Letters Exchanged between KENZABURO OE and EDWARD W. SAID
>From Oe to Said
Japan's youth should avoid assimilation into cultural imperialism
My dear Edward Said,
On New Year's Day, I participated as a commentator in Tokyo in a debate on satellite television by some youths in America and their counterparts in Islamic countries.
One of the students in New York eloquently advocated the role of world police by ``the most powerful and richest democratic country.''
His point was that all the problems would be solved if ``we'' taught democracy to ``those'' who are less advanced.
A girl student in Cairo clearly described the variety among Islamic countries and the anger against America shared by each of them. She also sent a message to the self-righteous American student: ``Read Edward Said's books instead of those propagandized by the mass media.''
Since the 11th of September you have intensively written penetrating articles that are all enduring as well as relevant to the times. They are going to be collected and published in this country. Together with them, I hope, my countrymen will also read ``Culture and Imperialism,'' of which a superb Japanese translation was published last summer (both by the Misuzu Shobo publishing house).
The time has already come in which cultures are all ``hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic.'' At such a time, why should the cultural and the national identity of Americans combine to rule the world with the use of massive violence? This was the question you raised, soon after the end of the Persian Gulf War.
However, in the middle of the war in Afghanistan, Japan readily volunteered to be assimilated into the cultural imperialism of America, with mixed hope and anxiety.
It seems that the sometime Japan bashing by the West has visibly subsided; and, as the course they will take in the 21st century, Japan and the Japanese, at the nadir of their disorientated economy, have chosen to follow in the wake of America with its unitary and monolithic political and cultural identity.
The prime minister, who promptly expressed his unqualified wish to take part in the aggressive policies of the Bush administration and thereby gradually nullified the resisting constitutional power of Japan against warfare, is enjoying enormous popularity in wide-ranging sectors of the nation.
Nevertheless, I am still hoping that the youths of Japan will learn wisdom and courage from your works and never assimilate themselves into the bizarre political and cultural situation brought about by the Afghan war. I hope they will be able ``to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about `us.'''
When you first came to Japan in the summer of 1995, I had the privilege of being your interlocutor in the officially published dialogue. I took the opportunity to have you autograph my copy of ``Culture and Imperialism.'' We have since met many a time, but I have somehow failed to tell you, my dear Said, that your book gave me the incentive to resuscitate myself as a novelist.
By the time of our reunion in Tokyo in 1995, I had publicly announced that I would give up writing novels. I was then devoted only to reading. My crisis was made more serious by the fact that my lifelong friend and spiritual guide, the composer Toru Takemitsu, was dying of cancer.
I gave up writing novels after a long deliberation. I then felt that my way of writing had deviated from its original principle and intent and had gone astray into a maze: the materials of my novels had become too much involved with my own life, on the one hand, and, on the other, with esoteric mysticism. If I had kept on writing that way, my novels would have lapsed into perverted confessions of faith. In such a state of mind I received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, feeling it to be a kind of burden.
Whenever I was in the company of Takemitsu during my youth, I tended to create monologues most of the time. He suddenly enlightened me with a precise solution: It was just like a composer hitting upon the exact notation for which there could be no other alternative. That bliss was leaving me forever.
In such a predicament, I was reading your ``Culture and Imperialism.'' I was reading it partly to intensify my criticism against myself for not sufficiently confronting history and reality. At the same time, I now remember, my literary yearning was being satisfied by your fully genial ways of reading a whole variety of novels.
After the death of Takemitsu, I spent a long time writing ``Toru Takemitsu's Elaborations'' to make up for his loss. I also made up my mind to make a fresh start by elaborating my own method of writing novels.
For my support and stay, I had not only the word ``laborate'' but also others uniquely re-defined by you concerning intellectuals and their morals-those intellectuals who are sufficiently independent while deeply rooted in society.
In re-reading ``Culture and Imperialism'' in my native language, I become keenly aware that, written some 10 years ago, it can be an exact analysis of present-day Japan and Japanese.
The Japanese are now willingly accepting the rule by cultural imperialism or unification of the cultural and national identity, which engulfed America at the time of the Gulf War and has been reiterated and reinforced in America throughout the war in Afghanistan. It also means Japan's envisagement of her identity with the world other than Islamic countries.
Certainly the Afghan Reconstruction Conference in Tokyo was held for all-important motives. But the high-ranking Japanese officials, with the exception of the Government Delegate Madam Sadako Ogata, looked as if they were celebrating the war victory in the presence of the Secretary of State Mr. Powell.
Did this not have a bearing on the fact that, although temporarily, the Japanese government barred from the conference the delegates of two NGOs who had seen the dubious battle with their own eyes?
