A few days after viewing The Power of the Dog, my mind is still vibrating in the recollected afterglow of impressions I received from this film. The casting is superb, and I do think it is Benedict Cumberbatch's best performance in career so far.
There is something enigmatic about the film, and I do not claim to have deciphered the mystery. I think the taming of the wild and unpredictable, the power of the dog, is a common theme in contemporary society with which we can all identify and shiver. It is a nuisance and should be cleverly phased out. And yet, we see at the same time that love, life's vital forces, and a sense of community all arise because of the power of the dog, which we utilise and then shamelessly discard. The power of the dog then leaves an unforgettable impression, like the soil under our feet from which greens flourish and flowers bloom.
The score by Jonny Greenwood was very original, eerily piercing, and totally profound.
For some time, I have been thinking of writing a fictional work titled Albert's Regrets. When you think of the life of Albert Einstein, you would think that his greatest regret scientifically has been the fact that he could not complete his unified theory of physics. He might regret his treatment of his first wife, Mileva, both on personal and professional terms. Some estimate that Mileva contributed to theory of relativity much more than is usually thought.
Albert's greatest regret, however, would have been the signing of the letter to President Roosevelt to develop the atomic bomb. There was historical urgency to do so, to be sure. On the other hand, when you know Einstein's deeply pacifist views, he would have been the last person you would expect to be involved in such a conduct. So there is a genuinely profound food for thought in the circumstances in which Albert Einstein wrote that crucial letter.
I wrote about this in my forthcoming book The Way of Nagomi, and I think the editor did not cut it (although at this particular moment I am not that sure). I think the Japanese art of bonsai is a great way for plants to share the ecological space.
When you see a great tree, it is all beautiful. At the same time, it means that the tree has a monopoly on the ecological niche. When you have bonsai, a tree can fulfil its life potentials in a limited space while allowing other entities to enjoy the adjacent spaces.
This, I think, is the most beautiful aspect of bonsai.
I think there is what could be tentatively called the Nietzsche phenomenon. Friedrich Nietzsche was a great philosopher. His philosophical writings are full of inspirations and poetic repercussions. His ideas about life are superb. I love his conceptualization of the apotheosis of dancing. I endorse his prediction that the future would be centered around comedy rather than tragedy, as exposited in Gay Science.
Towards the latter part of his life, his passion seemed to have shifted to music, partly inspired by Richard Wagner. However, Nietzsche's compositions were at best mediocre.
So how could someone who is a genius in one field be quite lagging in another, although he or she shows passion for that alternative activity? That is the Nietzsche phenomenon, or Nietzsche syndrome.
In general, perception and action are separate, so it is no mystery that one could perceive good music but is unable to produce one. Genius could be compartmentalized, so that one who excels in one field is quite awkward in another.
Having said that, perhaps it was Nietzsche's interest in music, together with the personality and mindset accompanying it, that made Nietzsche's philosophy great. His writings are musical after all.
Thus, the Nietzsche phenomenon might explain the makeup of some geniuses. Even if the output is poor, passionate interest in one field might improve the performance in another.
The other day, Japan's prime minister Yoshihide Suga made some remarks on Tokyo Olympics in the Question Time at parliament. That is quite usual, but what was unusual was that Mr. Suga made some personal observations on the games, citing his memories of the 1964 Tokyo games which he experienced as a boy. The fact that the recollections, delivered in warm tone, failed to fascinate the public imagination seems to tell more about the status quo of Japan than Mr. Suga himself.
I sometimes wonder if the Japanese mindset, at least in the way it is depicted in the (social) media, has not aged compared to the heydays of rapid economic growth. The Olympic movement has not become old. Only the minds of some people have lost vigour, while the games of life goes on.
Dr. Shigeru Omi is a respected medic with a track record of earnest work and personal integrity, but he probably has lost the trust of Prime Minister Suga and key people in government. In Japan, the unwritten code of action is harmony. You need to keep accord with those you work with at any costs, and if you break that rule, then whatever you do, you would be judged to be unsound.
I am not making any judgments on Dr. Omi or Mr. Suga or those government officials. I am just making an observation. I can tell now that Dr. Omi is rapidly losing influence and respectability within the Tokyo government, especially as regards his alarmist attitude to the Tokyo Olympics.
If Dr. Omi makes the extraordinary move of appealing to the IOC directly, he would lose his standing within Tokyo further. It is a catch 22 situation for the respected medic.
In Tokyo, there is a growing feeling that the Olympics and Paralympics would go forward, mainly influenced by the activities and achievements of athletes. On Sunday, Ryota Yamagata set a new Japanese national record for the 100m heat of 9.95. Yamagata would have to compete in the coming Japan Championship at the end of this month to qualify for the Olympics. Then, the legendary gymnast Kohei Uchimyra qualified for the Olympics in men's horizontal bar event. Uchimura has been men's artistic individual all-around Olympic champion in the London and Rio de Janeiro Olympics, and considering his age (32), made a decision to focus on the parallel bar to go to the Olympics.
