動画の冒頭でA hundred dolphins beached themselves on the shoreline north in Tokyo.と言っているようにbeachが動詞として使われています。意味については言うまでもないですが、beach oneselfのような使い方は日本人の作文では難しいでしょうね。
（ロングマン） beach [transitive] 1 to pull a boat onto the shore away from the water 2 if a whale beaches itself or is beached, it swims onto the shore and cannot get back in the water
（オックスフォード） beach [transitive, intransitive] beach (something) to come or bring something out of the water and onto the beach He beached the boat and lifted the boy onto the shore. a beached whale (= one that has become stuck on land and cannot get back into the water)
ロングマンがa whale beaches itself or is beachedと説明しているように、At least 150 dolphins were beachedと受動態で報じているニュースもありました。
At least 150 dolphins were beached and stranded in the northeastern coast of Japan this Friday morning. Beach goers and volunteers have been working to rescue all the dolphins to no avail.
beach itselfとbe beachedに意味においての違いはそれほど顕著にはないのでしょう。be stranded on a beachと表現されていることもあるようですし。。。
TOKYO — About 150 dolphins beached themselves and became stranded on Japan’s northeastern coast, but frantic rescue efforts Friday saved just a few of them.
Mostly melon-headed whales or blackfish, the dolphins were found alive but were extremely weak and later died.
Tadasu Yamada, a cetacean expert at the National Museum of Nature and Science, told Japan’s NHK public television that the dolphins may have had a physiological or psychological problem and faced an unknown threat and panicked, before becoming stranded.
Smaller beachings have occurred around Japanese coasts, including some 50 dolphins on a nearby beach in 2011.
beachの動詞の意味は頻出ではないので、別に知っておくべきではないでしょうが、今回のbeach oneself / be beached / beachingのように単語の柔軟な使われ方には慣れておきたいですね。
When Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe travels to Washington at the end of this month, he’s sure to bring with him an upbeat message about the successes of Abenomics and how he intends to have Japan make a “proactive contribution to peace.” But Americans should listen carefully to what he has to say about national security. Mr. Abe is giving Japan’s foreign policy its most extensive face-lift since Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida defined the country’s foreign policy shortly after World War II.
Viewed from Tokyo, the world today is more uncertain and dangerous than it was during the Cold War. Under that bipolar system, Japanese could be confident that any Soviet threat against them would be taken as a direct challenge to the U.S. What worried a pacifist Japanese public was not the possibility that the U.S. might abandon Japan but that the alliance might entangle Japan in conflicts it wanted no part of.
Now the stability of a bipolar world order is no more. China has arisen as a great power, intent on growing its economy, its military and its political influence. North Korea has nuclear weapons, and before long may have many more along with missiles capable of reaching not just Japan but also the continental U.S.
安倍政権の安全保障の方針を３つにまとめています。XXX has three prongs: to A, to B, and to Cといった書き方はまねできそうです。何もfirst, second, and thirdを毎回使う必要はないんですね。ただ一番言いたいことは、次のパラグラフのBut以降のようです。
The Abe national-security strategy has three prongs: to have Japan do more for its own defense, to do more to contribute to and strengthen its alliance with the U.S., and to build security ties with Australia, India, the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam and other countries in Southeast Asia. If Mr. Abe were to resign tomorrow, this basic security strategy would not change. It is being driven by the imperatives generated by the international situation, not by this prime minister’s personality.
But there is something missing here, and that is a fourth prong that seeks with empathy and boldness to bring about reconciliation with China and Korea. One will find little disagreement in Asia with the argument that the U.S.-Japan alliance is indispensable for maintaining peace and security in the Asia Pacific. But long-term Asian stability and a peaceful environment are not going to be possible if Japan and China each assumes the worst about the other’s intentions and acts accordingly.
