Last year was one of the deadliest for journalists. Will 2018 be any better? Al Jazeera's Media Institute launches a book to help reduce violence against journalists in the region.
by Awad Joumaa
24 Jan 2018
Telling the human stories from Syria, Yemen, Libya and other conflict areas means a vast number of reporters, citizen journalists and media activists find themselves pushed deeper into the ever-shifting conflicts.
In the Middle East, not a day passes without a journalist being pursued, censored, harassed, kidnapped, imprisoned or even killed.
Last year, at least 81 journalists were killed worldwide, according to the International Federation of Journalists and many more detained.
The Aljazeera Media Institute has published a new book that aims to contribute to the debate on war reporting in this region.
Journalism In Times of War, edited by Awad Joumaa and Khaled Ramadan, is rooted in the region.
By transferring the accumulated knowledge of the contributors based on decades of reporting, the publication brings together experienced reporters, citizen journalists and media activists in order to provide a practical manual for aspiring war correspondents and those who want to work in the field.
War Journalism – Lessons Learned and Practical Advice
PART 2
From the Digital Trenches: Transforming War Cove age
PART 3
Making Journalism Better and Safer
全部で13章ありますが、Tip Boxとして取材で気をつけることをまとめてくれている章もあります。
Chapter 6
Tales of a Local: Freelance Journalist in Yemen
By Muatasm Alhitari
Muatasm Alhitari
is a 26-year-old Yemeni journalist and TV cameraman. He started work- ing for Al Jazeera Arabic News Channel as a freelancer seven years ago. Later on, he joined a rights group that advocates for the protection of journalists in Yemen. Muatasm has also worked as a freelancer for inter- national media outlets such as BBC World. He is currently working as a freelance news fixer for Al Jazeera English.
As freelancer, you should take measures to improve your safety conditions while covering conflict. Here are some tips based on my own experience reporting on the Yemeni civil war:
1. Your personal safety is more important than any news or image
2.When armed groups are in control of a city, always hide your photography equipment
3. Avoid going to targeted areas and wait at least two hours after the shelling stops before going to cover the event
4. When hearing airplanes, you must immediately leave and watch what is happening from distance
5. If the shelling is close to your location, leave the place as fast as possible. Consider that any plane that has just dropped shells cannot do it again immedi- ately. It needs at least 10 minutes before resuming, so this gives you some time to run
6. If the shelling is happening where you are, do not run. Lie on the ground and take cover
7. If arrested by an armed group, always surrender and do as they tell you. Try to calm things down
8. In addition to taking hostile environment training, take first-aid sessions before going to the field
9. Without exception, wear protective head and chest gear when filming armed clashes
10. A golden rule is to try to stay away from direct armed confrontations
Digital Sherlocks: Open Source Investigation and New Verification During Wartime
By Christiaan Triebert and Hadi Al-Khatib
Chapter 11
Closing the Door on Inciting Violence: How to Avoid Hate Speech
By Ibrahim Saber
イエメンの日刊紙の副編集長の話でなるほどと思ったのは一番ありがたかったのは一般の人から支持を受けてた、the only way that you can protect yourself is by ensuring the public protects you. と語っていた部分です。政府による弾圧のところから抜粋します。
Chapter 1
A Struggle Within a Struggle: Media Coverage and Censorship in Yemen
Interview with Bashraheel Hisham Bashraheel
The Cost of Journalism: Personal Sacrifices
AJ: I want to get into the issue of the personal versus the public. During the old al-Ayyam battles, you and your family were in danger, how did you cope?
BB: Before I answer this, let me add another component to the equation. One of the major problems for newspapers is financial independence. The major problem that we face here in Yemen is that a lot of newspapers do not have a functioning financial system in place. The finances of any newspaper are critical to its survival and integrity. The independence of al-Ayyam hinged on that. We did several workshops for newspapers across the country around this issue. The goal was to explain the importance of media independence and how to achieve financial independence. If you are not financially independent as a newspa- per or media outlet, you are not independent.
Now, returning back to your question about sacrifices. The sacrifice my family and myself have made has been daunting. We paid a heavy price. As a journalist in Yemen, you face huge emotional stress. It is not just about you, but also your family.
My family, for example, was virtually under house arrest from 2008-2012. As a result, my children had to be home schooled, and there was always a threat someone would kidnap them. Attacks on our property were common. In 2010, the government launched an un- precedented attack on our home and our newspaper offices, in which they used canons, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and heavy weapons against our complex. They sur- rounded our printing facility and did not allow anything to go in or out. They confiscated our newsprint paper, and any shipments that came to the Aden port, without any legal justi- fication or court approval whatsoever. It was basically a military operation.
AJ: That is quite severe. Many journalists are used to being in-and-out of detention facilities at most. This is something else. What protective steps did you take?
BB: We had legal teams that worked for us on the case. More importantly, we had the support of the public. This helped us a lot. This is a critical point for any journalist: the only way that you can protect yourself is by ensuring the public protects you. This comes as a result of defending the interests of the public. In Yemen, we had wide public support.
Many people rallied around us, which I think curtailed the severity of the government crack- down against us.
I found this YouTube phenomenon fascinating because it is not always apparent that one’s individual memories and nostalgic longings are actually shared by many others. It is through the expression of intimate memories that a sense of a generational identity materialises and an emotional bond between strangers is fortified. In certain situations, such as political crises, economic shifts, revolutions and wars, this bond is mobilised in collective political action.
Within such contexts, childhood cartoons offer a convenient and accessible source of inspiration for reclaiming identity by adults. Childhood cartoons proved to be a familiar and intimate source of expression of a generational identity and memory, particularly as they were originally broadcast on TV within defined ‘children segments’, which meant they were watched by the young target audience at the same time on the same channel. Nostalgia towards these cartoons surpasses their content as it also includes a yearning for a lost family life and childhood sociability. The cartoon series also offer simplistic narratives about good versus evil, where the good always triumphs. Their plots lend themselves well to activism and revolutionary action, which rely on the idea that sacrifices are necessary for the greater good to prevail.
一例としてまんが猿飛佐助が紹介されています。オープニング曲がthe importance of patriotic sacrifice, national unity and themes about foreign occupationを喚起しているそうです。こういうオープニング曲をjingleと呼ぶようですね。
In the case of the Arab world, I note that the original cartoons as dubbed from Japanese already reflected a particular political culture. Some anime opening jingles, such as the Ninja boy Sasuke, referred to the importance of patriotic sacrifice, national unity and themes about foreign occupation. The beginning of the Arabic jingle translates to: Rise up, put your hand in my hand, rise up to defend your tomorrow and mine; we shall defend our land; with our blood we shall defend it. This original political and cultural Arabisation of the cartoons is another reason why they acquired a second life when new political circumstances presented themselves and when social media and digital technologies allowed now-adults to engage in different kinds of communicative practices.
アラビア語ではRise up, put your hand in my hand, rise up to defend your tomorrow and mine; we shall defend our land; with our blood we shall defend it. というかっこいい内容ですが、日本語オリジナルの歌詞はそんなことはなかったです。英語版のウイキペディアにも項目が立っていてヨーロッパやアラブ地域で放映されていたことがわかります。
(Wikipedia)
Manga Sarutobi Sasuke (まんが猿飛佐助) is a 24-episode anime series about the young Sarutobi Sasuke, a legendary ninja. It was first aired from October 9, 1979, to April 29, 1980 on Tokyo 12 Channel (now TV Tokyo), and was later dubbed in several languages. The whole 24-episode run was aired in many European and Arabic countries.
It is best known to the American fans as Ninja, The Wonder Boy: a highly edited, highly condensed feature-length version of this series. This version, dubbed in English, was produced by Jim Terry Productions of Force Five fame. The names of several characters were changed, with Sarutobi Sasuke becoming "Duke Hayakawa", his female companion Sakura being changed to "Blossom", and the villain Devilman became "Dragon."
However, the cartoons did not only animate the expression of defiant political action. They also reflected an overwhelming sense of loss and defeat over losing one’s country to war, and also of exile during the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis. Syrian refugees were forced to leave their country and cross seas and vast land territories. Most of the media coverage of this tragedy revolved around Europe, portraying it as Europe’s refugee crisis. Few cared to consider what Syrians may be feeling themselves, away from their beloved country. YouTube videos which appeared since 2014 offer a snapshot of the pain of exile. A number of these showed redubbed cartoons and anime characters made to express a sense of devastation. For example, one cartoon character, Silver, who is a pirate in the anime series Treasure Island, addresses his companion Jim in one sad scene. He tells him:
I am stuck at sea between Turkey and Greece. I want to seek asylum. The war in Syria has not ended yet… You know Jim, even if I reach Sweden; life is going to be miserable and void of meaning. I will live in a country that is not my own. I will yearn for Syria.
