenerate local community as a whole.
Foodo is a medium to organize local government, farmers and local
residents to realize this vision. Between these four parties, local currency,
labor, material and information, are interactively exchanged, and theseinteraction will finally be envisioned to form a Junkan system of material
circulation. This community-level Junkan structure is no other than an
epitome of a sustainable society. Sustainable society should be realized
not only in local community, but also at the national level. Any efforts

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for sustainable society on whatever level should be evaluated andpromoted, because these small sustainable communities can be bases
for global sustainability.
Globalization in economic terms has both good and bad sides.
Globalization led by market has both good and bad aspects. However
for agriculture, peasants and rural community, globalization brings
destructive impacts such as decrease of rural population, destruction ofagricultural economy, social disintegration, and collapse of cohesion
and cooperation networks. By reviving the material circulation systemon the local and regional levels, it is believed that we can revive
agriculture, peasant and rural community as well.
Ogawa’s small junkan system is not simply an isolated action. Linked
to this junkan system is the Artist Power Bank that is led by the superstar
musician Sakamoto Ryuichi. Sakamoto and his two fellows Kobayashi
Takeshi and Sakurai Kazutoshi have capitalized from their own money
and have been collecting fund through musical concerts and have set
up the Artist Power Bank that selectively lends small credits to renewableenergy projects, eco-friendly farming, and energy conservation projects.
Mr. Sakamoto acted in the ‘Last Emperor’ and composed theme music
for the movie, and won Academy Award for the music composition. He
is also a social and environmental activist. In order to appeal for thecancellation of reprocessing of high-level nuclear wastes in Japan, he
led a movement in May 2006 called ‘Stop Rokkasho’ (Rokkasho is aplace in Aomori Prefecture where nuclear wastes are reprocessed).
Renewable energy sources such as solar power, wind power, biogas
and biodiesel have not yet earned sufficient competitiveness in energy
market, because they are still small in terms of market scale, andproduction costs for equipments are still high. However, it is also truethat solar power is gradually getting cheaper and wind power equipments
are getting cheaper as well. Therefore it is vitally important to support
renewable energy projects in order to sustain and expand its use.
These three artists lend money to expand the renewable energy projects
at the annual interest rate of 1%. NPO Foodo of Ogawa also borrowed
4 million yen (approximately 3.5million US dollar) to expand the biogas
and liquid fertilizer production project.
These artists hold musical concerts at the small restaurants in Tokyo,
Osaka and Kyoto for fund raising and campaigning for renewableenergy, and they also make music CDs for campaign. In every summer,

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they hold three-day open-air music festival. In 2006 for three days,
60,000 young people attended the festival. During the festival, not only
music fans, but also environmentalists and renewable project-related
citizens participated and some of them opened their own booths for
campaign. Sakamoto and his fellows also make use of TV talk shows
to campaign about energy issues.
New attempts as such have not yet form a mainstream in this world.
However, these are points for reformation. These points are linked toeach other, and thus finally make a reformed space in a corner of theworld from which the world itself begins to change. Industrial revolution,
information-communication revolution, China’s peasant revolution andall other reform movements started not from the center of the world,
but from the margins. Although these experiments still remain very
local, these will eventually become a central trend in the society. We
do not know when it will become an alternative stream, but, I believe,
it will definitely come true. They are indeed prophets in our world that
we have longed for.
Solidarity Economy for the Weak
I visited a restaurant at the suburban city of Misato near Tokyo. The
restaurant, called Community Space Aosaora (Blue Sky), is a workers’
collective. It is surrounded by some houses and vegetable fields. I
exchanged name cards with the representative of the workers’ collective
Ms. Asakusa Hideko, and found in the backside of the name card words
written such as ‘networking for safety and security of food, cooperationand mutual help’. Seven women run the restaurant, investing 500,000
yen each, and formed a worker’s collective. All members can participate
in work and management. This Aosora is not simply a restaurant, butalso functions as a center for other local activities. This place is rented
out for meeting and used as a place to exhibit and sell handicrafts thatthe local people make. Aosora also delivers food to the elderly people
in the neighborhood and renders helping hands to those who needassistance. This restaurant has a function to link social relations andexchange materials and services in this region.
When we visited Aosora, three or four members were working, two in
the kitchen and another two in the serving hall. It seemed to me that
there was no director on one hand, or all seemed to be directors of theirown work. I met a 22 years old young woman working there. She served
tea and took orders from us. We were later informed that she has adisease called ‘hikikomori’; she is afraid of meeting people and avoids

