Book Review: Barefoot Gen, Volume 1

Barefoot Gen, Volume One: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima by Keiji Nakazawa




"No matter how often you're stepped on, grow up tall and strong, through the wind and snow."

-- Gen's mother

Nakazawa takes us into an ordinary urban Japanese neighborhood in the summer of 1945. As Japan loses the war, everyone becomes more anxious, and families are ripped apart as young ones are sent to the countryside, older sons are all drafted into suicidal service, and all food and money become scarce. And yet, anti-war feelings are rare in what is now a police state, making the protagonist's anti-war father a martyr for an endangered value.

The story of Gen Nakaoka and his little family reminds us of the limits the honest poor can reach when a nation at war absorbs too many resources; the rarity of such conscience is always saddening, yet the persistence of the voice is reassuring, and the expansive treatment of the basic tensions of a boy who must grow up in war and its aftermath seems a beautiful and worthwhile project -- I look forward to digesting the next 9 volumes, slowly, as I read the poetry of Du Fu:

This winter...they haven't released the Guanxi troops
but officials still press for the land tax.
Land taxes! How are we to pay that?
The truth is it's a sour thing to have sons.
Better to have a daughter—
at least she can marry a neighbor.
Our sons lie unburied in the grass.
My lord, have you seen the
Blue Sea's shore where the old white bones lie ungathered?
New ghosts keen and old ghosts weep
jiu, jiu like twittering birds as rain sifts from the bleak sky.

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Poem: Wait, China, Wait

Apparently this poem is going around the internet in the wake of the last major train accident:

中国，请等一等你的灵魂
——有感于7.23温州动车追撞悲剧
童大焕

Wait, China, Wait for Your Soul: Moved by the July 23 Wenzhou Train Collision
"Tong Dahuan"

中国，请停下你飞奔的脚步，	China, please stop your flying footsteps,
等一等你的人民，	Wait for your people,
等一等你的灵魂，	Wait for your soul,
等一等你的道德，	Wait for your morals,
等一等你的良知！	Wait for your conscience!
不要让列车脱轨，	Don't let the trains derail,
不要让桥梁坍塌，	Don't let the bridges fall,
不要让道路成陷阱，	Don't let the roads turn into pits,
不要让家国变成危楼……	Don't let the country become a condemned and decrepit tower...
慢点走，	Slow down some,
让每一个人都不被“时代”抛下，	None must be tossed out by "the times,"
让每一个人都顺利平安抵达终点，	All must reach their own ends in peace,
让每一个生命都有自由和尊严！	The lives of all must have freedom and respect!

"Attention: Dangerous Building (wei lou)" -- illustrating a very interesting term

Attacks of Interest 2011

July 22, 2011, A man sets up a bomb in Oslo and shoots teenagers on an island outside the city.

July 23, 2011, Teens in Alaska attacked by Bears

There's violence in the air, and perhaps not actually more than there always is, but a few stories lately touch me more deeply because they involve young people with whom we can identify -- Stephen King could not have thought of better. (There was another interesting animal attack in the last few weeks, but now I can't remember what animal. Maybe it will come back to me.)

Politics: The Issue of America's Debt

Ten years ago the federal debt was equivalent to less than a third of US gross domestic product. Now it is nearly two thirds. If nothing changes, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the federal debt could exceed GDP by 2021. Interest payments alone could absorb roughly two fifths of all federal revenues by 2031. So everyone agrees that government has to address the debt, and soon. -- Niall Ferguson, Newsweek, August 1 and 8, 2011

Yes, the ratio of the national debt to the total economy is high relative to what it’s been. But it’s not nearly as high as it was after World War II – when it reached 120 percent of the economy’s total output. If and when the economy begins to grow faster – if more Americans get jobs, and we move toward a full recovery – the debt/GDP ratio will fall, as it did in the 1950s, and as it does in every solid recovery. Revenues will pour into the Treasury, and much of the current “budget crisis” will be evaporate. Get it? We’re really in a “jobs and growth” crisis – not a budget crisis. -- Robert Reich,  RobertReich.org, July 28

Politics: The Shock Doctrine

Klein's "Shock Doctrine" is an alternative history of economic and political institutions from Nixon and Chile to Bush, Iraq and Katrina; in this story, free-market fundamentalists trump up crises to impose privatization, tax cuts, and government spending cuts during times of "shock." Pretty persuasive stuff -- decent refutations, anyone?