こちらのアニメも英語版のウイキペディアにも項目が立っていました。
(Wikipedia)
Treasure Island (宝島, Takarajima) is a Japanese anime television series developed with the 26 episodes for 23 minutes series that aired in 1978 and 1979 in Japan and in the mid-1980s in Europe, Mexico, South America & Arab World countries, based on Robert Louis Stevenson's novel of the same name.[1] In 2013 a movie compilation dubbed in English by Bang Zoom! Entertainment was available on the North American Hulu, but has since been removed. However, as of early 2016, TMS has made the 2013 compilation movie available to watch on YouTube for free
サウジの皇太子は光と陰があると紹介されていますが、光にあたる経済改革もうまくいくと考えるのが難しいみたいです。もしそうなれば絶大の支持を受けている若者が離反することになるので心配です。この書評で紹介されているサウジの役人は1日1時間しか働かない(He quotes a Saudi minister saying that the average government bureaucrat works one hour a day)といところは日本でも話題になりましたね。
For now, the domestic and foreign policy ambitions of MBS continue unchecked because, although he has alienated the traditional power brokers—the clergy, the business elite, and the quarrelsome royal factions—he is wildly popular among Saudis under thirty. No longer do young Saudis feel that they live in a backward country or a backwater compared to other Gulf States. But their continued enthusiasm is dependent on the economy delivering jobs and prosperity. In his chapter on the Saudi state in the age of austerity, Steffen Hertog points out that employment has previously been regarded as a form of welfare, and it will be hard to convert Saudis from jobs as largely idle bureaucrats in meaningless government positions into productive private-sector workers. (He quotes a Saudi minister saying that the average government bureaucrat works one hour a day). The structural obstacles are immense. “While the Saudi private sector has built real capacities since the 1970s, it mostly caters to a domestic market that relies on state-generated demand, and has developed production models that rely on state protection and state-provided subsidies,” he writes.
The air in Riyadh is choked with dust from the construction of a new subway and dozens of skyscrapers. The aim is to create a skyline like Dubai’s, but the danger is that many towers will lie empty if the ambitious plan to diversify the economy falters for lack of foreign investment. The Dubai parallel is limited because the Saudi royal family, as guardians of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, cannot allow what religious Saudis regard as the debauchery of the United Arab Emirates. The guardianship of Islam’s most holy sites remains essential to the Saudi sense of self. A group of grumpy old men I met at a livestock market just outside the capital told me that they could go along with newfangled ideas like movie theaters, but anything involving “alcohol and fornication” would be beyond the pale. It is no secret that some of the more than a million Saudis who visit Dubai annually indulge the pleasures of the flesh, but what happens in Dubai stays in Dubai and is regarded as entirely different from what is permitted at home.
If you stopped an American on the street and asked him or her to sum up the Saudi-American alliance in one word, it would probably be oil. They sell it, we buy it.
But this has not really been true, at least in the sense that people mean it, for decades.
During the Cold War, two oil exporters dominated global markets: Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union. And the United States relied heavily on imports. The Saudis cutting off sales, as they did in the 1970s over Israel, could cripple the United States.
So the United States desperately needed to keep the Saudis on their side, both for its own needs and to balance against Soviet energy dominance. Once the partnership was established, they worked to keep the reliable Saudi royal family in power.
None of this is quite true anymore. The Saudis make up a smaller share of the market, as other oil producers have come online. The United States now produces lots of its own oil. Its greatest source of imports is, by far, Canada.
Oil is traded on global markets — rather than country to country — that today have built-in shock absorbers, like strategic reserves. A Saudi cut-off wouldn’t be the catastrophe it once was, and there is no longer a threat of Saudi-Soviet (or Saudi-Russian) alignment.
Washington’s willingness to criticize the Khashoggi murder owes as much to the changing nature of the U.S.-Saudi relationship as to growing repression. Though the few defenders of the Saudi government have trotted out the standard arguments in favor of the U.S.-Saudi partnership — oil, regional politics, arms sales — these arguments are far less persuasive today than they were 35 years ago. The United States simply no longer needs a close relationship with Saudi Arabia to achieve its foreign policy goals and meet its energy needs.
Take oil. It’s true that Saudi Arabia remains among the world’s largest producers of oil, producing around a quarter of the world’s crude oil. And thanks to changing production patterns — notably the growth of shale oil production in the United States — America is far less directly dependent on Middle Eastern energy.
*******
America’s key interest in the Middle East is stability. Yet in recent years, Saudi foreign policy has far more often been destabilizing than stabilizing. Saudi Arabia is often portrayed as a bulwark against Iranian regional influence, but it’s unclear why a destabilizing reactionary Saudi foreign policy is any better than a revolutionary Iranian one. Just as Iran sponsors Hezbollah, Saudi Arabia has sponsored various militant groups in Syria. Iran meddles in Lebanese politics, while Saudi Arabia recently kidnapped the Lebanese prime minister. If America’s regional interest is stability — rather than simply taking sides — it doesn’t make sense to back either country in their regional aspirations.
*******
Even arms sales — a more contemporary argument in favor of a close partnership with Saudi Arabia — are no longer convincing. With his typical exaggeration, President Donald Trump cited $110 billion in arms sales and the resulting U.S. jobs as an excellent reason to maintain good relations with Riyadh. In fact, experts assess that Saudi arms sales are in reality worth only about $20 billion, while the 4,000 jobs created are a tiny fraction of the overall U.S. defense industry. With Saudi human rights abuses now regularly making headlines, it is much harder to justify the sale of offensive weapons to the kingdom.
All of your work deals with painful subjects. Would you like to highlight a pleasant side of life?
I used to shoot concerts. I have shot four Olympic Games and various sports. I think after the 2004 Olympics in Athens, I never did anything else. I do not have any internal need to shoot something different. I have decided to go to these places, to do these jobs at any cost, because obviously there is a cost. This year will be the 16th anniversary of the death of my best friend in Sierra Leone. I mean to say that I carry the scars of hardship on my body and on my soul.
I have chosen to do what I do because I want to relay these messages: “I want to be your eyes. I want to be their voice.” I want to be the eyes of the world in these places and to show what is happening so that nobody can say, “I had no idea.” I believe we should know about these events, which are not at all pleasant, rather than turning our heads away. These are things that are happening in our lives. We cannot close our eyes to reality.
I’m sorry, but reality is there and you have to look at it. Our world has a lot of ups and downs; not everyone is lucky. The fact that we have to live alongside people who are not so beautiful, or gifted, or lucky, or rich, to respect them, and if possible to help them, not to trip them up. That is what I want the world to understand.
Have you ever wondered if your work is worth the effort?
At first, I had very ambitious dreams – I was going to change the world, I would make it better – and I had great expectations of myself, my work and the world. Of course, at some point, I came down to earth, but, no, I have not been disappointed because I have seen a lot of changes.
Saving a person, sending a message to a small community, forcing a minister to resign is no small thing – you change the world. You can’t change the entire world, everything in one day, but by changing little pieces of it, I believe you make it better. And I have done that with my work many times.
All good things in moderation. In other words, every day I change little, or slightly larger, pieces and the world becomes a better place, as I imagine it – as a romantic. I have seen it happen.
One strategy pro-Assad bloggers use to discredit the White Helmets is to argue that the group is funded by governments that, in the bloggers’ view, are intent on regime change in Syria. Part of the White Helmets’ funding comes from the British government’s Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, which oversees various global projects such as building dams in Central Asia and preventing sexual violence during war. Le Mesurier confirmed that the total UK government funding of the White Helmets had been about £38.5 million ($51 million) over a five-year period to March 2018. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) provided about $33 million over a similar period. The Qatari Red Cross has made a donation of about $1 million to the White Helmets, and other funding comes from the German, Canadian, Danish, and Japanese governments. These funds support the group’s budget of approximately $30 million a year, much of which is spent on equipment such as ambulances, fire trucks, and heavy diggers to recover bodies from collapsed buildings, and stipends for individual White Helmet volunteers, which are $150 a month.
But the White Helmets’ financial backing is not the real reason why the pro-Assad camp is so bent on defaming them. Since 2015, the year the Russians began fighting in Syria, the White Helmets have been filming attacks on opposition-held areas with GoPro cameras affixed to their helmets. Syria and Russia have claimed they were attacking only terrorists, yet the White Helmets have captured footage of dead and injured women and children under the rubble. According to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as eyewitness accounts, Putin’s bombers have targeted civilians, schools, hospitals, and medical facilities in opposition-held areas, a clear violation of international law. “This, above all, is what the Russians hated,” Ben Nimmo, a fellow at the Atlantic Council specializing in Russian disinformation, told me. “That the White Helmets are filming war crimes.”
Conroy was where he wanted to be, but not in the manner he had intended. A day earlier, he had convinced Marie Colvin, the intrepid Sunday Times correspondent, that the situation in Baba Amr was too dangerous for them to stay. Colvin had agreed to leave on the condition that they visit the beleaguered hospital one more time. The day before that, Colvin had also made the fateful decision to speak to the BBC and CNN about the dire situation inside the siege. She was aware that the broadcast would reveal her presence to the regime, putting her life in danger. A Lebanese intelligence officer had earlier warned them both that regime troops had orders to execute any Western journalists on the spot. (New information suggests that Colvin was indeed actively targeted by the regime.)
The regime had failed to thwart their entry, but it was determined to prevent their exit. Early the morning after her last broadcast, the regime started its assault on the activist-run media center where Conroy and Colvin were housed. A former artillery gunner in the British Army, Conroy quickly judged that the barrage was targeted at the media center. But before he could warn Colvin, the center had taken a direct hit, killing Colvin and the French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik, wounding Conroy and others.
Yet this may be changing. Younger viewers appear to be less concerned about the face, or even the voice, as they watch news on devices, often with subtitles rather than voiceover. When it comes to conflict, the trend is toward raw, dramatic video, shot by local activists and journalists, showing bombs exploding and children being pulled from the rubble, often filmed by rescuers with helmet cameras. On the whole, the online viewer does not seem to mind that none of this is mediated by an on-the-spot reporter—when your story is competing with video games and Netflix, video is the draw rather than sober explication. The era of the star war correspondent who can stand in front of a camera and talk fluently while things go bang all around may be coming to an end.
