Kishi's Ghost

The difference between the cartographers and the others is that they could trace their lineage back hundreds of years and they were aware that they were not acting of their own accord, but could feel the skeleton of their forbears moving beneath their skin, like a puppet master controlling his puppet. Shinzo would often feel his grandfathers ghost twitching in his muscles and ligaments, and he could feel that blood pulsing through his veins which spoke of an inter-generational project, from the time the Choshu-Satsuma alliance, recognizing its weakness in the face of the european state technology, overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate and began the process of nation building and modernization. Yet in this context liberalism was not seen as an essential component of statehood because it developed concurrently with nationalism rather than through the parthenogenesis of one from the other. This was his grandfathers battle and it was his too, to see the state as a monstrous but useful instrument for sovereignty but whose Enlightenment underpinnings were fundamentally at odds with  Japanese culture. Shinzo was a great synthesizer like his grandfather, and it was his dream to dismantle the edifice of civil society which function as a valve for regulating the power of government but which he only saw as a hindrance and superfluous Western oddity stiffening the joints of the state machine. In the end, the Japanese associate beauty not only with flower arrangement, wabi sabi, shinto and zen buddhism, but with violence and death.

The Monitor Stage

I have noticed, of late, a tendency amongst European aesthetes of a certain generation a fashion for looking at Asians looking at things through cameras. Their curiosity seems unbounded at what would seem a fairly mundane sight, peering through their half rimmed spectacles or ironic black frames, at teens and 20 somethings from Korea, Japan, China or even Myanmar taking photos at exhibitions or performances.  Commonly they will be heard to make a broad generalizing remark along the lines of, 'and this is how they look at everything here'. My attention to this phenomenon was first drawn after I had organized a performance in latter day Chosun for a one-eyed Scottish chansonier and while watching the performance, I noticed two strange figures crouched in the audience looking not at the stage, but at their fellow audience members. After the event, I discovered they were an artistic couple from Berlin who remarked bewilderedly, 'I haff nevah seen any-zing like eet bevore!'
Puzzled and perplexed by this oddly naive and yet sincere behavior I asked a German directly about his fascination.
'You see, we Europeans, with our history and culture, perceive the world through our human faculties and senses without augmentation, but the Asians, having come to Modernity and State building later, and following our example, have not developed a similar Romantic sensualist sensible distance from the world but rather perceive it through technological viewing devices as inter-penetrative, supra-mental, organisitic appendages. I have a theory that, as Lacan posed a mirror stage for the typical European infant for the point at which it sees itself in a mirror and begins the process of forming an objective ontology and Imaginary construction of the world outside of its immediate sense responses, the Asian in fact goes through a 'monitor stage', that they would first perceive their own image as an object outside, not as a reflection but as a double, doppleganged digitally on a screen. Therefore, from that moment onwards, the Asian begins the trajectory of perceiving the world through a Digital Imaginary and therefore, in fact, cannot actually see the object in front of its eyes other than through the screen which presents the amanuensis through which being is formed. That, and also I think their eyes are really small so they need to take pictures of everything so they can see them properly.'

The Contract

"Once people (colonialists) have power, they think universal truth is on their side. They will resort to any unscrupulous means to achieve their goal. If I have travelled on the sea, I will then understand that war, trade and piracy are fundamentally like the Trinity, which is inseperable and indivisible.'
("FAUST", Part 2, Act 5, Goethe)

Quoted in The Opium War, "Series of the 1st Imperialist War of Aggression Against China in English and Chinese Commemorating the Handover of Hong Kong to China and Seeing the Issue in the Right Perspective!"

The Border (Redux)

That afternoon, an insane sage came to speak with the students, he had once served as a watchman at the border, protecting the people against the non-state's perceived enemies. He had gone mad with the idea of building a wall so high and deep that it encompassed the entire territory of the state, that the nation would consist entirely of border so that, in effect, the border could never be breached. He spoke;

"We consider the border not to be a purely physical barrier separating nation states, but a complex continuum stretching offshore and onshore, including the overseas, maritime, physical border and domestic dimensions of the border. 

Treating the border as a continuum allows an integrated, layered approach to provide border management in depth— working ahead of and behind the border, as well as at the border, to manage threats and take advantage of opportunities. By applying an intelligence-led model and working with our partner agencies across the border continuum, we deliver effective border control over who and what has the right to enter or exit, and under what conditions."  

At the end of his speech, the girls autonomously and unanimously stood up, bared their nails and tore the insane sage to pieces with their hands and consumed the flesh. This was an object lesson for the girls in the difference between critique and action.