Poem: Ballad of the War Carts

From a cool page with recitals and illustrations of the poem.

The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry, edited and with translations mostly by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping, has an inspiring version of Du Fu's "Ballad of the War Wagons" 兵车行. Using the "highlight" function of the Kindle edition, I copied out Barnstone and Chou's text, as follows:

Ballad of the War Wagons

Carts grumble and rattle
and horses whinny and neigh
as the conscripts pass, bows and quivers strapped to their waists.
Parents, wives, and children run to see them off
till dust clouds drown the bridge south of Changan.
Tugging at soldiers' clothes, they wail and throw themselves in the
way, their cries rising into the clouds.

On the roadside a passerby asks what's happening.
The soldiers only say, “We're called up often,
some went north at fifteen to guard the Yellow River
and still at forty are farming frontier settlements out West.
We left so young the village chief wrapped our turbans for us;
we came back white haired but now we're off to fortify the frontier!

The men there have shed a salt ocean of blood,
but the warlike emperor still lusts for empire.

My lord, haven't you heard how in two hundred districts east of
China's mountains countless villages grow just weeds and thorns?
Even if a stout wife tries to plow and hoe,
east to west the crops grow wild over broken terraces.
The Qin soldiers are fierce warriors,
but they are driven forth to battle like chickens or dogs.

You, sir, can ask questions
but conscripts don't dare complain.
This winter, for example,
they haven't released the Guanxi troops
but officials still press for the land tax.
Land taxes! How are we to pay that?
The truth is it's a sour thing to have sons.
Better to have a daughter—
at least she can marry a neighbor.
Our sons lie unburied in the grass.
My lord, have you seen the
Blue Sea's shore where the old white bones lie ungathered?
New ghosts keen and old ghosts weep
jiu, jiu like twittering birds as rain sifts from the bleak sky.”

(I later found that the Mac Kindle App has a "copy" function, so my work was mostly unnecessary. Oh well.) Then I looked up the text on Google and copied it from the Baidu page: 

兵车行

车辚辚，马萧萧，行人弓箭各在腰。

耶娘妻子走相送（也作“爷娘”），尘埃不见咸阳桥。

牵衣顿足拦道哭，哭声直上干云霄。

道旁过者问行人，行人但云点行频。

或从十五北防河，便至四十西营田。

去时里正与裹头，归来头白还戍边。

边庭流血成海水，武皇开边意未已。

君不闻汉家山东二百州，千村万落生荆杞。

纵有健妇把锄犁，禾生陇亩无东西。

况复秦兵耐苦战，被驱不异犬与鸡。

长者虽有问，役夫敢申恨？

且如今年冬，未休关西卒。

县官急索租，租税从何出？

信知生男恶，反是生女好。

生女犹得嫁比邻，生男埋没随百草。

君不见青海头，古来白骨无人收。

新鬼烦冤旧鬼哭，天阴雨湿声啾啾。

I'm obsessed with optimizing this task to: 

• Compare the original and the translation and so learn about how the translation was done.
• Produce an eBook containing the Chinese texts of the poems -- then I can have Chinese poems I've studied on my phone!

Health: Effects of One Cigarette Per Day

According to a 2010 AP Report,

Smoke from a single cigarette takes 24 hours, roughly, to be purged from the human respiratory system. Hence, smoking that single cigarette on a daily basis avoids many problems with long-term lung damage.

It would seem that as I suspected, smoking one per day has a minimal effect on the lungs; but what about the arteries? New research such as this recent study of young people found that they had measurable reductions in blood flow even after two days of not smoking at all; the reductions were much more severe right after they smoked two cigarettes. As the doctor in the study says, "A reduction in responsiveness, known as impaired flow-mediated dilation, is an early sign of arterial damage that often foreshadows cardiovascular disease." The video above is part of a campaign that vividly illustrates the process of arterial damage. (Warning, squeamish readers like myself will squirm!)

So smoking one cigarette a day likely belongs in the category of activities like not exercising and eating unhealthy foods -- they increase risk of heart disease. And heart disease is the most likely cause of death for all of us Americans.