As Western publications and channels economize by cutting back on foreign bureaus, it’s tempting to see digital forms of reporting as a substitute for sending in foreign correspondents. No reporter can discount WhatsApp, YouTube, and the myriad of modern ways to keep abreast of the story as it happens beyond our view, but “being there” remains of the essence. Arab-American reporters told Palmer that they operated at a huge advantage because they could emphasize whichever part of their cultural and linguistic identity helps them get the story, from expressing empathy (“I’m an Arab like you—I understand”) to pretending not to understand the language in the hope that people will speak to one another more freely, safe in the knowledge that the idiot reporter has no clue about what is going on. They have the equivalent cultural understanding to communicate to a Western audience.
The future of war corresponding, then, is hyphenated—Syrian- American, Lebanese-British, Iranian-French, Nigerian-Canadian—and probably more self-effacing. With their personal chronicle of war enhanced by evocative illustrations, initially forged through the medium of Twitter, Hisham and Crabapple show the potential of new methods of storytelling. Abouzeid’s understated bravery and ability to merge into the background speak to the power of immersive eyewitness reporting, foregrounding the experience of the people she meets and writing with modesty.
down by the waterやdown by the old harbourのように海沿いにあるレストランを表現している例をサイトでも見つけました。
Leverick Bay the restaurant down by the water
Brilliant restaurant down by the old harbour
restaurant down by the town hallとdownもあったので、down by ...（〜のそばを通って先にいったところにある） のように解釈したのでしょうが、downとby the town hallを別々に理解し、少し離れたところになる、市役所のそばにあると解釈したほうが会話の流れとして自然だと思うのです。
A popular restaurant down near the port with a large air-conditioned dining room and a big bunch of tables out on the sidewalk that's famous for its picadas.
There is a Mexican restaurant down near the water called Mamacita's. Be there at eleven o'clock tonight. You'll get what you need.
Kusama already holds the record for the highest price paid for a work by a living female artist. At 87, with two new exhibitions, she’s busier than ever
By Darryl Wee
Feb. 6, 2017 10:24 a.m. ET
A turning point finally came when she was chosen to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale in 1993, yet prices for her work did not rise significantly until the past decade. In the ’90s, “a 2-meter-by-2-meter painting from the ’60s sold for about $50,000, while a new work might have fetched $20,000,” says Ota. “Today, a new painting of that size would sell through a gallery for about $750,000, but often for more than $1 million at auction.” Fierce competition among her collectors has pushed other prospective buyers to the auction market, where prices are even higher: Kusama set a record for living female artists with the most expensive piece ever when her 1960 painting White No. 28 sold for $7.1 million at Christie’s in 2014.
Kusama recently received the Order of Culture, one of Japan’s highest honors, personally bestowed by Emperor Akihito in November. Such belated recognition is familiar terrain to Japanese contemporary artists, who are often passed over during their early days. The careers of younger artists like Takashi Murakami, 55, and Yoshitomo Nara, 57, have followed a similar pattern: Flee the constraints of Japan, build up a body of work and an audience in an international art capital and return to Japan to be validated after being feted by a foreign audience.
草間彌生が一般受けするのもセルフィー受けするからという人たちもいるみたいで映画評ではSkeptics would say that a sizable number of Kusama's new fans don't care about art nearly as much as they do about finding a novel backdrop for their next selfieと触れています。
Not that anybody is fretting too much today about Kusama's place in art history. Though Lenz addresses the failures and breakdowns to come, the film is eager to move toward Kusama's rediscovery, decades after her political Happenings, when retrospectives created new fans for her work. Social media, of course, eventually had much to do with this. Skeptics would say that a sizable number of Kusama's new fans don't care about art nearly as much as they do about finding a novel backdrop for their next selfie — and if that backdrop is a Kusama "Infinity Room" that multiplies the Insta-narcissist's image over and over into the horizon, so much the better. But the fickleness of fame and commerce aside, Kusama: Infinity presents a creative life that is worth exploring, even by those who've been scared away by the crowds.
Osamu Dazai is one of the most famous—and infamous—writers of 20th-century Japan. A Shameful Life (Ningen shikkaku) is his final published work and has become a bestselling classic for its depiction of the tortured struggle of a young man to survive in a world that he cannot comprehend. Paralleling the life and death of Dazai himself, the delicate weaving of fact and fiction remorselessly documents via journals the life of Yozo, a university student who spends his time in increasing isolation and debauchery. His doomed love affairs, suicide attempts, and constant fear of revealing his true self haunt the pages of the book and reveal a slow descent into madness. This dark tale nevertheless conveys something authentic about the human heart and its inability to find its true bearing.
“Dazai's reputation has not waned a bit in seventy years. Reading Mark Gibeau's brilliant translation will show you why.”
—Roger Pulvers, award-winning translator, film director, and author of LIV
“Certain novels evoke such a vivid sense of a character that it almost hurts to reach the end. This nuanced, engaging translation of Dazai Osamu's masterpiece A Shameful Life is just such a work: subtle and complex, it pulls the reader in and refuses to let go. Indeed, Mark Gibeau's helpful afterword left me wanting to turn right back to the first page and dig into the book again. A Shameful Life has that kind of power: it is Dazai at his finest.”
—Michael Emmerich, Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at UCLA
I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. I was born in a village in the Northeast, and it wasn’t until I was quite big that I saw my first train. I climbed up and down the station bridge, quite unaware that its function was to permit people to cross from one track to another. I was convinced that the bridge had been provided to lend an exotic touch and to make the station premises a place of pleasant diversity, like some foreign playground. I remained under this delusion for quite a long time, and it was for me a very refined amusement indeed to climb up and down the bridge. thought that it was one of the most elegant services provided by the railways. When later I discovered that the bridge was nothing more than a utilitarian device, I lost all interest in it.
Again, when as a child I saw photographs of subway trains in picture books, it never occurred to me that they had been invented out of practical necessity; I could only suppose that riding underground instead of on the surface must be a novel and delightful pastime.
I have been sickly ever since I was a child and have frequently been confined to bed. How often as I lay there I used to think what uninspired decorations sheets and pillow cases make. It wasn’t until I was about twenty that I realized that they actually served a practical purpose, and this revelation of human dullness stirred dark depression in me.
I can't understand how this thing called "human life" is supposed to work. I was born out in the country, in northeast Japan, so I was already fairly old by the time I saw my first steam engine. Back then I didn't realize that the bridges in the station were there simply to let people cross the tracks and get to their platform. I thought they were there to to give the station an air of sophistication and fun - like the playground. I maintained this belief for quite sometime, and clambering up and down those stairs always seemed to me the height of refined entertainment. Surely, I thought, this was the most considerate of all the services provided by the railroad. When I eventually discovered that they were nothing more than a practical set of stairs, my sense of delight vanished
Almost time, when I was a child, I saw an illustration of a subway. It never occurred to me that it might have been designed with some practical purpose in mind. I thought that people must have grown bored with riding above ground and the underground trains were built to provide new and exciting ways to travel.
I was a sickly child and often confined to my vet come flying to my bed. I remember lying there, gazing at the sheets, the pillowcase, the quilt cover and so on, wondering at their insipid designs. It wasn't until I was nearly twenty years old that I I realized that these things actually had a practical purpose, and, yet again, I was grieved by the dismal parsimony of humankind.
The Saudi Attorney General said on Friday night that the investigation showed the death of Saudi citizen Jamal Khashoggi during a fight in the consulate.
The Attorney General said in a statement that preliminary investigations on the case of Jamal Khashoggi showed his death, and that investigations continue with the detainees in custody of the case and the number so far is 18 people, all of Saudi nationality.
Ahmed Al-Asiri has been removed from his position in general intelligence and Saud Al-Qahtani from his advisory role at the Royal Court, royal decrees ordered.
ISTANBUL — The rulers of Saudi Arabia are considering blaming a top intelligence official close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, three people with knowledge of the Saudi plans said Thursday.
The plan to assign blame to Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, a high-ranking adviser to the crown prince, would be an extraordinary recognition of the magnitude of international backlash to hit the kingdom since the disappearance of Mr. Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi dissident. A resident of Virginia and contributor to The Washington Post, Mr. Khashoggi was last seen entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.
Blaming General Assiri could also provide a plausible explanation for the apparent killing and help deflect blame from the crown prince, who American intelligence agencies are increasingly convinced was behind Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance.
By Turki Aldakhil Al Arabiya News ChannelSunday, 14 October 2018
I read the Saudi statement in response to the American proposals regarding sanctions on Saudi Arabia. The information circulating within decision-making circles within the kingdom have gone beyond the language used in the statement and discuss more than 30 potential measures to be taken against the imposition of sanctions on Riyadh. They present catastrophic scenarios that would hit the US economy much harder than Saudi Arabia’s economic climate.
If US sanctions are imposed on Saudi Arabia, we will be facing an economic disaster that would rock the entire world. Riyadh is the capital of its oil, and touching this would affect oil production before any other vital commodity. It would lead to Saudi Arabia's failure to commit to producing 7.5 million barrels. If the price of oil reaching $80 angered President Trump, no one should rule out the price jumping to $100, or $200, or even double that figure.
An oil barrel may be priced in a different currency, Chinese yuan, perhaps, instead of the dollar. And oil is the most important commodity traded by the dollar today.
The United States’s aversion to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is more apparent in the current Trump administration, is the root of a predicament across the entire Arab world. The eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood is nothing less than an abolition of democracy and a guarantee that Arabs will continue living under authoritarian and corrupt regimes. In turn, this will mean the continuation of the causes behind revolution, extremism and refugees — all of which have affected the security of Europe and the rest of the world. Terrorism and the refugee crisis have changed the political mood in the West and brought the extreme right to prominence there.