カーティスさんは過去の反省をしっかり演説に盛り込むことを期待しているようです。
It is entirely appropriate that Prime Minister Abe in his address to Congress should emphasize the successes of Abenomics and the strength of the U.S.-Japan alliance. But he can move beyond that to give an important and even historic speech, saying what needs to be said about history, expressing his sense of tremendous remorse for all who were victims of Japanese aggression. He can remind his audience that the Japanese people’s rejection of militarism and authoritarianism and steadfast commitment to democracy and peaceful diplomacy for the past 70 years offers more poignant testimony to Japan’s repentance for the nation’s wartime policies than any words could convey.
The U.S.-Japan bilateral relationship is arguably in better shape now than it has ever been. The issue now is how to embed this alliance in an Asia-Pacific community that is at peace and is prosperous.
Instead, a historical talk of comfort women and visits to Yasukuni shrine threaten to reduce Asian appetites to work more closely with Japan. They also provide an opportunity for China to rally regional opposition based on a sense of shared grievance.
This would be unfortunate, especially because Japan is otherwise pushing on an open door. Most countries in Asia today seek what Japan and the U.S. also desire: a strong economic and diplomatic relationship with China secured by more capable militaries and ever-closer defense ties with each other.
The prime minister’s speech to Congress will provide a unique opportunity to sketch out a vision for Japanese leadership in Asian security affairs. By reducing the distractions and emphasizing the positive role Japan and its neighbors can together play, Mr. Abe can set an agenda for the U.S.-Japan alliance and for Tokyo’s regional ties. It’s a chance not merely to cite history, but to make it.
カーティスさんは中国との協力のためにも歴史問題と向き合うように、保守派の方は日本がリードするためにも歴史問題と向き合うように要請しているように思えます。立場は違っても、歴史問題を無視するなというメッセージは同じようです。保守派の方の最後にあったIt’s a chance not merely to cite history, but to make it.はなかなかうまい表現ですが、まさにそのような機会にしてもらいたいですね。
（英辞郎） have a steep learning curve 〔技術などが〕容易に習熟できる、覚えやすい◆【直訳】（縦軸を習熟度、横軸を時間としたグラフにおいて）急こう配の学習曲線を持つ ⇒ 少ない練習量（練習時間）で高い習熟度（または学習効果）を得る。◆【注意】「急こう配の学習曲線」を「険しい道のり」と誤解して、「習得するのが難しい」という意味で用いる人がいる。
（オックスフォード） learning curve the rate at which you learn a new subject or a new skill; the process of learning from the mistakes you make We have all been through a steep learning curve to master the new procedures.
（マクミラン） learning curve the rate at which you learn something a steep learning curve (=when you have to learn something complicated in a very short time)
（ケンブリッジ） a huge/sharp/steep learning curve › a situation in which someone has to learn a lot in a short period of time:
It took three days — three long, often confusing and frustrating days — for me to fall for the Apple Watch. But once I fell, I fell hard.
First there was a day to learn the device’s initially complex user interface. Then another to determine how it could best fit it into my life. And still one more to figure out exactly what Apple’s first major new product in five years is trying to do — and, crucially, what it isn’t.
It was only on Day 4 that I began appreciating the ways in which the elegant $650 computer on my wrist was more than just another screen. By notifying me of digital events as soon as they happened, and letting me act on them instantly, without having to fumble for my phone, the Watch became something like a natural extension of my body — a direct link, in a way that I’ve never felt before, from the digital world to my brain. The effect was so powerful that people who’ve previously commented on my addiction to my smartphone started noticing a change in my behavior; my wife told me that I seemed to be getting lost in my phone less than in the past. She found that a blessing.
Smartphones gave us the wondrous ability to take the Internet anywhere. But they’re not always productive. In fact, they’ve become like cigarettes, leaving us itching for the latest affirmation from Instagram or Twitter. I found I spend 4.3 hours each day looking at my phone—good grief, even on vacation.
So the company that invented the iPhone has a solution: Buy another gadget! That irony didn’t escape me a week ago when I began wearing an Apple Watch, on loan before they become available on April 24. Do I really need another connected screen blinking, beeping and buzzing all day?