The tone of my letter has become grim. And yet I find hope in the emerging new breed of young intellectuals who can raise their effectual voice of dissent against the united cultural imperialisms of America and Japan. I mean, for instance, the women members of the said NGOs and of even smaller respective groups of volunteers who are proficient in telecommunication techniques; and also those youths in the southern islands of Okinawa that house the military bases for the war in Afghanistan. Those Okinawans are trying to establish a network with ``them'' or ``not us'' and are receiving less and less attention from inhabitants of mainland Japan.
I am not certain-perhaps nobody is-whether humankind can surmount the current crisis without being integrated into the imperialism (not only cultural but overall imperialism) of one great nation.
But suppose we can. Then it will no doubt be by ``them'' or those diverse people, whether the volunteers of the NGOs or the Okinawans, that a spatial and temporal sphere could be created in which the humankind will lead a genuinely humane life in the 21st century.
With warmest wishes,
Yours ever,
Kenzaburo Oe.
(Translated into English by Hisaaki Yamanouchi from the Japanese original.)
◇ ◇
From Said to Oe
Indiscriminate hostility makes Muslims enemies of the state
Dear Oe-san:
I must say first of all how honored I am by this exchange of letters with you. As one of the world's great writers, you are also a sensitive witness to the travails of our time, particular those that concern Japan, an extraordinary country that seems to embody more intractably than most, the contradictions, the ups and downs of modernity and tradition, war and peace, dependence and audacity, empire and its loss.
No one has written more profoundly about these matters in the context of what I would call Japan's worldliness, that is, its place in the historical and secular world, than you, and your first letter to me is a perfect instance of what I mean about your work. If in the end you raise questions of an almost epochal seriousness-several of which I cannot answer here-then that too has been your style, to pose stark alternatives against each other without prettification, for example, between empire and victimhood, or between memory and future directions. We must face them, you say courageously. For that I am deeply grateful, as I am also for the consideration that you give to my own work.
I have now lived in the United States for 51 years, having come here from the Arab world (Egypt and pre-1948 Palestine) when I was a schoolboy aged 15. It was a momentous move for me, full of unhappy dislocation, a sense of loss, and great difficulty getting used to a place that was totally different from the warm (in both senses of the word) environment of Arab society.
After slowly getting used to America, getting all my education here, and then finding a job teaching at Columbia University (I began in 1963 and I am still a member of the faculty), I find myself feeling like a lost stranger all over again. The other day a friend asked me, ``What does it feel like to be the enemy?'' which is something that every Arab or Muslim American that I know feels: We are the officially designated enemies of a nation whose president committed himself publicly to a war against evil, on an apocalyptic level and scale unknown to previous history.
The war against Afghanistan was fought against the Taliban and al-Qaida, both of whom are unlamented in defeat; but it is still a noteworthy fact that two of the officially designated members of the ``axis of evil'' are Muslim states, one of them Arab, and that the only countries since the Vietnam War that the U.S. has waged all-out war against are Muslim countries, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, whose complete destruction was desired, if not totally achieved.
The media here has ceaselessly pursued ``terrorism'' and ``radical or militant Islam'' with such insistence and such indiscriminate hostility as to have made us all into enemies of the state, a state acting on behalf of righteousness and good with, it would seem, a mandate from God. Arab and Muslim Americans are routinely challenged by police, airline attendants, security officials because of the way they look, and even because of the language they speak or read. A plane-traveling friend of mine was recently asked to put away his Arabic newspaper because, the attendant said, it was ``disturbing'' other passengers. Understandably enough, Americans fear for their security after the atrocities of Sept. 11, but ``evil'' can't be localized so easily and found to be emanating only from the non-Atlantic world. Who can forget Herman Melville's character Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, the greatest American novel, in relentless, crazy pursuit of the white whale that has become his mon! omaniacal obsession as the perso
nification of evil?
For the first time in my life I find it next to impossible to read The New York Times or watch the network television news: both seem driven in their reporting and commentary by a patriotic attitude that essentially supports the war, increased defense spending (raised to an unprecedented level), and the projection of U.S. power, with the ability to fight a war everywhere in the world.
I myself have always opposed religious politics and have strongly condemned wanton and suicidal violence, and I have done so not only in English but in the Arab world in Arabic. And yet I feel that the hostility toward and misunderstanding of ``Islam'' (which is a useless description for 1.3 billion people who come from innumerable traditions, use hundreds of different languages, and possess every variety of diversified culture) have enveloped whole portions of the globe, especially in Europe and the U.S., so that everything has been boiled down reductively to a few caricatures of a whole culture and religion in order to sustain an attitude of the most profound bellicosity and to drag a huge body of Americans, unthinkingly and uncritically, into supporting that attitude.