A Japanese Vampire

1937

Kishi stumbled drunkenly from the slatted shack, as Chinese bumped and jostled him in the cold Manchurian evening. He just needed a breath of air, it stank inside of sake, baijiu, cheap face pancake and perfume, opium and of course semen. It was an intoxicating funk, that in itself was revolting but through its sensory association with carnal pleasure was as stimulating to the senses as the opiate fumes themselves. Kishi was in a good mood today, he'd emptied himself in a few of the Chinese 'toilets' he had around the office, invariably drug addicted chambermaids and waitresses who were nominally employed for this purpose but were nothing more than receptacles for him to drain his desire over the course of a day. As he said years later during the war crimes trials, 'I came so much, it was hard to clean it all up'. In the afternoon, he'd made a few phone calls which had easily transferred millions of yen into his own personal account from the ministries 'black rooms' where the profits from the state controlled opium monoply, state protection money from low -ife Japanese and Korean opium dealers, were funneled into his own accounts. Kishi felt himself a kind of capitalist genius, he had visited Germany, the US and Soviet Russia and had sythesized technical specialization with Taylorist production run along the lines of state planned economy padded with what he took as his own personal innovation, an almost infinite pool of Chinese labour. Paid absolute zero wages, or whatever measly wages they were paid the coolie forfeited back into the Japanese state coffers as opium revenues.  Kishi stepped back into the izakaya, and collapsed into a heap of hair and silk, across from him was the former drug dealer/murderer, now a respected official in charge of the state opium monopoly with his pants around his ankles, heaving himself on top of a comatose Korean girl, passed out at his side was the former human traffiker, who had started kidnapping girls from the countryside in Kyushu in the 90's and now ran one of the 29 comfort stations owned by the Japanese Machuko state. Gangsters, pimps, hustlers, murderers, politicians, businessmen, we were all the same, all after money and power and all our roles were reversible.

1987

Kishi lay dying on the tatami mate, he was surrounded by his family, his wife and children and his grandson. Yoko had married well, and he was proud of his grandson, he had already spoken with some of the children of his friends from the wild Manchuko days and Abe's political career was mapped out. The window was slightly open and he could see a single orange persimmon hanging from the tree, swaying gently in the breeze. The colour screen of the Sony television at the far end of the room was playing, and Kishi had only been absently paying attention until a commercial for Nissan came on and he let out a loud laugh, a deep wheezing yell, as it reminded him of old Yoshi who he'd helped convince to bring the car company to Japan's crown colony, though he hadn't needed much convincing since at the time Nissan were almost bankrupt and the incentive of a limitless supply of unpaid labour was obviously irresistible. He thought of the times the two spent in Dalian every month, carousing for whores and getting drunk and how Kishi would talk about his plans for Japan, how it would take its place as the dominant race in East Asia, on equal footing with the European's and how, China, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Indonesia would become the vast pit of resources which would drive Tokyo to become a glittering imperial capital for the Japanese. With their economic might, they would make every Asian bow their heads in awe at Japanese modernity, its technical perfection and cultural sophistication. Kishi felt at the time total war was the only way to implement his plan, and Manchuko was the perfect laboratory for testing his economic ideas. Of course the war hadn't turned out as he had hoped, perhaps they'd moved too fast, perhaps it was the damn liberalism which had infected the Japanese people when they were exposed to European modernity. But he was not sad or regretful now.
By the 60's every Asian government had come hat in hand, groveling to Japan and had asked for expertise and capital to fund their own version of Japanese state-capitalist development. His crowning achievement had been when President Park himself, had agreed to turn over reparations for Korea into Japanese foreign direct investment. Kishi laughed to himself again,  Yoko would read him articles in the Asahi Shimbun about the Japanese economic miracle, how Americans were scared of Japanese cars, VCR's, Walkmen, video games, televisions, suddenly the Japanese had become more popular than American brands! Already wages were getting too high in Japan though, and behind closed doors he had whispered to many chairmen of the zaibatsu that they needed to move their operations to China, as they had 50 years earlier and for the same reasons, abstract endless supplies of Chinese robot slaves to exploit for Japanese benefit.
Asian Tiger Economies, ha! Kishi remembered the stories by Rampo that he read as a young man in the 20's, they weren't tigers, they were monsters, vampires that would suck the life from workers, the attention of consumers and even the pleasure from sex to drink of that flowing red blood of money.