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Communities in Actionsocial contacts. The disease can be cured through stable social contacts
and training. Her parents sent her here to have training on social
adaptation. Therefore, she pays training fee instead of getting wages.
In the back of the restaurant, there was a mental hospital. Psychiatrists
recommended patients to visit this restaurant to socialize with otherguests and local people. Patients use this restaurant for preparation to
return to ‘society’ by talking with workers and local people. This Aosora
is always ready to help any one who needs it. When a certain childrefuses to go to school, and his or her parents have to work and cannot
take care of him or her, Aosora sends on request a person who takes thechild to school. If an old man cannot go shopping, Aosora sends a person
to buy something for the old. For these services, community space
Aosora receives a certain amount of fee.
For any workers’ collective, members have a right to work. But all
members do not necessarily work. Some members just pay shares anddo not work. Any member can work as many hours as he or she wants.
A retired member works only half or one day a week. When members
want to work, the Aosora allocates working hours. Members receive
hourly wage at the end of every month. In decision-making, members
have equal rights irrespective of their share or working hours. In Aosora,
there is nothing that can be called employer-employee relationship.
They are conceptually self-employed. This employment mode is quite
different from the capitalist one.
Every people basically have some abilities. In modern society, thatability that has value in the market is evaluated and traded. There areplenty of socially useful abilities, but do not have market value; they
are considered useless. Is it proper to say that the retired people’s labor
power has not social value? How is it possible to properly evaluate
housewives’ domestic work to sustain reproduction of labor power?
Labor power of the retired people, housewives, or the disabled has also
definite social value. We encountered this issue in another workers’
collective, the café Foo, where 40% of the members were disabled.
Some were mentally retarded, others were physically. They allparticipated in the Foo, as workers as well as members. They participate
in work and management. Some disabled persons cannot work for longtime for health reason. They decide working hours by themselves. Since
their wages are paid on the basis of working hours, their ‘quality’ oflabor is not discriminated.

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What does working mean for the disabled or the retired? It seems to me
that they do not work only for earning wage. What they really seek inthe work is a social and economic engagement. Work gives them afeeling that they are alive. Work is a livelihood activity without which
one cannot express one’s existence. Through their activities, theyexperience what life is like. Labor is social by nature. Our living isconstructed on the basis of others’ labor, and we also through our labor
sustain others’ life activities. These disabled or elderly people also,
through their labor, engage themselves in social reproduction, because
labor mediates between individual and society.
Market economy in this modern society has always been a function to
select and exclude human abilities. Market can make certain normal
person a fool, and stigmatize him as useless. Through severe
competition, even an able person can be weeded out. Workers in suchcompetitive societies acquiesce in slave-like labor tread-mill. In thelong run, the capitalist mode of production can not be sustainable,
because it depletes human and natural resources. Instead, I think,workers’ collectives like these that are operated on the principle ofsocial solidarity can be a mirror to expose the contradictions of capitalist
system, and can be developed into an alternative to the neo-liberal
production system. Women of Aosora and the disabled of the Café Foo
are examples of good practice that revive democracy in the work placethat has been eroded in institutionalism.
Memories of Okinawa
As part of the ALFP, we traveled Okinawa. Okinawa was a country of
Ryukyu Kingdom for 450 years since the 15th century, and annexed in1979 to Japan through so-called ‘Ryukyu Disposal’. When Japan was
defeated in the World War II in 1945, Okinawa had been occupied for
28 years by United State until it was ‘returned’ to Japan in 1972.
Okinawa was the only place where ground operation was fought during
the World War II, killing more than 200,000 persons. Among Okinawan
war victims were Korean soldiers, laborers, and comfort women.
I feel a peculiar intimate feeling about Okinawa. Okinawa people are
war victims as we were. They also have US Base problems as we have.
I felt I could fully understand them when they were forcefully mobilized,
abandoned, or killed by Japanese Army during the war.