There can be no political reform and democracy in any Arab country without accepting that political Islam is a part of it. A significant number of citizens in any given Arab country will give their vote to Islamic political parties if some form of democracy is allowed. It seems clear then that the only way to prevent political Islam from playing a role in Arab politics is to abolish democracy, which essentially deprives citizens of their basic right to choose their political representatives.
‘I heard they broke him ... they told me this he’s not going to be the same person again. They destroyed him,’ says source
Borzou Daragahi Tuesday 2 October 2018 15:25
Mr Zamel has been charged with serious offences, including membership of the Muslim Brotherhood, the outlawed international Islamist political group that renounced violence decades ago and once received the backing of the Saudi state.
According to the Saudi newspaper al-Riyadh, he was also charged with ties to Qatar, the tiny Arabian Peninsula nation that has had a cataclysmic falling out with the Saudi leadership. He’s also accused of “inciting and sowing sedition in society,” seeking the violent overthrow of the Saudi regime by calling for protests, and leaking “sensitive” information that could harm national security, as well as violating cyber law by “mobilising his followers on social media.”
As part of the plan, the Crown Prince wanted to pressure Saudi businesses into replacing expat workers with locals. But Mr Zamel – who at one point had close to one million followers on Twitter – warned that the plan would cause a recession by reducing demand.
“He dug into the economic aspect and concluded it was unworkable,” said Iyad al-Baghdadi, an Oslo-based Arab political activist.
Mr Zamel also criticised the Crown Prince’s plan to the take the country’s national oil company, Aramco, public to raise $2 trillion (£1.5bn). To reach such a valuation, Mr Zamel argued, the firm would have to sell off reserves, which he deemed not the property of the company.
At home, the roundup of prominent Saudis last fall at the Ritz-Carlton has led to capital flight and much reduced foreign investment. Confidence in the economy and the prince’s handling of economic issues is dropping. His signature plan to open up ARAMCO is now dead, the king having killed it. The prince arrests any independent voice — even if it is supporters of allowing women to drive, which he pushed for.
Fearing for his security, the crown prince is said to spend many nights on his half-billion-dollar yacht moored in Jeddah. It’s a floating palace longer than a football field and with many perks. It is also a potential escape hatch.
Why it matters: Ankara believes it has been successful in convincing global audiences that Khashoggi was murdered by officials closely linked to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. At the same time, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has yet to make an official statement about the case.
The dual game of leaks and official silence is widely seen as a bid to both embarrass and extract concessions from a geostrategic rival. Ankara and Riyadh are at odds over a wide range of issues, from Turkey's support for Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood to Ankara's staunch opposition of Saudi-backed Kurdish rebels in Syria. What exactly the Turks hope to gain from their negotiations with the Saudis remains shrouded in mystery.
Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy restricts almost all political rights and civil liberties. No officials at the national level are elected. The regime relies on extensive surveillance, the criminalization of dissent, appeals to sectarianism, and public spending supported by oil revenues to maintain power. Women and religious minorities face extensive discrimination in law and in practice. Working conditions for the large expatriate labor force are often exploitative.
Western Europe was a full year into the Great War, while the United States remained neutral. Although public sentiment veered strongly towards protecting fellow neutral nations like Belgium from German occupation, many Americans viewed the conflict as an imperialist quarrel between two equally unsympathetic foes. Despite a strong animus against what was widely perceived as a baldly nationalist venture by Kaiser Wilhelm, there was plenty of anti-British sentiment to balance that out. The sun had not yet set on the British Empire, and it was not at all clear to many Americans why they should support the nation they had fought so hard (and within the memory of living people’s grandparents) to overthrow. Irish-Americans in particular were outraged at the idea of an allegiance with Britain, as most of them had emigrated to America to escape conditions created by British rule, an offence that only deepened after the British government's brutal response to the 1916 Easter Rising. Neutrality also meant hat US citizens could contribute relief to victims in war zones, and the nation gave generously.
村上春樹の“Killing Commendatore”が発売されたことでニューヨークタイムズでも書評が出たりしていますね。この本はフィッツジェラルドのThe Great Gatsbyへのオマージュでもあるとか。“Gatsby” can be read as a tragic tale about the limits of the American dream.とあるように一般的にギャッツビーと聞けばアメリカンドリームの挫折みたいな連想があるみたいです。
You have said that “Killing Commendatore” is a homage to “The Great Gatsby,” a novel that, as it happens, you translated into Japanese about ten years ago. “Gatsby” can be read as a tragic tale about the limits of the American dream. How did this work in your new book?
“The Great Gatsby” is my favorite book. I read it when I was 17 or 18, out of school, and was impressed by the story because it’s a book about a dream — and how people behave when the dream is broken. This is a very important theme for me. I don’t think of it as necessarily the American dream, but rather a young man’s dream, a dream in general.
the belief that America offers the opportunity to everyone of a good and successful life achieved through hard work
（アメリカンヘリテージ）
American dream, also American Dream
An American ideal of a happy and successful life to which all may aspire: "In the deepening gloom of the Depression, the American Dream represented a reaffirmation of traditional American hopes" (Anthony Brandt).
an American social ideal that stresses egalitarianism and especially material prosperity
also : the prosperity or life that is the realization of this ideal
ウィキペディアではそのような意味の歴史的な変遷も含めて詳しく書いてくれています。
(Wikipedia)
The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States, the set of ideals (democracy, rights, liberty, opportunity and equality) in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, as well as an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers. In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement" regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.[1]
The American Dream is rooted in the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that "all men are created equal" with the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."[2] Also, the U.S. Constitution promotes similar freedom, in the Preamble: to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity".
When he promised to put America first in his inaugural speech, Donald Trump drew on a slogan with a long and sinister history – a sign of what was to follow in his presidency
The list of Trump-era jeremiads keeps growing: “The Road to Unfreedom,” “Can It Happen Here?,” “Fascism: A Warning” and now “How Fascism Works,” a slim volume by the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley that breezes across decades and continents to argue that Donald Trump resembles other purveyors of authoritarian ultranationalism.
Even the reader who finds much to admire in Stanley’s book may still wonder why he employs the term “fascist” so freely. In his epilogue, Stanley offers an answer. Citing a 2017 study in the journal Cognition, he observes that “judgments of normality are affected both by what people think is statistically normal and what they think is ideally normal.” Thus, if American politicians routinely associate Latino immigrants with murder and rape, Americans may grow less outraged by such accusations simply because they occur so often. Stanley supports this scholarly insight with a personal one, from his grandmother, a German Jew who wrote about the way Jews in Berlin psychologically accommodated themselves to Hitler’s rule as late as 1937: “We were still able to leave the country; we could still live in our homes; we could still worship in our temples; we were in a Ghetto, but the majority of our people were still alive.”
"First they came ..." is a poem written by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984). It is about the cowardice of German intellectuals following the Nazis' rise to power and subsequent purging of their chosen targets, group after group. Many variations and adaptations in the spirit of the original have been published in the English language. It deals with themes of persecution, guilt and responsibility.
The best-known versions of the speech are the poems that began circulating by the 1950s.[1] The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum quotes the following text as one of the many poetic versions of the speech:[2][3]
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
The Constitution once united a diverse country under a banner of ideas. But partisanship has turned Americans against one another—and against the principles enshrined in our founding document.
AMY CHUA AND JED RUBENFELD OCTOBER 2018 ISSUE
先鋭化している例として、建国の父の一人であるトーマス・ジェファーソンの奴隷所有を問題にして“The people vowing to protect the Constitution are vowing to protect white supremacy and genocide.”と黒人の運動家が主張するまでになっているというのです。公民権運動の時ではそんなことはなかったようです。
In recent years, however, the American left has become more and more influenced by identity politics, a force that has changed the way many progressives view the Constitution. For some on the left, the document is irredeemably stained by the sins of the Founding Fathers, who preached liberty while holding people in chains. Days after the 2016 election, the president of the University of Virginia quoted Thomas Jefferson, the school’s founder, in an email to students. In response, 469 students and faculty signed an open letter declaring that they were “deeply offended” at the use of Jefferson as a “moral compass.” Speaking to students at the University of Missouri in 2016, a Black Lives Matter co-founder went further: “The people vowing to protect the Constitution are vowing to protect white supremacy and genocide.”
Just a few decades ago, the cause of racial justice in America was articulated in constitutional language. “Black activists from Martin Luther King, Jr., to the Black Panthers,” wrote the law professor Dorothy E. Roberts in 1997, “framed their demands in terms of constitutional rights.” Today, the Constitution itself is in the crosshairs.
America is not an ethnic nation. Its citizens don’t have to choose between a national identity and multiculturalism. Americans can have both. But the key is constitutional patriotism. We have to remain united by and through the Constitution, regardless of our ideological disagreements.
There are lessons here for both the left and the right. The right needs to recognize that making good on the Constitution’s promises requires much more than flag-waving. If millions of people believe that, because of their skin color or religion, they are not treated equally, how can they be expected to see the Constitution’s resounding principles as anything but hollow?
For its part, the left needs to rethink its scorched-earth approach to American history and ideals. Exposing injustice, past and present, is important, but there’s a world of difference between saying that America has repeatedly failed to live up to its constitutional principles and saying that those principles are lies or smoke screens for oppression. Washington and Jefferson were slave owners. They were also political visionaries who helped give birth to what would become the most inclusive form of governance in world history.