Trade Regimes of the White Ape and the Yellow Horde

"Today we will give a brief history lesson on the trade regimes of these rival empires, the deep crevasses between which we make our home. The White Ape unveiled their grand plan to link the economies of the eastern maritime front of their empire through a system they called the Trans Pacific Partnership, a kind of imaginary, invisible system of trading posts which dotted the map, which when joined together formed the image of a fence to contain the rising Yellow Horde who were consciously excluded from this great union. Though their exclusion was an act of commission rather than omission from their point of view, if you do not believe them capable of deliberate disingenuousness, since according to the laws which were written up by which membership could be granted, all were welcome through the Great Gates of the Eagle if they willingly abided by the ruling ideology of that kingdom, which they considered universal though others might claim were arbitrary and self-perpetuating. At first the Yellow Horde were vexed by this proposal, and insinuated various suspicious intrigues and plots behind the seemingly benign and magnanimous proposal though, being a pragmatic race they wasted no time in instituting a competing trade regime of their own which travelled across the far Western reaches to create 'one belt and one road' both earthen and liquid, and opened up their coffers to any tribe or polity which agreed to ally with them. Interestingly enough, the rapidity with which the Yellow Horde rolled out their trade regime, with its generous pecuniary benefits and no demand for sacrifice, tribute or the customary offerings of ones daughters, allowed them to bring in a much greater number of member states, institute their program and reap its rewards before the TPP had even been singed into effect."

"My daughters, listen carefully to the moral of this story; there was in fact an agenda to the trade regime of the White Ape, which they avowed in their rhetoric to visiting kingdoms with whom they wished to partner. It can be summarized thus;

'For many years, we have been the single dominant force for what is good and right, and we have been responsible for policing The Law which you all abide by. It is clear now that the Yellow Horde proffers a competing vision, which not only follows a different version of The Law, it also questions the axiomatic truth of The Law while they follow a rule 'by' The Law, rather than having a rule 'of' The Law. Join us, and together we can follow the path of what is good and right in unity against the Yellow Horde and walk together, hand in hand, towards the sunlight.'

"So the many kingdoms along the pacific rim agreed to follow, yet many still let themselves be courted by the Yellow Horde with its painted visions of bounteous riches which flowed from their economies of scale. The White Ape cannot contain the Yellow Horde with a ring of loyal kingdoms, because those kingdoms, from expedience, pledge their allegiance to both and neither."

A dark shadow hung over the school room from a low cloud in the late afternoon sky. If you looked hard enough, you might see a vision of battle in its fuzzy formations, of the White Ape holding the various kingdoms of this land to hostage with their mercenary armies of lawyers, who upheld the rights of The Law in the name of profit and forced their bogus medicine show on the unwitting members of its trade regime.

The lives of the cartographers

Purple was tidying the classroom at the end of the day, half watching a film about the outback, when a stranger approached her desk. The stranger was very young, but she was already over 6 and a half feet tall. She was very embarrassed about her height and often looked at the ground and walked with a stoop.

"Teacher, I would like to join your class. I grew up as an orphaned child in a village far away. My parents moved to the coast for work. One day I found an old book by a forgotten geographer that said the following:

Whoever wants to go to China must cross seven seas, each one with its own color and wind and fish and breeze, completely unlike the sea that lies beside it. The first of them is the Sea of Fars, which men sail setting out from Siraf. It ends at Ra's al-Jumha; it is a strait where pearls are fished. The second sea begins at Ra's al-Jumha and is called Larwi. It is a big sea, and in it is the Island of Waqwaq and others that belong to the Zanj. These islands have kings. One can only sail this sea by the stars. It contains huge fish, and in it are many wonders and things that pass description. The third sea is called Harkand, and in it lies the Island of Sarandib, in which are precious stones and rubies. Here are islands with kings, but there is one king over them. In the islands of this sea grow bamboo andrattan. The fourth sea is called Kalah and is shallow and filled with huge serpents. Sometimes they ride the wind and smash ships. Here are islands where the camphor tree grows. The fifth sea is called Salahit and is very large and filled with wonders. The sixth sea is called Kardanj; it is very rainy. The seventh sea is called the sea of Sanji, also known as Kanjli. It is the sea of China; one is driven by the south wind until one reaches a freshwater bay, along which are fortified places and cities, until one reaches Khanfu.

I did not know where this geographer had come from but I decided it would be a place much different from where I was. I followed the directions in reverse as best as I could and I have arrived here. I wish for you to help me to write a book, a biography of the great cartographers.