I’ve found the Apple Watch isn’t a replacement for the iPhone, but it’s the right screen for many important things. I only look at it in blips, for rarely more than five seconds. It shows me the weather with one finger swipe. It gets physical, gently tapping my wrist when something important needs my attention and lighting up when I lift my arm to look. It nudges when I’ve been sitting too long.
You can grok all of this in an hour or two, but you’ll definitely want someone to show it to you. Once I learned the basics, I found a surprising number of things I could do faster or better on my wrist than by pulling out my phone: • Making sure I don’t miss that email from mom, or another VIP. • Dictating a text message. • Communicating an emotion, either through a set of cheesy animated icons—I’m talking jazz hands in mime gloves—or tapping with two fingers to literally share a simulation of your heartbeat. Maybe we’ll get to blow a kiss in Version 2. • Buying something: Tap twice on the watch’s side button to activate Apple Pay. • Checking on the weather or news through “glances,” available by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. • Asking virtual assistant Siri a question. • Controlling music, and sometimes even video, on my phone, Bluetooth headset or Apple TV. • Taking a photo: A wrist app gives a live view of your iPhone’s high-quality rear camera—so you can set the phone up for a better selfie. • Answering a call: Talking to your wrist might look funny, but it’s a remarkably good speakerphone, and you can switch over to your iPhone mid-call if you’d like.
本年は戦後70年に当たります。先の戦争では，太平洋の各地においても激しい戦闘が行われ，数知れぬ人命が失われました。祖国を守るべく戦地に赴き，帰らぬ身となった人々のことが深く偲ばれます。 This year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, which brought fierce fighting to various parts of the Pacific Ocean, resulting in the loss of countless lives. Our thoughts go out to all those who went to the battlefields to defend their countries, never to return home.
私どもはこの節目の年に当たり，戦陣に倒れた幾多の人々の上を思いつつ，パラオ共和国を訪問いたします。 In this milestone year, reflecting upon those many people who fell in battle, we will visit the Republic of Palau.
終戦の前年には，これらの地域で激しい戦闘が行われ，幾つもの島で日本軍が玉砕しました。この度訪れるペリリュー島もその一つで，この戦いにおいて日本軍は約1万人，米軍は約1，700人の戦死者を出しています。太平洋に浮かぶ美しい島々で，このような悲しい歴史があったことを，私どもは決して忘れてはならないと思います。 In 1944, the year before the end of the war, fierce battles took place in the region, and Japanese forces fought to their deaths on many islands. The island of Peleliu, which we will visit on this trip, was one of those islands. Some 10,000 Japanese soldiers and 1,700 American soldiers lost their lives there. We believe that we must never forget that those beautiful islands in the Pacific Ocean have such a tragic history.
私どもは，この機会に，この地域で亡くなった日米の死者を追悼するとともに，パラオ国の人々が，厳しい戦禍を体験したにもかかわらず，戦後に，慰霊碑や墓地の清掃，遺骨の収集などに尽力されてきたことに対し，大統領閣下始めパラオ国民に，心から謝意を表したいと思っております。 At the same time, taking this opportunity, we wish to offer our heartfelt thanks to His Excellency the President and all the people of Palau, for, although they suffered the ravages of war themselves, the people of Palau worked hard after the war to care for the memorial cenotaphs and cemeteries and to collect the remains of the fallen.
終わりに，この訪問の実現に向け，関係者の尽力を得たことに対し，深く感謝の意を表します。 Finally, we would like to express our deepest gratitude to all those who worked so hard to make this visit possible.
ちょうどイアンブルマの上記の本を読み終えました。「廃墟の零年1945」の訳書が出たばかりでありますが、こちらの本も大変読みごたえがありました。１９９０年代の湾岸戦争のころの戦後５０周年を控えたドイツと日本で敗戦の経験をどのように捉えていくか、左・右のどちらに偏ることなくバランスよく取り上げていて面白かったです。今週末はYear Zero A History of 1945も読み進めたいと思います。
The orange is so vivid it is as though you have at last gone beyond things that are coloured orange to the colour itself, particularly in the passages where the torii gates are just a few feet apart, or in one extraordinary sequence many paces long of gates only inches apart, a tunnel of total immersion in orange (vermillion say some of the accounts, but I saw pure intense orange). Nearly every gate bears black inscriptions on one side, and if I could read Japanese I might’ve read individual business people and corporations expressing their gratitude, because rice and prosperity and business are all tied up together in the realm of the god Inari, but I couldn’t. The place was something else to me.