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335

Their stories of war drastically revealed what a state should be like,
and what it is in reality.
Local peace activists explained day-by-day occurrence of the war sites
for three months from March 1945. They reconstructed the war stories
of each date and place. They also explained those names that sufferedand sacrificed. They told us how high school girls of the Himeyuri
School were mobilized as nurses and sacrificed along with Japanesearmy. A survivor of the Himeyuri School narrated her terrible memories
of suffering.
In present-day Okinawa, there are some people who desperately try tomemorize their pasts. Their memory of the war is directly connectedwith their aspiration for peace. Not simply war, but they want tomemorize their rapidly eroding vernacular language and culture. They
insist that their history, language, culture and environment as well should
uninterruptedly be remembered.
We watched the royal dancing of ‘shodon’ at the garden of the Shuri
Palace. More than 100 tourists watched the dance. I did not know eventhe name of the dance, what the dance takes in the cultural constellationsof Okinawa. Without any prior knowledge, I was immensely shocked
by the dance. The climax of Shodon was almost immobile action of
Triangle Eyesight. The dance did not move at all except slight motionsof lower jaws and glance. I learned later that the motion was neither
asleep nor awake, still expresses longing for the departed lover. I wasshocked by such immobility. The immobility can move people. I learned
such superhuman expression of moving immobility can be masteredthrough long and intensive training. Memory cannot simply be stored
in brain. Okinawans, through their bodies, minds and actions struggle
against erosion of their memories.
Ando Tadao and Water Chapel
On 24 October 2006 I stepped down the unmanned rail station ofTomamu at Hokkaido. There were no houses around the station. I saw
yellow and red leaves and white birch were brilliantly shining by
reflecting autumn sunshine. The reason why I came to this place was tovisit a ‘water chapel’ that the world famous Japanese architect Ando
Tadao designed. I have watched the photos of the water chapel for longtime and I wanted to look at it with my own eyes. I also wanted to feelsolemn sacredness by sitting at the Church. This was why I came tofind this water chapel as if I visited to a sacred place as pilgrimage.

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I have been for last several years interested in Japanese architect Ando
Tadao. He had a special idea ad career. After graduating middle school,
he learned woodwork under his father, a carpenter. On the other hand,
he was a professional boxer. He did not get higher education, and instead
traveled to Europe for about seven years, and watched famous
architectures and independently studied them. Even though he did not
get professional training in architecture and no diploma, he opened
Ando Tadao design office in Osaka.
Sumiyoshi detached house project in Osaka is one of his early works.
An oblong three-room row house was by his idea and his hands
transformed it into a world famous house. This project is very important,because his architectural philosophy has been elegantly expressed. He
divided a land of 3.5 meter wide and 14 meter long into three parts, andbuilt a two-storied building at the side ends, and left the middle part asa courtyard. The upper floors of two buildings were connected by abridge, and each upper floor has respective bedrooms, while lower floors
were equipped with living room, kitchen and toilet. Since there wasonly one toilet in the lower floor, a person in the upper floor may go
through bridges and stairs, while breathing outdoor airs. Even though
this structure apparently seems to be inconvenient, this design leads
people in the house to communicate with nature while walking in thewinds and possibly in rain. This communication with nature wasconsciously designed for people in the house to be exposed to nature.
This bridge is a space for communication and meditation. This design
eloquently expresses Ando’s philosophy that is simplicity,communication with nature, enhanced spirituality, and lowering cost.
He designed major architecture such as the Meditation House of
UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. He taught at the University of Tokyoand lectured at Harvard University and Yale University in the UnitedStates. When he came to Korea some years ago, I arrived 20 minutes
earlier than scheduled to attend his lecture in a more than 1000-seatauditorium. I could not enter because many more people were waiting
outside to listen to his lecture.
He specially designed really inspiring religious architectures. He
designed a Buddhist temple at Awajishima, and making use of a slope,
he designed a temple and a lotus pond at the top of the temple,
symbolizing a heavenly garden in the sky. If one steps so many stairs
and passes through the temple rooms, one may suddenly enter the otherworldly lotus garden. Osaka’s light chapel is also a famous project. He