Given the heat coming from the enthusiasm and efforts by these athletes, it is felt that the rest of us should perhaps make corresponding efforts to make the games a reality, despite the difficulties all of us are facing at this time.
A paper by Harvard law Professor Mark Ramseyer has recently been drawing controversy.
Ramseyer, J. M. (2021). Contracting for sex in the Pacific War. International Review of Law and Economics, 65, 105971.
Personally, I always felt that these historical issues should be taken in the light of human rights and universal values standards of today. Otherwise we would not do justice to the human beings that we currently are.
Reports in the New York Times and New Yorker seem to have been mainly concerned with historic facts and interpretations of them. While these are certainly important issues, reading the paper, I was more concerned by the weakness and irrelevance of the game theoretic approach that Prof. Ramseyer applied to this issue in the paper.
Although economic analysis based on game theory has been a powerful tool, when you think of the comfort woman controversy, money is not necessarily the first thing that would come into your mind. Compared to issues of human dignity, freedom, and social and psychological coercion, not to mention the military culture at that time, economic factors seem to be a subsidiary issue at best.
In the above paper, Prof. Ramseyer gives some casual descriptions of credible commitments, reward and income structures, compensation for much higher risks involved, indenture contracts with a large advance with one or two year terms, etc. but fails go extend the theoretically analysis fully, so that non-trivial results are obtained which are not obvious from the assumptions themselves. This insufficient treatment, coupled with the general neglect of social, cultural, and psychological elements described, for example, in Min Jee Lee's novel Pachinko (2018), makes the Ramseyer paper largely irrelevant to the comfort woman controversy.
This is very unfortunate, especially considering the fact that Prof. Ramseyer is an excellent scholar, versed in the interplay between law and economics. It is a pity that Prof. Ramseyer failed to see much beyond that.
I watched the acclaimed Netflix original White Tiger. I should say I did not resonate with the film so much. The White Tiger is not so beautiful.
It tells a story of class division and political dirt in India. The protagonist aspires to climb the social ladder, identifying himself with the white tiger he sees in a zoo. The beauty of the beast inspires him to break free from the slave mentality.
Although the satire is good and the actings superb, the script and editing lacked a crucial finishing touch, depicting only the crime and not the punishment. It may be OK to be bullish in the climb uphill, but if a self-reflection is lacking there it would fall short of a literally masterpiece, let alone a cinematic one.
To be fair, I haven't read the original novel yet. I might have different impressions from the presumably more nuanced text.
If the film had some self-reflecting element at the end, I might have been more favourably inclined. The fact that it was received favourably by Western critics appears to suggest some element of political correctness applied to the rise of India and China by the West, repentant of its colonial past, which is good in itself but does not testify for the quality of the work. In all, I see it as a great missed opportunity.
I had the pleasure to have an online conversation with Prof. Adrian Cheok and Senator Fraser Anning.
I have been friends with Adrian for many years. Adrian suggested that I have a conversation with Senator Anning, and I gladly accepted. It is always interesting to get to know people and exchange ideas.
Although I don't necessarily agree with the views expressed by Senator Anning and Adrian, it is very important to compare notes and say what comes up to your mind honestly when you hear somebody say something contrary to your opinion. I also felt that I really needed to have an insight into Senator Anning's personality, the deeply seated motivations and values, before becoming too judgemental as the Zeitgeist of the social media era would tend to promote.
Here's the link to the youtube video that Adrian put up.
I thank Adrain and Senator Anning for the interesting conversation. I hope people can live in a spirit of diversity and inclusion everywhere. Please leave comments on this blog or the youtube video if you feel something needs to be said.
I was walking in the backstreets of Tokyo after nightfall. It was a chilly January day, and I was listening to an audiobook of Middlemarch by George Eliot. This elaborate novel has established itself in the history of world literature despite its somewhat cumbersome structure. I imagined how Mary Anne Evans, who wrote under male pseudonym due to the unsavoury prejudice towards women at that time, must have felt when she wrote it. The intricate circumstances of gender-sensitive authorship of the novel is quite poignant. The young and talented Dorothea marries Mr. Casaubon, who appears to be culturally superior with significant ambitions. The disappointment of Dorothea in finding the dry and aged nature of Mr. Casaubon is a wonderful study of human psychology, if somewhat sarcastic.