I had the impression midway through the hours I spent wandering, that time itself had become visible, that every moment of my life I was passing through orange gates, always had been, always would be passing through magnificent gates that only in this one place are visible. Their uneven spacing seemed to underscore this perception;
スマホのようなテクノロジーの便利さを徹底的に考えるにはその欠乏状態を自ら体験してみることは今後の発想に絶対役立ちます。one way to write about something like that is consider its absence.と語ったのはステーションイレブンを書いたマンデルさんです。
Station Eleven is about a travelling Shakespearean theatre company in a post-apocalyptic North America and the reason I picked that theme was that I really wanted to write about the life of an actor. I’m interested in an idea about what it means to devote a life to art and I love films and theaters. And I thought it would be interesting to write about the modern world, this incredible apparatus of technology and infrastructure that we take for granted. And of course, one way to write about something like that is consider its absence.
What would you turn to after the apocalypse? Author Emily St John Mandel on how Shakespeare fits into a post-pandemic era... I wanted to write a love letter to the modern world – the high-speed trains, internet, antibiotics, electricity, mobile phones, all of these wonderfully useful things that we take for granted. I’ve always loved post-apocalyptic novels, and it occurred to me that one way to consider the modern world would be to write about its absence. So, Station Eleven is about a travelling Shakespearean theatre company in a post-apocalyptic North America. It’s also about friendship, love, what it means to devote a life to art, what remains when civilisation crumbles, music, oppressive dinner parties and knife-throwing. The narrative moves back and forth in time between the years leading up to a societal collapse, and a point in time 20 years later when the travelling company moves between the settlements of the altered world performing Shakespeare and music.
AN INCOMPLETE LIST: No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.
No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.
No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment.
No more countries, all borders unmanned.
No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.
No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space.
ドナルドキーンさんが訳された小田実の「玉砕」の英訳を読んでいて、軍歌が登場していました。ちょうど桜の季節でもあり、“What It means to be an Infantryman”というタイトルや歌詞が気になったのでオリジナルを見てみました。
They automatically drew up in two ranks and, at a word of command from Nakamura, immediately began to sing. First of all, of course, cam “What It means to be an Infantryman”:
Ten thousand clusters of cherry flowers Blossom on your collars — * Storm winds blow the blossoms in Yoshino, And you, who have been born sons of Yamato, Will scatter like blossoms in skirmish formation.
How many times had Nakamura sung that song since he first joined the army as a regular soldier? And how many more times would he be able to sing it before he died? Of course, he'd go on singing it until he died.
「歩兵の本領」が“What It means to be an Infantryman”となるとは、吉野や大和という名詞を聞いただけで日本人はあるイメージがわきますが、外国人にはピンとこないかもしれません。そのようにキーンさんも感じたのか、以下のような注記が入っていました。
* The collar of the infantryman was white, suggesting cherry blossoms. Yoshino was the most celebrated place in Japan for these blossoms. Yamato (in the next line) was a poetic name for Japan
The Meaning of life is continually being dried up, as it were, and left for dead in the human mind by the operation of a purely discursive intellectual activity, of which language -- builded, as it is, on the impact of sense perceptions -- is the necessary tool. This discursive activity is inseparable from human self-consciousness, out of which it would kill, alike the given Meanings of which language, at its early stages, still retains an echo, and the meanings which individual poets have inserted into it later by their creative activity in metaphor. 'Language', wrote Emerson, in a flash of insight which covers practically all that has been written in these pages, 'is fossil poetry.' Living poetry, on the other hand – the present stir of aesthetic imagination – lights up only when the normal continuum of this process is interrupted in such a manner that a kind of gap is created, and an earlier impinges directly upon a later – a more living upon a more conscious.