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hollowed a cross shape in the front of a dark church room, throughwhich light enters. Therefore if you enter the chapel, a cross shaped
light will welcome you. This cross light gives strong inspiration. The
religious architecture as such expresses special spiritual implication,
and architecture as such is a holder that contains the human spirit.
He also designed the water chapel in Tomamu, Hokkaido. He placed
the transparent wall in the front of the chapel. In front of the chapel isalso placed a calm water surface. A large iron-made cross is put up in
the right front of the chapel. Behind the cross are forests and the low
mountain. Any Christian will notice that the cross symbolizes the Christ
who walks over the lake. I previously thought this chapel had the best
condition for prayer and meditation. When I saw the photo of this chapel
for the first time, I thought just sitting in the chapel would be sufficient
to enrich my faith and spirit.
It is the human being that makes architecture. However, once architecture
is completed, it is the architecture that shapes human idea and lifestyle.
Therefore, it is why human beings want to live in good architecturalenvironment. In Fengshui of Oriental thought it is also considered that
housing sites and tomb sites determine one’s destiny. Most architectureon the earth is designed by common people, that is, architecture without
an architect. In other words, most architecture was built with local
materials. However, any architecture as such still gives impact on human
lives that live there.
Cherishing such a good expectation, I visited the water chapel. In asense I was fully ready for intense inspiration. I pondered on what totalk with priest. I thought Japanese churches are small in size. I thought
I had to donate some money to encourage the priest. A bus was waiting
for guests taking off from the express train, and I took it. Bus driver
told me to get off in front of a wedding house. A lady attendant of thewedding house, brightly smiling, guided me to the water chapel. I asked
the lady, how many Christian members were attending the chapel, who
was the priest, and when they would have a service…. I was stunned
by her replies. She said that this chapel had no Christians, no priest andno Sunday service. My expectation fell asunder. This architecture is
not of a religious chapel, but an annex structure of a wedding house,
and an outdoor set unit for wedding ceremony. In Christian tradition,
Church does not necessarily mean architecture, but a group orcommunity of believers. Church without member is not a church any
more.

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As I entered the chapel, I saw a large iron cross on the surface of water.
The scene was not very different from what I have searched in theinternet. Checking closely, I could not find small tools such as piano,
choir rows, offering box that a chapel should have. I felt that every
facility in the room looked counterfeit. I went out of the room andwalked around outside, and looked at the chapel from behind the crossand water pond. I found that there were some deceits in the photo of thechapel too. By changing angles, the photos were so manipulated as not
to include wedding house building. In the photos, the chapel was
photographed as if a single building standing in the calm and beautiful
landscape. How strongly did I get inspiration from the photos of thischapel? I wanted to feel on the spot what I have seen in the photos. My
expectation also fell asunder. The photo of the water chapel did notconvey, but conceal the truth of reality.
The lady told me that many Japanese visit this chapel for wedding after
searching photos in the internet. Most of them are not Christians. It
may be possible for any building to change its use. However, it is not
an objective of architecture to construct a fake building from the
beginning. Any architecture should have its proper genuine objective,
and such architecture should be matched with its natural, social andhistorical backgrounds.
When Ando Tadao designed this chapel with a misplaced objective,
what did he think? I earnestly want to ask this question and to hear his
reply.