One side has moved steadily leftward over the past decade, and many progressives are feverish with their own vision of tribal righteousness: identity politics. The escalation requires both sides to feed and perpetuate it. But only one side has turned a major political party over to an unapologetic leader who knows no limits. I could draw a pretty straight line from Newt Gingrich’s radicalism and the government shutdowns of the nineteen-nineties to the opportunistic majority opinion of Bush v. Gore, in 2000; the unstoppable rightward lurch from Jesse Helms to Jim DeMint to Ted Cruz; the nomination of Sarah Palin, in 2008; Mitch McConnell’s vow, in early 2009, to derail the Obama Presidency; the Senate Republicans’ abuse of the filibuster to block all Democratic legislation and appointments; the unleashing of dark money with Citizens United; the extreme gerrymandering and attempted voter suppression in Republican state houses, after the 2010 midterms; the stonewalling of Merrick Garland, in 2016; Republican leaders’ refusal to acknowledge Russian interference in that year’s Presidential election; and the final takeover of the Party by Trump.
On Wednesday, More in Common, a research organization based in Europe and the United States, released a report called “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape.” It builds on the group’s prior work in France, Germany, and Italy—an effort to understand and counteract rising populism and fragmentation in the Western democracies. Throughout the past year, the report’s four authors surveyed eight thousand randomly chosen Americans, asking questions about “core beliefs”: moral values, attitudes toward parenting and personal responsibility, perceptions of threats, approaches to group identity. The authors then sorted people, based on their beliefs and values, into seven “tribes”: Progressive Activists, Traditional Liberals, Passive Liberals, Politically Disengaged, Moderates, Traditional Conservatives, Devoted Conservatives. Progressive Activists, as described by the report, tend to be “younger, highly engaged, secular, cosmopolitan, angry.” The Politically Disengaged are “young, low income, distrustful, detached, patriotic, conspiratorial.” Moderates are “engaged, civic-minded, middle-of-the-road, pessimistic, Protestant.” Devoted Conservatives are “white, retired, highly engaged, uncompromising, patriotic.”
Desire for compromise split by Wings and Exhausted Majority
Differences in people’s underlying beliefs have always existed in healthy societies. Today, however, these differences are becoming more difficult to mediate. Liberals and conservatives are moving farther apart,1 and tribal tensions are boiling over more regularly in politics and media as well as in daily life.
The forces driving polarization have a variety of sources including economic insecurity, growing inequality, cultural and demographic change, and the weakening of local communities. Many people are feeling a loss of identity and belonging. Populists and extremists are exploiting these vulnerabilities by advancing us-versus-them narratives, often focusing on immigrants and refugees. Social media is heightening conflict in public debate and bringing extreme narratives into the mainstream.2
If we can better comprehend what lies behind our differences, we may prevent this polarization from spiraling out of control. Many Americans today suffer from deep injustices related to their race, sex, religion, sexuality and other facets of their identities. But productive national dialogue about these and other critical issues has reached an impasse, in large part due to the widening gap between the major ideological and partisan perspectives.
The goal of this report is to improve our understanding of this polarization and its underlying causes. It highlights the need to unite Americans of conflicting beliefs and values. These connections create empathy and put people’s opinions and beliefs into a more human context. This report tries to capture that human context by allowing Americans from every position on the political spectrum to speak for themselves.
Combating us-versus-them tribalism and polarization may be one of the greatest social and political challenges of the digital age. As much as building a just and democratic society requires thousands of initiatives large and small, so does defending one from these threats. It may well take a generation, but these efforts start with understanding how we can effectively counter this polarization.
This report is not intended to provide a blueprint for those efforts, but it shows how much such a blueprint is needed. We hope that by building on the insights in this report:
– Political candidates can speak to the values that unify the nation with a larger “we,” instead of mobilizing their base while polarizing the country.
– Activists and advocates can broaden their appeals to the underlying values of those they don’t usually reach.
– Philanthropists can invest creatively in the thousand points of light that can show us a way forward to counter polarization and develop robust evaluation measures to prove impact.
– Creative artists and media can spotlight the extraordinary ways in which Americans in local communities build bridges and not walls, every day.
– Technology companies can turn their vast resources and analytical tools to creating platforms and systems that help do the hard work of bringing people together, rather than the easy work of magnifying outrage in echo chambers and filter bubbles.
– Leaders in government, business and nonprofits can apply the lens of integration to every context where Americans are brought together - from schooling and town planning to office layouts and volunteer activities, creating spaces that connect people together across the lines of difference.
All these efforts, though small in their own way, are needed if we are to build stronger communities and a country more unified and more resilient to division. More in Common is one of many organizations that can help galvanize a much larger ecosystem of local and national solutions that can counter the forces of fragmentation and bring us together around all that we have in common.
アンカリーさんの記事によると、政府は強制収容所の生活をあたかも快適なもののように描いていたそうですが、恐らくその類の映像がありました。保守派のグレンベックの番組なのが気になりますが、2分30秒あたりにカリーさんの記事にある“We are protecting ourselves without violating the principles of Christian decency.”というナレーションもあります。
When the U.S. government held more than 120,000 civilians captive during World War II, it left an enduring stain on the nation.
BY ANN CURRY
People stayed in the assembly centers for months before they were moved, most by train, to 10 camps in remote mountains, deserts, and other inland areas. A government film produced at the time called it a “mass migration” to “pioneer communities” on desert lands “full of opportunity,” adding, “We are protecting ourselves without violating the principles of Christian decency.” The congressional commission that investigated the incarcerations later described it much differently, documenting “harsh” conditions, including “hard winters” and “unbearably hot and humid” summers in which people were forced to live in uninsulated and hastily built “tar paper barracks” that were “bleak” and “spartan,” with one room per family, in camps surrounded by “barbed-wire fences.” Military police manned watchtowers with machine guns and searchlights, and people perceived to be violating the boundaries were shot.
The Red Cross did not investigate the living conditions of regular prisoners
Late in the war, after D-Day and the invasion of Normandy, the Nazis permitted representatives from the Danish Red Cross and the International Red Cross to visit Theresienstadt in order to dispel rumours about the extermination camps. The commission that visited on June 23, 1944, included Swiss Red Cross representative Maurice Rossel, E. Juel-Henningsen, the head physician at the Danish Ministry of Health, and Franz Hvass, the top civil servant at the Danish Foreign Ministry. Dr. Paul Eppstein was instructed by the SS to appear in the role of the mayor of Theresienstadt.[48]
Weeks of preparation preceded the visit. The area was cleaned up, and the Nazis deported many Jews to Auschwitz to minimise the appearance of overcrowding in Theresienstadt. Also deported in these actions were most of the Czechoslovak workers assigned to "Operation Embellishment". The Nazis directed the building of fake shops and cafés to imply that the Jews lived in relative comfort. The Danes whom the Red Cross visited lived in freshly painted rooms, not more than three in a room. Rooms viewed may have included the homes of the "prominent" Jews of Theresienstadt, who were afforded the special privilege of having as few as two occupants to a room.[16] The guests attended a performance of a children's opera, Brundibár, which was written by inmate Hans Krása.[citation needed] The Red Cross representatives were conducted on a tour following a predetermined path designated by a red line on a map. The representatives apparently did not attempt to divert from the tour route on which they were led by the Germans, who posed questions to the Jewish residents along the way. If the representatives asked residents questions directly, they were ignored, in accordance with the Germans' instructions to the residents prior to the tour. Despite this, the Red Cross apparently formed a positive impression of the town.[16]
Following the successful use of Theresienstadt as a supposed model internment camp during the Red Cross visit, the Nazis decided to make a propaganda film there. It was directed by Jewish prisoner Kurt Gerron, an experienced director and actor; he had appeared with Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. Shooting took eleven days, starting September 1, 1944.[49] After the film was completed, the director and most of the cast were deported to Auschwitz. Gerron was murdered by gas chamber on 28 October 1944.[50]
The film was intended to show how well the Jews were living under the purportedly benevolent protection of the Third Reich. If taken at face value, it documents the Jews of Theresienstadt living a relatively comfortable existence within a thriving cultural centre and functioning successfully during the hardships of World War II. They had to comply and perform according to Nazi orders. Often called The Führer Gives a Village to the Jews, the correct name of the film is Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet ("Terezin: A Documentary Film of the Jewish Resettlement").[a] As the film was not completed until near the end of the war, it was never distributed as intended, although a few screenings were held. Most of the film was destroyed, but some footage has survived.[citation needed]
It may be one of the only true classics of Japanese fiction that most Japanophiles have never heard of. “No-No Boy,” a 1957 novel by Japanese-American writer John Okada, unravels the complicated, varied perspectives of Japanese-Americans in the aftermath of World War II under the shadow of the internment camps of the American northwest.
この書評でRuth Ozekiさんの前書きをa compelling, insightful forward by Ruth Ozekiと書いていましたが、彼女の思いが詰まったとても丁寧なものに仕上がっています。OzekiさんはA Tale for the Time Beingの小説で知られていますね。Amazonのなか見!検索で前書きも読めるので是非。
When I finally did read your book, at the age of forty-something, I was stunned. I'd grown up in the shadow of World War II. I knew about the internment, and I had a general sense of the world you describe in the novel, but I'd never felt it before. Your novel made me feel it. The way you told Ichiro Yamada’s story shocked me into realizing how profoundly shaped I'd been by the normative postwar assimilationist values that were so prevalent among people of Japanese heritage living in America, including my own family. This may sound unbelievable but I'd never realized, until I read your novel, that a Japanese American could be angry. Mad with rage, or just plain crazy! I thought the Japanese American emotional palette comprised more neutral shades: resignation, obedience, forbearance, sadness, nostalgia, regret.
Reading No-No Boy reminded me that history—and in this case, a history I thought I knew—is so much more than just facts.