It is doubtless for this reason that the absolute has often been identified with the infinite. Suppose that I wished to communicate to some one who did not know Greek the extraordinarily simple impression that a passage in Homer makes upon me; I should first give a translation of the lines, I should then comment on my translation, and then develop the commentary; in this way, by piling up explanation on explanation, I might approach nearer and nearer to what I wanted to express; but I should never quite reach it. （中略） It follows from this that an absolute could only be given in an intuition whilst everything else falls within the province of analysis. By intuition is meant the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known, that is, to elements common both to it and other objects. To analyze, therefore, is to express a thing as a function of something other than itself. All analysis is thus a translation, a development into symbols, a representation taken from auccessive points of view from which we note as many resemblances as possible between the new object which we are studying and others which we believe we know already. In its eternally unsatisfied desire to embrace the object around which it is compelled to turn, analysis multiplies without end the number of its points of view in order to complete its always incomplete representation, and ceaselessly varies its symbols that it may perfect the always imperfect translation. It goes on, therefore, to infinity. But intuition, if intuition is possible, is a simple act.
In its eternally unsatisfied desire to embrace the object around which it is compelled to turn, analysis multiplies without end the number of its points of view in order to complete its always incomplete representation, and ceaselessly varies its symbols that it may perfect the always imperfect translation. It goes on, therefore, to infinity. But intuition, if intuition is possible, is a simple act.
サブタイトルに使われたChina’s most authoritarian leader since Maoというキャッチーな部分は以下に説明があります。
But, a quarter of the way through his ten-year term, he has emerged as the most authoritarian leader since Chairman Mao. In the name of protection and purity, he has investigated tens of thousands of his countrymen, on charges ranging from corruption to leaking state secrets and inciting the overthrow of the state. He has acquired or created ten titles for himself, including not only head of state and head of the military but also leader of the Party’s most powerful committees—on foreign policy, Taiwan, and the economy. He has installed himself as the head of new bodies overseeing the Internet, government restructuring, national security, and military reform, and he has effectively taken over the courts, the police, and the secret police. “He’s at the center of everything,” Gary Locke, the former American Ambassador to Beijing, told me.
As for a broad diplomatic vision, Chinese leaders since Deng Xiaoping have adhered to a principle known as “Hide your strength, bide your time.” Xi has effectively replaced that concept with declarations of China’s arrival. In Paris last year, he invoked Napoleon’s remark that China was “a sleeping lion,” and said that the lion “has already awakened, but this is a peaceful, pleasant, and civilized lion.” He told the Politburo in December that he intends to “make China’s voice heard, and inject more Chinese elements into international rules.” As alternatives to the Washington-based World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Xi’s government has established the New Development Bank, the Silk Road infrastructure fund, and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, which, together, intend to amass two hundred and forty billion dollars in capital. Xi has been far bolder than his predecessors in asserting Chinese control over airspace and land, sending an oil rig into contested waters, and erecting buildings, helipads, and other facilities on reefs that are claimed by multiple nations. He has also taken advantage of Putin’s growing economic isolation; Xi has met with Putin more than with any other foreign leader, and, last May, as Russia faced new sanctions over the annexation of Crimea, Xi and Putin agreed on a four-hundred-billion-dollar deal to supply gas to China at rates that favor Beijing. According to the prominent editor, Xi has told people that he was impressed by Putin’s seizure of Crimea—“He got a large piece of land and resources” and boosted his poll numbers at home. But, as war in Ukraine has dragged on, Xi has become less complimentary of Putin.
A decade ago, the Chinese Internet was alive with debate, confession, humor, and discovery. Month by month, it is becoming more sterilized and self-contained. To the degree that China’s connection to the outside world matters, the digital links are deteriorating. Voice-over-Internet calls, viral videos, podcasts—the minor accessories of contemporary digital life—are less reachable abroad than they were a year ago. It’s an astonishing thing to observe in a rising superpower. How many countries in 2015 have an Internet connection to the world that is worse than it was a year ago?