Some of the arguments used to keep Americans at war are, for instance, that Islam is enraged; or, Islam has not had a Reformation and needs one now; or, something has gone wrong with the Islamic world; or, finally, that Islam is a militant and violent religion.
The result has been to make the complex, dynamic interaction of peoples, cultures and traditions a simple oppositional matter, rather in the (basically) mindless and simplified way advocated by Samuel Huntington in his ``The Clash of Civilizations'' on the one hand, and, on the other, to blind Americans to what their nation or culture is in fact doing.
This is strikingly reminiscent of the rhetorical war between the U.S. and Japan during World War II, described by John Dower. But, that was soon over and replaced for a time with Japan-bashing that occurred while Japan's power grew so remarkably in the 1970s and after. Hostility between Islam and the West is a much older one. It goes in both directions, of course, but with the enormous asymmetry of power favoring the U.S., it is a far more disturbing and destructive exchange.
What I would underline in such a situation is the ever-increasing importance of understanding and criticism, both of which are the essence of citizenship and democracy.
My impression is that what has overtaken America is a wave of triumphal patriotism, much of it of course stemming from the shock of the atrocities of Sept. 11. Yes, it is completely understandable for the United States to have responded to the attacks, but that response has been overlain with a kind of metaphysical language justifying unilateralism abroad while preventing discussion and criticism at home.
Thus President Bush speaks of a crusade in one breath, of an axis of evil in another, whereas what we are talking about (in the terms of history and reality that you so eloquently invoke in your letter to me) is American power on such an unprecedented scale as to grind down the rest of the world and say, as Bush does continually, you're either with us or you're for terrorism.
No one has defined terrorism adequately even though the whole world seems to be mobilized to fight against it, Japan included, as you very accurately say. The U.N. spent several years in the mid-1970s debating the meaning of the term, and was unsuccessful in finding a common, all-encompassing definition.
The problem is that, used without qualification as a concept merely to identify what one doesn't like, or something evil that has been done, or an official enemy, the word ``terrorism'' can also obscure what may be an act of resistance, or of desperation caused by a preponderance of power that is both heedless and destructive. I agree that what bin Laden did, and what his followers advocate, are terroristic because they call for the indiscriminate killing of innocent people and a false divide of the world simplistically into his enemies and his allies. What madness this is, and what a misrepresentation not only of Islam but of the complexity of human history.
But I think it is especially wrong to use the word ``terrorism'' uniformly (as General Sharon does) whenever Palestinians strike back at Israel. If one were to say, as Sharon and George Bush repeatedly do, that Palestinian suicide-bombings are terrorism-I myself find them unacceptable-and then demand that Yasser Arafat should stop Palestinian violence altogether, the context is entirely missed, which is that Israel has been in an illegal military occupation of Palestinian territory for 35 years, the longest one in modern history (along with the Japanese occupation of Korea between 1910 and 1945).
Israel is a nuclear power, with F-16s and attack helicopters furnished by the United States; it has used those to collectively punish and besiege an entirely civilian, unarmed, stateless and dispossessed Palestinian population, all the while confiscating Palestinian land, building illegal settlements, destroying houses, assassinating leaders, and now, imprisoning Yasser Arafat in his compound. To every Arab and Muslim, what Israel has been doing is state terrorism, and what Palestinians do most of the time is to resist that violence, sometimes using desperate terrorist means.
The problem is that for independent intellectuals like you and me, the questions we raise, the moral issues we discern, the language and imagery that we use are central to the whole enterprise of democratic citizenship. You have shown in your beautiful reflections on the atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, or rather in your careful work recording the testimonials of people who lived through that indescribable apocalypse, that human knowledge is essentially tragic and always somehow inadequate to the terrible immediacy of human experience. That doesn't stop one, however, from thinking and trying everlastingly to elaborate the situation that presents itself so urgently for consideration, analysis, judgment.
And this is one reason, whether we live in Japan or the United States, the engulfing power of enormous military enterprises and huge corporate endeavors prompts us to deal with them carefully and stubbornly, analyzing and demystifying them, without falling into the kind of assent to authority that so many of our compatriots have succumbed to. Never unquestioning solidarity without criticism, is my motto. And I think yours, too.
Doubtless we are now in a new phase of history, of which the regulation of political discourse by central authority is an intimidating reality for individuals everywhere. Isn't it also our role, I would ask you cherished Oe-san, not only to outline the reality but also to present alternatives to it?
So many of our generation have turned away from their earlier critical positions and have embraced ``pragmatism'' and endorsements of the status quo. But surely there are other ``realities'' to which we can appeal, here and in Japan. Maybe we can go into this in our next letter.
I embrace and salute you,
With my fondest wishes,
(C) Edward W. Said