Asian Face of theStruggle for Integrity
Albert E. Alejo
To put the world right in order,
we must first put the nation in order;
to put the nation in order,
we must first put the family in order;
to put the family in order,
we must first cultivate our personal life;
we must first set our hearts right.
- Confucius
My present concern is how to struggle against corruption in a waythat goes beyond the prevailing discourse of anticorruption
movement and the trendy managerial technologies for good
governance. I suggest that a promising approach is to develop thediscourse on integrity.
What, by the way, is ‘integrity’ in Nihongo? Is it ‘keppaku’ meaning
pure of heart, the opposite of ‘fuhai’? Or is it ‘kouketsu’ which
connotes living one’s life on a high moral ground? Who among theleaders of our countries can we consider “a person of integrity’? In
my Tagalog language, the nearest term is probably dangal so that aperson of integrity is said to be ‘taong marangal’, one who earns
his living in an honest way, one who does not cheat his way tosuccess, who can face any other person without blushing, one who
is respected by others, although probably not rich and not necessarily
winnable in an honest election.
In most of our Asian languages, I guess, integrity connotes the qualityof a person who is both sincere in finding what is true and alsosteadfast in doing what is right; one who is ‘clean’ in business
transactions as well as can be trusted in fulfilling one’s promise. A
person of integrity is incorruptible, her principles are not for sale,
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checking the direction of her desires; the person of integrity consistently
realigns his actions according to the demands of personal dignity as
well as of the public good.
If you check the internet, other uses of the word ‘integrity’ appear,such as ‘integrity of the data base program’ (meaning it is protectedfrom the corrosive effects of pernicious viruses), ‘integrity of
infrastructure’ (implying the strength of material and construction
cannot be shaken by earthquakes and other pressures), ‘territorial
integrity’ (which means that the boundaries of a particular state is kept
whole and under control), and ‘psychic integrity’ (as in therapies formaintaining mental and emotional wholeness). If you apply these
metaphors to integrity in public life, it becomes quite obvious that my
topic is very ambitious.
This search for a new language does not arise from a safe academic
agenda. It emerges from our four-year experience of conducting Ehem!
anticorruption seminars among government, educational, business andreligious institutions in the Philippines. At this very moment, one of
our Ehem! champions in Mindanao is seeking legal assistance and asafe house because he has a death threat from those whose interests
were hit by his agrarian reform program. The chief auditor, whoinvestigated the plunder case of a military general, also emailed me last
week, raising soul-searching questions about the apparent futility ofher sacrifice when some of the cases they have filed have been dismissedby high-ranking public officials.
It dawned on me that the fight against corruption and the campaign forgood governance demands a deeper foundation. For why should
whistleblowers, for example, risk their jobs and sometimes their lives,to expose irregular practices in their offices, or companies, or evenNGOs? On the other hand, how do we assist those who privately admit
to having committed corrupt behavior, but are afraid of the full force ofthe law if they come out in the open? (Many of them, at least in ourPhilippine situation, are alumni of Christian schools suffused with moral
lessons or scholars of State universities funded by taxpayers money.)
And how do people who have good track record (so far) sustain theirlife of integrity with meaning, discipline, and energy?
These issues get highlighted in our region where most of Asian countries
are perceived to seriously corrupt. In the Corruption Perception Index(CPI) of the Transparency International, which came out just a few