********* To maintain economic growth, China is straining to promote innovation, but by enforcing a political chill on Chinese campuses Xi risks suppressing precisely the disruptive thinking that the country needs for the future. At times, politics prevails over rational calculations. In 2014, after China had spent years investing in science and technology, the share of its economy devoted to research and development surpassed Europe’s. But, when the government announced the recipients of grants for social-science research, seven of the top ten projects were dedicated to analyzing Xi’s speeches (officially known as “General Secretary Xi’s Series of Important Speeches”) or his signature slogan: the Chinese Dream.
これを機に読みたいなと思っていたAge of Ambitionを読了しました。中身の濃い本で相当エネルギーを使いました。一般の人々を扱ったものかと思ったら、芸術家のAi Weiweiや盲目の弁護士陳 光誠、クレージーイングリッシュの李陽など、日本でも知られた人を大きく扱っていて、政治と賄賂、インターネットと監視など中国の現状を丁寧に取材しています。新幹線事故や正義のサンデル教授が中国でも熱狂的に受け入れられているエピソードなども入っていて、中国に詳しくない人でも読み進められる工夫がなされています。
CITATION Evan Osnos vividly depicts the hopefulness and disappointments, clarity, and confusion that we have come to recognize in China’s dazzling drive toward modernization and economic sustainability. With potently spare observations, he introduces the reader to individuals ensnared in a variety of ways in the complexity and contradictions of the country’s evolution. Engrossing and edifying, this book succeeds admirably in answering the question, “What, in the end, is the idea of China?”
ABOUT THE BOOK In Age of Ambition, Evan Osnos describes the greatest collision taking place in China: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control. He asks probing questions: Why does a government with more success lifting people from poverty than any civilization in history choose to put strict restraints on freedom of expression? Why do millions of young Chinese professionals—fluent in English and devoted to Western pop culture—consider themselves “angry youth,” dedicated to resisting the West’s influence? How are Chinese from all strata finding meaning after two decades of the relentless pursuit of wealth? Osnos follows the moving stories of everyday people and reveals life in the new China to be a battleground between aspiration and authoritarianism, in which only one can prevail.
Sometimes China is compared to the Japan of the 1980s, when a hundred square feet in downtown Tokyo sold for a million dollars, and tycoons were sipping cocktails over ice cubes shipped from Antarctica. By 1991, Japan was in the largest deflation of assets in the modern history of capitalism. But the similarities run thin; when Japan's bubble burst, it was a mature, developed economy; but China, even overheated, remains a poor country in which the average person earns as much as a Japanese citizen in 1970. At other moments, China's goose- stepping soldiers, its defectors and its dissidents, recall the Soviet Union or even Nazi Germany. But those comparisons are unsatisfying. Chinese leaders do not threaten to "bury" America, the way Khrushchev did, and even China's fiercest nationalists do not seek imperial conquest or ethnic cleansing.
China reminds me most of America at its own moment of transformation- the period that Mark Twain and Charles Warner named the Gilded Age, when "every man has his dream, his pet scheme." The United States emerged from the Civil War on its way to making more steel than Britain, Germany, and France combined. In 1850, America had fewer than twenty millionaires; by 1900 it had forty thousand, some as bumptious and proud as James Gordon Bennett, who bought a restaurant in Monte Carlo after he was refused a seat by the window. As in China, the dawn of American fortune was accompanied by spectacular treachery. "Our method of doing business," said the railway man Charles Francis Adams, Jr., a grandson and great- grandson of presidents, "is founded upon lying, cheating and stealing." Eventually, F. Scott Fitzgerald gave us the slippery tale of James Gatz of North Dakota, who catapulted himself into a new world, in doomed pursuit of love and fortune. When I stood in the light of a new Chinese skyline, I sometimes thought of Gatsby's New York-"always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world."