しかし、no-no boyは現在からみて主流から外れた人を扱います。でもof course they had their reasons, which were various and complexとOzekiさんが書くようにそれぞれの事情があったんですよね。
But I didn't know that while many of the young men answered yes-yes to these two questions, some, like Ichiro, did not. I'd never thought about it until I read your book, but of course they had their reasons, which were various and complex. Some had family in Japan and did not want to have to kill a brother or a cousin in combat. Others were tripped up by semantics: they were Americans, so how could they forswear an allegiance to a foreign emperor they'd never pledged to begin with? And still others didn't understand why they should give their lives for a country that had branded them “enemy aliens,” stripped them of all rights of citizenship, herded up their families, corralled them like cattle, and forced them to submit to the draft.
Bird-killing programs at airports ramped up in response to 2009 accident when jetliner was forced to land in Hudson river after birds were sucked into engine
Associated Press in New York
Sat 14 Jan 2017 14.38 GMT
Nearly 70,000 gulls, starling, geese and other birds have been slaughtered in the New York City area, mostly by shooting and trapping, since the 2009 accident in which a jetliner was forced to land in the Hudson river after birds were sucked into its engine.
It is not clear whether those killings have made the skies any safer.
Birds took the blame for bringing down the plane that Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger landed on the Hudson river eight years ago this weekend, an event that inspired the Tom Hanks-starring, Clint Eastwood-directed movie Sully, a box office hit last year. They have been paying for it with their lives ever since.
The cruel decision to roundup and exterminate 751 Canada geese at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge last Monday was based on bad science, and counters the very definition of a "wildlife refuge."
By David Karopkin Published : July 15, 2012
The roundups are not humane in any way, and carbon dioxide asphyxiation of these birds is especially cruel. The goose meat donated to food banks under the guise of charity are unregulated and insufficiently inspected, in other words, potentially toxic.
The removals proceeded despite pleas from animal advocates, aviation experts, biologists, ecologists, and public officials, who agree that the removal of these birds will have no impact on the alleged risk posed to airplanes. Actually, the removals could even prove counterproductive, as other birds can be expected to reoccupy the newly created vacant habitat.
DNA testing by The Smithsonian Institute determined that geese which collided with Flight 1549, the "Miracle on the Hudson," were migrating from Labrador, Canada — and do not live in the area around the city's airports. Geese migrating through New York in January are distinct from the population of geese targeted by summer round-ups; even removing every animal in New York City would not have prevented the potentially horrific incident.
JEFFREY BROWN: Smith has been a professor at Princeton since 2005 and now heads its creative writing program, teaching small seminars to young poets in the making.
Here especially, she says, the emphasis is on how we use language.
TRACY K. SMITH: Yes, this is our library and one of our favorite classrooms.
I want them to start thinking that a poem isn't just an expression of all these things that you're feeling, but it's a set of choices that you're making in language.
So, every description, every question, every statement, every turn is a choice that opens up or closes off certain possibilities. And you don't always think about that when you're sitting down to write in the flush of emotion. But thinking about …
JEFFREY BROWN: Now Tracy K. Smith will have a prominent voice, a very public national platform, to reach new audiences.
If you think about the tumultuous times we're in technologically, all kinds of changes around us, if you think about the divisions politically at this moment, it seems like an appropriate moment to say, why poetry? Why bother? Why bother being a poet? What kind of impact could you possibly have, amidst all that?
TRACY K. SMITH: Mm-hmm.
I will say that a poem allows or requires you to submit to something else. Often …
JEFFREY BROWN: Submit means?
TRACY K. SMITH: That's one of the things we don't want to do, to say, OK, I'm not the expert. You're the expert. Let me listen. Let me respond to something that's completely counterintuitive for me, that pulls me toward a different sense of what's valuable.
I think, when we do that with a work of art, we're learning how to do that in real time with other people.
JEFFREY BROWN: Does that mean even making us better citizens?
TRACY K. SMITH: I think so. Poems remind us of that.
Poems remind us that someone is saying, come here. This has happened to me. This is how it made me feel. This is who I am in the wake of this thing.
And we all have stories like that. And they're important to honor, and they're important also to say, maybe my story helps me listen and cherish this other person's story, too.
The Hate U GiveというYA小説が話題になっていたのは知っていましたが、中年のYutaはどうしてもヤングアダルト小説というだけで敬遠していました。アメリカでは映画が公開されたそうですね。Yutaは映画館で予告編を見て、ようやくというか、Sorry to bother youの映画監督Boots Rileyが警察が黒人の味方のように描いたことに対してSpike Leeの映画を批判したことも腑に落ちました。
National Geographicの4月号には黒人が運転中に警察官に止められることが多いこと、その不安や屈辱を記事にしていました。この記事も目を通していたはずですが、自分の中で繋がらなかったんですよね。。。
Minorities are pulled over by police at higher rates than whites. Many see a troubling message: You don't belong.
BY MICHAEL A. FLETCHER
The first time my now 28-year-old son was stopped by police, he was a high school student in Baltimore, Maryland. He was headed to a barber shop when he was startled by flashing lights and the sight of two police cars pulling up behind him. The stop lasted just a few minutes and resulted in no ticket. It seems the cops just wanted to check him out. My son’s fear morphed into indignation when an officer returned his license, saying, “A lot of vehicles like yours are stolen.” He was driving a Honda Civic, one of the most popular cars on the road.
Shaken by cases in which seemingly routine traffic stops turn deadly, many black parents rehearse with their children what to do if they are pulled over: Lower your car window so officers have a clear line of sight, turn on the interior lights, keep your hands visible, have your license and registration accessible, and for God’s sake, let the officer know you are reaching for them so he doesn’t shoot you.
By German Lopez@germanrlopezgerman.lopez@vox.com Aug 8, 2016, 11:40am EDT
It’s known as "The Talk" — a discussion left almost exclusively to black parents and family members about police.
"It’s maddening," one black mother said. "I get so frustrated and angry about having to prepare my kids for something that they’re not responsible for."
"The Talk" was the topic of a New York Times video from 2015, explaining how black parents have to prepare their sons for police encounters — out of fear, mainly, that such interactions can go horribly wrong, ending with their son dead.
まさにこのThe Talkの場面はThe Hate U Giveでも出てくるそうで以下の動画では監督自ら説明してくれています。
On filming the scene where the children receive 'the talk' from their father
Tillman: You know, it was a very emotional scene. I remember Russell Hornsby, who plays Mav Carter, would choke up because he has kids himself. I have a 15-year-old son. So it was a very emotional time because in the African-American community, that is something that every kid have been through one way or another. For me, it was with my uncles and my dad. You know, they came out of the MLK riots, you know, in '68 with family members in Detroit and Milwaukee, Wis. So all those things were planted inside me.
So in the movie, you know, it's two young kids who actually hearing the scene for the first time. It was just emotional. This deals with history. This deal with survival and how we can continue to stay on this earth without police brutality or being shot or being killed. You know, this is part of the fear of the African-American community.
The Hate U Giveがどんな本かは渡辺由佳里の書評を読んでいただきたいのですが、その書評でもこの場面が取り上げられています。
When I was 12, my parents had two talks with me. One was the usual birds and the bees. The other talk was about what to do if a cop stopped me.
Mama fussed and told Daddy I was too young for that. He argued that I wasn’t too young to get arrested or shot. Starr-Starr, you do whatever they tell you to do, he said. Keep your hands visible. Don’t make any sudden moves. Only speak when they speak to you.
None of this mattered. At the time of Ms. Buck’s institutionalization, the United States was swept up in a mania for eugenics. Part of the obsession was driven by xenophobia: Nativists feared that the sudden influx of immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe would make thin gruel of hearty American stock.
But the movement, because of its supposed reliance on science to improve society, also found champions in the progressive and intellectual elite, including Alexander Graham Bell, Margaret Sanger and Theodore Roosevelt.
America in the early 20th century was awash in reform. As giant corporations took root, so too did calls to check their power. Laws were passed setting maximum hours and minimum wages, limiting child labor, preserving natural resources and breaking up the “trusts” that were said to be destroying fair competition. Not all of these laws worked out as planned, and some were eviscerated in the courts. But a new force had been unleashed, aiming to serve the greater good not by destroying big business but by curbing its abuses.
Progressivism was always more than a single cause, however. Attracting reformers of all stripes, it aimed to fix the ills of society through increased government action — the “administrative state.” Progressives pushed measures ranging from immigration restriction to eugenics in a grotesque attempt to protect the nation’s gene pool by keeping the “lesser classes” from reproducing. If one part of progressivism emphasized fairness and compassion, the other reeked of bigotry and coercion.
“Imbeciles,” by Adam Cohen, the author of “Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America,” examines one of the darkest chapters of progressive reform: the case of Buck v. Bell. It’s the story of an assault upon thousands of defenseless people seen through the lens of a young woman, Carrie Buck, locked away in a Virginia state asylum. In meticulously tracing her ordeal, Cohen provides a superb history of eugenics in America, from its beginnings as an offshoot of social Darwinism — human survival of the fittest — to its rise as a popular movement, advocating the state-sponsored sterilization of “feebleminded, insane, epileptic, inebriate, criminalistic and other degenerate persons.” According to the New York attorney Madison Grant, whose immensely influential 1916 tract, “The Passing of the Great Race,” became standard reading for eugenicists — Hitler himself is said to have called it “my bible” — about 10 percent of Americans produced unworthy offspring and had to be stopped.
Scholars are mapping the international precursors of Nazism.
By Alex Ross
American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featured them in “The Great Gatsby.” (The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having evidently read Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 tract “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” says, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged.”) California’s sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934. There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American and German technologies of death. In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.” Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.