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days ago, only Singapore has made it to the top five of countries withconsistently good record, garnering 9.4 points where 10 is the perfectscore. Hong Kong and Japan got 15th and 17th places, respectively,
out of the 159 countries that participated in the rating. Macao, Taiwan,
South Korea and Malaysia got a score of 5 or above. The rest of theSouth, East, and Southeast Asia continued to get miserably poor scoresof 3.6 and below.
There is hope, however. Based on the number of online searches, theMerriam-Webster Dictionary’s 2005 Word of the Year was “integrity.”
The other top searches were “refugee,” “pandemic,” and “tsunami.”
The fact that “integrity” was the most searched word in 2005 mostprobably indicates that more and more people are concerned about the
ethical dimension of anticorruption work.
What I would like to do in the rest of this sharing is to highlight one
learning from the very rich experience I had during the Asia Leadership
Fellow Program, held recently in Japan, under the sponsorship of theJapan Foundation. I got insights on the relationship between integrityand ecology, integrity and peace, integrity and the body. I shall however,focus on one thing, that of integrity and the media. We had some very
interesting discussion on the tension on those who wield the power ofcommunication but who have a difficult relationship with truth.
What could be the shape of integrity in the media?
Asian experiences offer a range of practices in the media practitioners’
struggle for a life of integrity given the complex task of covering eventsand catching deadlines. Sheila Coronel, in the lead article of AsiaViews
last year1 , affirms the contribution of a courageous press. In Asia,
however, there is so much that blocks journalists from ethical practice.
A good number are poorly trained in the meticulous and even risky
investigation of corruption in high places. And so sometimes honest
officials are ‘unjustly pilloried by the mob mentality of an overzealouspress.’ Many practitioners are easily lured by ‘envelopmental
journalism.’ Corruption, therefore, also infect the press people
themselves. In 2001, the Alliance of Independent Journalists based in
Jakarta found that ‘70 percent of journalists in East Java and 97 percent
in Jakarta were taking envelopes of cash from their news sources.’
1

Sheila Coronel, ‘Digging for Dirt: The Challenges of Investigating Corruption in Southeast
Asia’s Democracies’ AsiaViews (November 2005), pp. 5-8.

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Similar statistics can be found in the Philippines2 , and there is reason
to believe that this practice is rampant in other countries as well. In the
midst of this, it is consoling that there still exist individuals and groups
who have not succumbed to the temptation of leaving their professional
ethics behind.
My reflection on integrity in the media is enriched because ALFP has
journalists in the group. Kunda Dixit is a publisher-editor of a big
nationwide group of newspapers and magazines in Nepal. Maria
Hartiningsih maintains a column in the well-respected Kompas daily inIndonesia. Mohiuddin Ahmad writes for a Bangladeshi newspaper whileat the same time rendering consultancy work on development programs.
Our group had a night caucus on alternative media plus a whole morning
session with famous Nonaka Akihiro, the pioneer in independentjournalism in Asia. The challenge to uphold one’s principles in thecontext of this ‘history on the run’ also figured prominently during our
focus group discussion on integrity. What comes out from our sharing
and from my own reflection is, among other images, of picture of
integrity as the ‘balancing of biases’.
Kunda Dixit from Nepal reminded participants that integrity and ethics
are on the gray area. There is a moral priority in it. According to Kunda,
Son can have 2000 USD without losing his integrity. “But, according
to me, this is an ethical issue. He feels more comfortable not to accept
it,” he observed.
Kunda spoke about journalists being given ‘wrapped-in-envelope
money’ by their news sources. This is almost a standard practice. And
it is quite difficult to stand up alone and refuse it when everyone else isunderstood to be in the take. Some conscientious reporters have decided
to strike a compromise. They would take the money but place it inescrow for some social fund or to finance some worthwhile causes.
This, according to Kunda, has been considered ‘Soft corruption.’ Janet
Pillai, another fellow from Malaysia, compared this practice to somekind of late-bloomer philanthropists. In Penang, according to Janet,many old Chinese businessmen do the similar thing. Business people
rake in a lot of money by unscrupulous means when they are younger,
and then try to patch up their past by all of a sudden being generous
with their loot. In their final years of doing business, they use the money
2

For a Philippine study, see the monograph Media and Corruption by the Center for People

Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG), 2005.