Chinese leaders do not threaten to "bury" America, the way Khrushchev didの部分は以前ブログ記事で取り上げました。読書を進めるにはいろいろな知識があったほうがいいですね。まえがきの最後が印象的です。西洋と東洋とか、市場主義と社会主義というよりも中国はthe struggle to define the idea of Chinaに取り組んでいるんだ、というところです。
The story of China in the twenty- first century is often told as a contest between East and West, between state capitalism and the free market. But in the foreground there is a more immediate competition: the struggle to define the idea of China. Understanding China requires not only measuring the light and heat thrown off by its incandescent new power, but also examining the source of its energy- the men and women at the center of China's becoming.
Michael, by contrast, saw his own life as an epic fable of frustration and triumph. He wrote, “I was extremely lonely and confused from 2002 to 2007. I wanted to be someone great. I didn't want a commonplace life … Was I really destined to be a failure? What should I do? Maybe I was doomed to be an ordinary person.” The prospect of conformity offended him. He wrote, “Why should I be like everyone else, just because I was born to a poor family?” He framed the study of English as a matter of moral entitlement. He told his students, “You are the master of your destiny. You deserve to be happy. You deserve to be different in this world.”
等身大の人形が住民より多い徳島の集落 ドイツ人制作のドキュメンタリー、海外でも話題に【画像】 The Huffington Post | 執筆者： 中野渉 投稿日: 2014年06月06日 06時49分 JST ドイツの映画制作者フリッツ・シューマンさんのドキュメンタリー映像「Valley of Dolls（人形の谷）」が、海外で話題となっている。徳島県の山あいの限界集落で等身大の人形を作り続ける女性と、人形を捉えた作品だ。
I visited Nagoro in November 2013 to film my documentary, Valley of the Dolls, and to introduce Tsukimi’s strange creations to a Western audience for the first time. When I arrived, Nagoro was eerily silent. There were no murmurs or conversations, no humming of machines, and no shouts of playing children. Only the Iya River made a steady noise, gushing down its valley. The lone road to the town is just a single lane, twisting and turning alongside the mountain and shrouded in complete darkness at night. A visiting car is a rare sight in this village, situated high in the mountains and one hour away from the next traffic intersection. Yet, almost all travelers who pass through stop once they see the dolls. Tsukimi made all her dolls by hand out of wood, cotton, old paper, and donated clothes. She says that for her, the lips are one of the hardest parts to get right. “A little tweak and they can look angry,” she told me. But, “I’m very good at making grandmothers. I pull the strings at the mouth and they smile.” At least 70 of her dolls sit, stand, or crouch just outside her house and she has placed another 20 inside her living room. The rest are scattered throughout the village and the eastern side of the Iya Valley. Altogether, Tsukimi believes she has created at least 350 dolls over the last eleven years. But she hasn’t kept count and isn’t sure that number is right. The dolls, which initially served as scarecrows, last up to three years, so she has had to fix and replace them quite often. Sometimes, she even forgets where she has put them.
The Japanese government has been aware of the looming ghost-town problem—of shrinking communities in mountain regions or islands—since the 1960s, when mass urban migration first began. Over the years, Tokyo has passed a number of laws and reforms to address the lack of development in remote areas. But most of them failed or were shortsighted.
The government’s initial approach in the 1960s was to create self-supporting communities that do not require outside aid or labor to survive. In the case of Nagoro, a dam was built to power the valley, which largely lacked electricity even late into the second half of the twentieth century. For a time, the concept of self-sustainability worked. Several hundred people moved back to Nagoro and the town thrived. But after construction wrapped up, they all left for the cities again. The dam still stands.
Since the self-support era, Tokyo has introduced at least one new plan a decade to improve rural development. Ideas have ranged from providing financial incentives to attract returnees to creating more construction projects. The current approach, introduced by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s administration in the early 2000s, harks back to the idea of self-sustaining communities. This plan promotes local agriculture and food production. The concept is to use empty spaces for farming, which could create jobs, generate tourism, or, at the very least, provide a pastime and livelihood for senior citizens. That would, in turn, create a market for healthy, locally produced food, in which urban areas might show interest.