When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether. For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality. The Immigration Act, too, played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America. In 1938, President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of European refugees; this was held in Évian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive change resulted. The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it “astounding” that other countries would decry Germany’s treatment of Jews and then decline to admit them.
"You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy," I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. "Can't you talk about crops or something?"
I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way.
"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read 'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"
"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
"Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be--will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."
"Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we----"
"Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things."
"We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.
アメリカの優生思想がナチスに影響を与えたことを取り上げた本として、New Yorkerの記事でThe Nazi Connectionがあげられていましが、War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Raceという本の抜粋がガーディアンで読めました。ヒトラーのMein Kampfでの該当箇所です。
The Nazis' extermination programme was carried out in the name of eugenics - but they were by no means the only advocates of racial purification. In this extract from his extraordinary new book, Edwin Black describes how Adolf Hitler's race hatred was underpinned by the work of American eugenicists
Edwin Black
Fri 6 Feb 2004 02.36 GMT
Hitler displayed his knowledge of American eugenics in much of his writing and conversation. In Mein Kampf, for example, he declared: "The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of clearest reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane act of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings, and consequently will lead to a rising improvement of health as a whole."
Mein Kampf also displayed a familiarity with the recently passed US National Origins Act, which called for eugenic quotas. "There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but [the US], in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigrants on principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalisation, it professes in slow beginnings a view that is peculiar to the People's State."
An adage in publishing is that you can never go wrong with books about Lincoln, Hitler, and dogs; an alternative version names golfing, Nazis, and cats.
As for Hitler and America, the issue goes beyond such obvious suspects as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model,” with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s “The American West and the Nazi East,” a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “The Nazi Connection,” which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking. This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.
The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.” To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies. The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.
America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated. He made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion. The Volga would be “our Mississippi,” he said. “Europe—and not America—will be the land of unlimited possibilities.” Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer farmer-soldier families. Autobahns would cut through fields of grain. The present occupants of those lands—tens of millions of them—would be starved to death. At the same time, and with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticization of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’s less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors.
Jim Crow laws in the American South served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense. Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies. Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type. “Race Law in the United States,” a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans. Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications. Why not simply say what one means? This was a major difference between American and German racism.
National Geographicの記事でも20世紀初頭での日本人の扱いについて触れています。露骨な人種差別があったんですが、トランプ政権になって新たな意味を帯びてきています。
When the U.S. government held more than 120,000 civilians captive during World War II, it left an enduring stain on the nation.
On May 7, 1900, San Francisco Mayor James Duval Phelan had said, “Chinese and Japanese are not bona fide citizens. They are not the stuff of which American citizens can be made.”
The American Federation of Labor lobbied Congress to legally exclude all “Mongolian” labor. An editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle agreed: “Our first duty is to preserve America for the Americans and the white races whom we can assimilate, and whose children will have the American standard of life.”
A pattern soon emerged, constraining the freedoms of people of Japanese ancestry. First, immigration from Japan was limited by an unwritten agreement. Japanese people were not allowed to own land in California. It became illegal for anyone with Japanese ancestry to marry a Caucasian. Then, in 1924, Congress approved an immigration ban on all Asians, including Japanese people, saying that they could not become citizens, no matter how long they lived in the United States. Only their children, if born in the U.S., could be citizens, as guaranteed by the Constitution. The nation’s leaders made it clear that Japanese people were not wanted in America.
New Yorkerの記事で登場していたJames Q. Whitmanの“Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law”はちょうど翻訳が出たばかりでした。
In the 1930s, the Germans were fascinated by the global leader in codified racism—the United States.
IRA KATZNELSON
NOVEMBER 2017 ISSUE
薄い本なのでコスパが悪いのですが（汗）早く内容を知りたかったので翻訳本の方を読みました。センセーショナルに書くのではなく、できるだけ冷静にナチスへの影響を探ろうとしています。ナチスのニュルンベルク諸法成立に絞ったものなので、あらゆるナチスの蛮行がアメリカに着想を得たものではありません。記事にあった“everybody does it” justificationを持ち出しても意味がありませんし、アメリカを悪の帝国と描くのも単純かし過ぎですが、世界大戦の頃の歴史の見直しはしいつでも必要かもしれません。
Ms. Rich is the Tokyo bureau chief of The New York Times.
Oct. 6, 2018
TOKYO — Just over 40 years ago, when my family moved from California to Tokyo, the fact that my mother was Japanese did not stop schoolchildren from pointing at me and yelling “Gaijin!” — the Japanese word for foreigner — as I walked down the street.
After seeing my red-haired, blue-eyed father, a shopkeeper in the suburb where we lived asked my mother what it was like to work as a nanny in the American’s house.
この記者も大坂なおみが受け入れられたのは控えめな態度があったからではないかと見ています。
Ms. Osaka’s popularity in Japan appears to depend in part on what commentators see as her quintessentially Japanese behavior. She has repeatedly been praised for her humility, with the media zeroing in on her apology for winning against Ms. Williams.
Shortly after we arrived in Tokyo, I went out to dinner with a white American friend of my parents who is the mother of two daughters with her Japanese husband. When I asked what it had been like for them to grow up here as “hafu,” she suggested I should adjust my language. She tells her children that they should never think of themselves as less than, but more. Instead of “hafu,” she said, she calls them “double.” That works for me.
The central conceit – of a man giving up his treasured possessions for more days of life – has potential, but the treatment is illogical and increasingly frustrating
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 27 July, 2016, 8:15am
Selected not by our hero but rather his Mephistophelean doppelganger, each item represents the foundation of our hero’s relationship with someone close to him. With their disappearance, there also goes his connection with his ex-girlfriend (Aoi Miyazaki), best mate, father and so on.
While this is a fascinating plot device, narrative logic simply doesn’t follow through. The lack of telephones would have a far greater impact on society than simply two teens never meeting. With each new bargain comes a beautifully crafted disappearance sequence, but so too the story becomes increasingly frustrating.
Raising a Flag over the Reichstag is a historic World War II photograph, taken during the Battle of Berlin on 2 May 1945. It is assumed to show Meliton Kantaria[A 1] and Mikhail Yegorov[A 2] raising the flag of the Soviet Union atop the Reichstag building. The photograph was reprinted in thousands of publications and came to be regarded around the world as one of the most significant and recognizable images of World War II. Owing to the secrecy of Soviet media, the identities of the men in the picture were often disputed, as was that of the photographer, Yevgeny Khaldei, who was identified only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It became a symbol of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.
Censorship
After taking the symbolic photo, Khaldei quickly returned to Moscow. He further edited the image at the request of the editor-in-chief of the Ogonyok, who noticed that Senior Sergeant Abdulkhakim Ismailov, who is supporting the flag-bearer, was wearing two watches, which could imply he had looted one of them, an action punishable by execution.[6][18] Using a needle, Khaldei removed the watch from the right wrist.[1][6] He also added to the smoke in the background, copying it from another picture to make the scene more dramatic.[1]
The photograph of Russian troops hoisting the red flag over burning Berlin is recognised as one of the most famous wartime images.
Sixty three years after the photograph was taken, a new exhibition in Germany reveals the image was doctored to protect the soldier from the wrath of Joseph Stalin.
By Rukmini Callimachi, Jeffrey Gettleman, Nicholas Kulish and Benjamin Mueller
Oct. 5, 2018
In the midst of a global reckoning over sexual violence, a woman who was forced into sexual slavery by the Islamic State and a Congolese gynecological surgeon were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their campaigns to end the use of mass rape as a weapon of war.
The award went to Nadia Murad, 25, who became the voice and face of women who survived sexual violence by the Islamic State, and to Dr. Denis Mukwege, 63, who has treated thousands of women in a country once called the rape capital of the world.
'Offers powerful insight into the barbarity the Yazidi suffered alongside glimpses into their mystical culture . . . this is an important book by a brave woman, fresh testament to humankind's potential for chilling and inexplicable evil' Ian Birrell, The Times
'Courageous . . . Anyone who wants to understand the so called Islamic State should read' The Economist
With a foreword by Amal Clooney
A Nobel Peace Prize nominee and the first Goodwill Ambassador the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking of the United Nations and winner of the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize, Nadia Murad is a courageous young woman who has endured unimaginable tragedy (losing eighteen members of her family) and degradation through sexual enslavement to ISIS. But she has fought back.
This inspiring memoir takes us from her peaceful childhood in a remote village in Iraq through loss and brutality to safety in Germany. Courage and testimony can change the world: this is one of those books.
Digging deep to ensure that materials are responsibly sourced.
We’re proud to be recognized as a worldwide leader in the responsible sourcing of minerals in our products. In 2010, we were the first company to map our supply chain from manufacturing to the smelter level for tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold (3TG). We were also the first company to publish a list of the smelters in our supply chain. In 2014, we started mapping for cobalt and completed that mapping in 2016. In 2017, for the second year in a row, 100 percent of our identified 3TG and cobalt smelters participated in a third-party assessment program. We do this to make sure minerals in our products are responsibly sourced following standards set by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and other internationally recognized human rights instruments. Our efforts consider conflict, human rights, and other risks as we go above and beyond what’s required by law.
The Enough Project ranked Apple number one worldwide across all sectors in recognition of our efforts to develop conflict-free mineral supply chains in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The narrator of this book has a grade four brain tumour, we are told, and only has days to live. That is, until the devil appears, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, and offers him a trade-off: he will be given an extra day of life if he chooses one thing to eliminate from the world. He accepts the bargain, sacrificing phones, films, clocks – but he draws the line at his beloved cat, Cabbage. A warm, quirky novel that has sold more than a million copies in Japan, it reflects on life, love, family estrangement and what remains when we are gone with levity and a surprising emotional charge. Kawamura’s message is clear without being didactic: look around you, embrace those you love and enjoy life while you can.
