2001-09-16 - 6:47 p.m.
Just back from Tokyo, where I spent a weekend trying to escape the horrible thoughts and feelings brought on by Tuesday’s events. I don’t feel any better now than when I left on Friday, but it was good to divert my mind for a little while & good to spend time with people from Vassar. Friday night Rena took me and Lela to a lush and serene rooftop onsen (hot spring). It hardly felt like we were in the city at all. Rena’s mom had put out a ton of food for us to snack on, so we ate chips and drank white wine and watched a dumb American movie and tried to forget about the past week.
Then we turned on CNN and caught the end of the National Cathedral thing and the commentary that followed. It was the first American news coverage I’d seen on TV -- until then I’d been reading newspapers online for information. Watching that brief amount of American coverage, any desire I had to be in America during this horrible tragedy vanished. The coverage was so infuriating that I am not sure I would be able to control my anger if I had to watch this all the time in the US. I think the combination of racism, force-fed Christianity and excessive militarism coming from politicians and talking heads on TV would drive me crazy in about one second. I would have to agree with Michael Moore (www.michaelmoore.com) when he says that we have to ask the most difficult question: why? Those who died were certainly innocent, but that does not mean that the United States is innocent as a nation. These events did not happen in a vacuum, and they did not come out of nowhere. We cannot just go to church and drop a few bombs or even got to war and call it even. Our national memory is incredibly short, and our comprehension of our capacity for wrongdoing is woefully non-existent.
Oh, well the rest of the weekend was good -- went to the Yokohama Triennial, a massive contemporary art show, then Lela and I went to a birthday dinner party for a new Japanese friend we met at the parade a couple weeks back. We were, for the most part, blissfully removed from the US, though from time to time something would evoke a terrible thought. One of the pieces at the art show is an installation called “Petrified Forest.” First, you enter a room which is completely dark. Then, you walk through a curtain and you are in an office, florescent lights, desks, computers and everything -- except it has all be covered in concrete, which has been piled on sloppily as if it dropped from above. A week ago, this wouldn’t have struck me as creepy. At Lela’s apartment I looked at some American magazines from before last Tuesday -- US News and World Report, People, and they were full of articles on all sorts of things like cracking down on truancy, which seem so trivial now. Things seem to be either “before” or “after.” “Before” was charmed, smooth, predictable. “After” is scary, unclear, and out of control. I asked Lela if she was going to go to her high school reunions, and in the back of my head I wondered if there would BE any more high school reunions, if Bush takes us into WWIII. I try not to have these grim thoughts but I’m not sure what else to think. Tomorrow the weekend is over and I am back at school, where thankfully I’ll have a lot less time on my hands to contemplate the end of the world.
A couple of anecdotes about Japan’s reaction:
Saturday night, Lela and I went into a convenience store in Yokohama, and on the door was posted a sign in English which said that the company expressed its deepest sympathies to the people of the United States.
Friday at school, a 3rd year (9th grade) girl came up to me and asked me “how I thought” about what happened in New York. I told her that it was very scary. I asked her what she thought. She put her hands on her heart and said “Deeply pained. I cried.” “Me too,” I said. “Japan and America” she said, putting two fists up and bringing them towards each other, “fight together!”