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for philanthropic activities, like building hospitals and temples to pray.
“They do that as an act of washing what their hands did in the past,”
she claimed. This tradition called “repenting”, doing a lot of charity
with the money from corruption. “Buddha has similar kind of traditionin this case,” she maintained. Such is a gray area in ethics that Kunda,
at one point, was trying to introduce—with a certain amount of hesitation
because he also, by word and deed, was fighting against ‘moral elasticity’and ‘hypocrisy.”
Maria Hartinigsih of Kompas brought up the issue on the close
relationship between top editorial staff in media with political or militaryleaders and businessmen in the country. She mentioned one case inIndonesia that of the damaging hot-mud eruption caused bymismanagement of gas exploration. The corporation is owned by one
official of the coordinating ministry in the cabinet under President
Soesilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s administration.
The hot mud eruption so far has sunk 400 villages and thousands ofpeople have lost their houses and land. But, to Maria, the solution ofthis problem is not only giving compensation settlement and relocationof the people, because with their ownership of the land, the owners areattached to the land emotionally and psychologically.
In its report, however, the country’s most well-known and most credible
daily, did not probe into the issue. In a big newsroom meeting, theeditor-in-chief rebuked deputy head of regional desk because the report
was allegedly no more than a simple account from the field situation.
“Such an issue is already known to everybody else. Why do not we try
to find a solution so that this issue can be solved,” the chief editor
exclaimed. For year, Kompas has not published even a single word on
the scandal just because of the intimate connection of the top editorial
staff with those who were involved in the case.
In our discussion on integrity, Maria conceded that she feared to standup and to express her disagreement to her editor-in-chief. In her silence,
she had to ‘endure the guilt of being too cowardly.’ Maria promised to
do something as soon as she goes back to Indonesia. It was at this point
when Kunda proclaimed that media is practically ‘the fourth state,’wielding power over the people but with neither the legitimacy thatcomes from the people’s vote nor the accountability that goes withpublic office. The values that each journalist has to live by must be
entrenched in the mainstream media itself.

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It is easier said than done, as Nonaka Akihiro, one of our resource
persons, experienced when he spoke about what is ‘Required of
Journalism in Asia: From the Perspectives of an Independent Journalist.
‘Much of what we know about Asia,’ Nonaka complains, ‘is given to
us by western media: BBC, CNN, and Fox. The perspective iswestern…While we use TV to learn about what is happening in theworld, we do not really know what is the balanced view. He and otherself-ascribed ‘independent journalists’ have to struggle hard to achievesome difficult balance. This is especially true of Japanese mass media.
For example, the Japanese papers are told not to send reporters to Iraq.
But, Nonaka asserts, ‘If we believe that there is reason to be there, wewill go there.’ Sometimes they get arrested on the borders. They can
become hostage. They insist, however, that ‘we are responsible for ourwork. Our rule is: no rescue operation…Why do we say this? We arejournalists. We need to cover the war out there in the battlefield. So,
whatever happens to us, we are totally responsible. The government is
not responsible for what happens to us. Sometimes the governments
forget about the rules of journalism.’ Nonaka cites one example. He
inched his way to cover Iraq war. When he asked an American official
about the ‘body count’ of the war victims, the official apparently said,“We don’t count bodies here.’ If this is the situation, who is going toreport on the side of the victims? When a fellow confronted him witha question on objectivity and bias, Nonaka waxed philosophical: ‘In a
war like this, you cannot report with absolute objectivity. In democracy,
you should have many “biased” reports. There should not be only one
biased report. If you have several biased report, then you can have awider view of the world. We have a bias but in this democratic world,
we believe that our bias has a place and must be included.’This is integrity, but integrity that is not simplistically equated with
objectivity. One does not have to extremely astute to appreciate thisargument, especially if one realizes that although there is freedom of
expression in Asia, in reality, big corporations are still in control, notjust of media but also the military.
What all this and other discussions reveal is that the struggle for integrity
may be a complex combination of structural, technical, cultural, andpolitical forces, but it does not cease to be personal. There remains thereality of the persons, flesh and blood individuals and groups, whohave to embody the principles that they have discerned and decided to
be worth living for.

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Communities in Action

I know that framing the issue of corruption and integrity like this may
immediately spark a critique from those who would tend to reduce
corruption issues into questions of political structures at the expense of
personal values. While I strongly appreciate the absolute necessity of
institutional pressure, this sharing unashamedly focuses on the personal
dimension of holding fast to integrity. At the end of the day, it is still
persons, most often as individuals but also as communities, who carry
the burden of making integrity both a private commitment and a public
institution.