アロハシャツって英語だとHawaiian shirtの方が普通のようですね。
(Wikipedia)
The Aloha shirt, commonly referred to as a Hawaiian shirt, is a style of dress shirt originating in Hawaii. It is currently the premier textile export of the Hawaii manufacturing industry.[citation needed] The dress shirts are printed, mostly short-sleeved, and collared. They usually have buttons, sometimes for the entire length of the dress shirt and sometimes just down to the chest (pullover). Aloha dress shirts usually have a left chest pocket sewn in, often with attention to ensure the printed pattern remains continuous. Aloha shirts may be worn by men or women; women's Aloha shirts usually have a lower-cut, v-neck style. The lower hem is straight since the shirts are not meant to be tucked in.
小説を英訳する場合は読み進めてもらうことも大事ですから、日本語を忠実に訳せばいいというわけにはいかないので大変そうです。特に日本固有のものを扱う場合には。例えば、きのこの山と、たけのこの里なんかはどうでしょう。英訳だは素直にそれぞれをMountain Mushrooms、Bamboo Shoot Villageとそのまま訳していましたが、以下の部分では割愛しています。馴染みがないでしょうからthe boxes of chocolateだけで十分と判断したいのでしょうか。また「福引の景品」のところでも(more like compensation for not winning the big prize)と補足説明しています。日本人なら、きのこの山と、たけのこの里が福引きの当たりというよりは残念賞に近いものというのは言わなくても分かりますが、馴染みがない人向けに補足説明したのでしょう。
I had won the boxes of chocolate in a raffle in the local shopping center a few days earlier (more like compensation for not winning the big prize), and they had sat there on the table ever since. When you think about it, it is kind of a weird concept for a brand of chocolate biscuits. It was no wonder the Devil was confused.
“Ah, yes. I've heard about how much humans love chocolate, but I didn't realize they'd taken it this far. Why in the shape of mushrooms and bamboo shoots?”
But no, it wasn’t a dream. He was actually talking. And the he who was speaking was definitely Cabbage. And for some reason he sounded so refined… It was hard to know exactly what was going on.
Another thing I wondered about was how was it that Cabbage came to speak like an upper-class gentleman. Then suddenly I knew.
It was Mom’s influence.
Around the time Cabbage first came to live with us as a kitten, Mom suddenly got into TV period dramas. (This was during the “My Boom” of the late 1990s when it seemed like everyone was adopting short-lived obsessive interests.)
She would watch popular long-running series and declare that “all Japanese men should be like this”.
Along with her personal “boom’ came outdated theories about Japanese masculinity.
“Sorry, Mom, but I really prefer films to TV shows.”
I politely refused her offers to join in with her historical drama obsession.
What's the point of living without the things you enjoy?
ByLaurenon 20 September 2018
Format: Paperback
I had to read this story the second I saw the word 'cats' and I honestly can't think of much worse than a world without cats. When I started reading this book, I realised it was full of humour and straight away it was a put off as I don't read 'funny' things, but within a couple of chapters you realise that humour is just such a small part of the story and really the main part is looking at how different the world would be if objects were taken away from it. The protagonist is dying, but he can live an extra day by removing something from the world. Now this would be easy if for example you could say 'get rid of my dirty dishes', but no, it's things that have a lot more impact on our everyday lives such as phones. The protagonist goes from doing everything to stay alive for longer, to realising that either way death will eventually come for him anyway and what's the point of life without all these things we enjoy. This book does need a proofreader as I found a lot of grammatical errors and I wish there was just a chapter or two more of it to see the reconciliation, but I still can't take a star off for these as the story was so beautiful and heartbreaking all in one.
********
Cute, quirky little novelette
ByBookish Laraon 20 September 2018
Format: Paperback
For a quirky little novelette, this actually brought home and few home truths and was quite insightful.
I expected it to be a funny homage to cats, but no, it was all about what "things" we need, what "things" make us happy, how relationships are built & fall and the endless question what is this life actually worth.
It has a Japanese sense of humour running through it and I really liked that. It's self-deprecating in a very relatable and English way.
My favourite sentence is "Like love, life is beautiful because it has to end".
TIMEの記事ではJapanese-British-Argentine actor Sonoya Mizuno as Araminta Leeとシンガポール人でない人物がキャスティングされていると批判の対象になってしまったそうです。。。
Given its ambitions, it’s unsurprising that Crazy Rich Asians has been held to high standards. It was criticized before a single scene was shot—specifically for the casting of British-Malaysian actor Henry Golding as Nick and Japanese-British-Argentine actor Sonoya Mizuno as Araminta Lee. But the litigation of whether mixed-race actors are “Asian enough” has overshadowed the number of cast and crew members who are Straits Chinese, such as Lim, Yeoh, associate producer Janice Chua, actor Tan Kheng Hua and Ronny Chieng, who was born in Malaysia, grew up in Singapore and cinched the multi-national life of his character Edison Cheng by attending law school in Australia. “We strived very hard to match the perfect accent to every actor, and I think we did a pretty amazing job, but sometimes we had to make concessions,” Kwan says. “Like, this actor was amazing, but he’s not going to sound like he went to Hong Kong’s top boarding school his whole life.”
Honjo said that curiosity and not hastily believing something must be true were always in the back of his mind while doing research.
"I think it is important to continue until one can confirm the results with one's own eyes," Honjo said. "One has to think for oneself and pursue the research until one is satisfied."
「教科書を信じない」だけ切り取って広めると「教科書が教えない〜〜」とトンデモ系に流れてしまうので、YutaとしてはTurst, but verifyという文脈で受け止めたい言葉です。
(Wikipedia)
Trust, but verify
Trust, but verify (Russian: Доверяй, но проверяй; Doveryai, no proveryai) is a Russian proverb. The phrase became well known in English when used by President Ronald Reagan on multiple occasions in the context of nuclear disarmament.
翻訳でもTurst, but verifyという態度は必要で、少しでも「おやっ」と思うところがあれば変なあら探しという意味ではなく事実などを確認したほうがいい場合があります。
ー『Fresh Off the Boat』と比べて、『クレイジー・リッチ！』の撮影はいかがでしたか？
全然違ったわ。唯一の共通点と言えば、20年かけて初めて手にしたTVドラマの役がアジア系アメリカ人で、25年経ってやっと手にした主演映画の役もアジア系アメリカ人だった、ってところかしらね。デジャヴみたいな、変な気分よ。でもね、『Fresh Off the Boat』の登場人物はみな子供を持つ親か、子供でしょ。どっちかというと仕事という感じ。毎週末、子供と大暴れする、なんてこと実際にはないもの。でも『クレイジー・リッチ！』はプロジェクトに関わっている感じだった。単なる仕事じゃなく、情熱を注いだプロジェクト。私にとっては、まさに天のお告げを受けたみたいだったわ。
The ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ star talks tokenism, representation and why this movie is a watershed moment
By AMY X. WANG
What was it like working on Crazy Rich Asians, coming from Fresh Off the Boat?
Totally different. The only similarity for me is, for some reason I was on the first network TV show in over 20 years to feature an Asian-American cast, and now I was leading the first studio movie in over 25 years to ever have an Asian-American cast. So it felt like a weird déjà vu. But you know, a lot of the people on Fresh Off the Boat either have children or are children, so that’s more like a job. You can’t be talking about getting wasted on the weekends with kids. Whereas Crazy Rich Asians felt like a movement. It was a passion project, it wasn’t just a job. I know for me, it felt like a calling.
Totally different. The only similarity for me is, for some reason I was on the first network TV show in over 20 years to feature an Asian-American cast, and now I was leading the first studio movie in over 25 years to ever have an Asian-American cast.
日本語訳だとウー本人が掴んだ役柄のように感じますが、ここではto feature an Asian-American cast / to ever have an Asian-American castとcastという集合名詞ですから、TVドラマや映画がアジア系を中心にキャスティングしているということですよね。
例えば、次の動画でも50秒あたりからそのようにウー本人が語っています。
8月にTIMEでもカバーストーリーになりましたが、そこでも映画をthe first modern story with an all-Asian cast and an Asian-American lead in 25 years、TVドラマをto feature Asian-American leads since Margaret Cho’s show All-American Girl in 1994と紹介していますね。
The much-anticipated movie signals a major step forward for representation—and for the industry
By Karen K. Ho
August 15, 2018
To many in Hollywood, Crazy Rich Asians might look like a risky bet. It’s the first modern story with an all-Asian cast and an Asian-American lead in 25 years; the last, The Joy Luck Club, was in 1993. It’s an earnest romantic comedy in a sea of action and superhero films. It features two leads who are new to movies: Wu, an actor most recognizable for her role on the ABC series Fresh Off the Boat, and Henry Golding, a virtual unknown who last worked as a travel host for the BBC. And it makes use of a multilingual script that flips seamlessly from English to Cantonese to Mandarin and back again.
******
Wu is, nonetheless, grateful. With her experience on Fresh Off the Boat, the first network comedy to feature Asian-American leads since Margaret Cho’s show All-American Girl in 1994, the Taiwanese-American actor has now had the unique experience of being featured in two milestone projects about Asian Americans. This matters to her. Both she and the film’s director, Jon M. Chu, she says, are Asian-American pioneers. “We are not supporting roles,” Wu says. “We are stars on our own journeys.”