Suddenly, while listening to the recording of Middlemarch on my iPhone in the chilly Tokyo night, I realized how any hopes of eternal fame is only an ultimately sad illusion generated by our reaction to our mortality. It is like the marriage of Dorothea to Mr. Casaubon. We stake our hopes on it, but it ultimately turns out to be without substance and empty. That is probably why Dorothea's disappointment has universal repercussions. I listen to George Eliot in Tokyo in the 21st century and am thankful for it. However, as far as the essence of existence is concerned, the life of Mary Anne Evans was there and then, and no more. The same is true for all of us.
So I have been watching The Office American version at last, as it is being streamed on Netflix in Japan.
I am a great fan of Ricky Gervais, and I enjoyed The Office U.K. version thoroughly. As many people would agree, The Office is arguably one of the best comedy shows ever made, in its creative juxtaposition of the comic and tragic, somewhat reminiscent of Shakespeare.
I have naturally watched some episodes of The Office American version now and then, mostly on international flights, but have not viewed the series systematically until now.
I had my own trepidations, but the American version has actually turned out to have some fine points.
Particularly interesting is the fact that perhaps in the U.S., there is not such a layer structure between the comedians and the "ordinary" people. The comedian (in this case the boss in the office) is also a member of the mediocre society. In the U.K., on the other hand, the comedian is probably superior in intelligence and dramatic grasp of life, a tradition carried by Ricky Gervais himself, although in an implicit style compared to, for example, Stephen Fry.
The fact that everybody is on the same board with equal humbleness makes The Office American version quite moving from time to time.
I have recently repeatedly heard news coverage of the Chinese Dream pushed by President Xi Jinping. In the Japanese media, the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Civilization is a phrase heard often, in relation to the Chinese Dream.
It would be great if the peoples of China would be able to enjoy the growth of the society in terms of economy or otherwise. On the other hand, it is hoped that diversity and individual freedom would be able to enhanced in China in the years to come.
In today's youtube posting I make a comparison between the Chinese dream and the American dream, with the latter more focused on the diversity of opinions and the individual freedom to pursue happiness.
Differences between the American and Chinese dreams.
In today's youtube posting I discussed the permanent ban of Mr. Trump from twitter and its implications.
I fear that there is a danger that the platforms would split into physically defined echo chambers. Up to now, echo chambers did exist, but they were subsets on a single platform, such as twitter.
When people split into twitter and parler, for example, there would be an increased danger of more absolute segregation of people and opinions.
Youtube: Twitter vs Parler: Danger of platform-defined echo chambers
The Uncertain exhibition at SCAI THE BATHHOUSE in the downtown area of Tokyo is a great leap forward into the brave new world by one of the world's greatest contemporary artist, Tasuo Miyajima.
The art gallery, owned by Masami Shiraishi, is a cultural icon itself, being a converted public bathhouse close to the Tokyo Geidai (Tokyo University of the Arts) and The University of Tokyo in the Yanaka area of downtown Tokyo.
The new exhibition shows Miyajima's hallmark digits, but this time as a collection of paintings, oil on canvas. The effect of bringing the LED numbers back into the realm of old school paintings, with twists on the canvas shapes and installations, is simply stunning. The 7 canvases are arranged in such ways so as to represent a particular digit, with the unused canvas lying in a ceremonial manner on the floor. Miyajima suggests a relocation of the canvases, based on the fate of specially designed dice telling which digit to install.
For Tatsuo Miyajima, a graduate from the department of oil paintings of the Tokyo Geidai, this is perhaps the first venture into the venerable method of oil painting in his long and productive career. The result is an inspirational and poignant statement on the relation between the abstract and concrete, the ephemeral and permanent, and between the certain and uncertain in this time of great vulnerability for the human race.
There are series of works with LED digits on white cloth, a statement perhaps on the co-existence of our organic self and the increasingly ubiquitous digital technology.
Photo Myself in front of the SCAI THE BATHHOUSE art gallery in Yanaka, Tokyo.
The world premier of Dai Fujikura's opera, A Dream of Armageddon, at the New National Theater Tokyo was an utter triumph.
Fujikura, a London-based composer originally from Japan, put the short novel by H.G. Wells into sublime music. It reminded one of the Karesansui Japanese garden traditions, an apotheosis of which is the famous Ryoanji Temple rock garden, once visited by Queen Elisabeth II. Against this backdrop of this abstract expression of the world at large, Fujikura's music occasionally brought fresh breaths of astonishing vivid colour of life.
The opera starts with a cappella chorus, a rarity in the genre. It ends with the solo of a boy soprano, who is one of the soldiers of the power that be. Fujikura accomplished the magic of matching the grand finale of Wagner's Gotterdammerung with a single "amen" at the very end, giving the audience a deep sense of redemption.
The libretto by Harry Ross, a long-time friend of Fujikura, used words in a sparing and inspirational way. The minimalist lyrics gave the impression of great Matsuo Basho haiku poems, which, in resonance with Fujikura's music, left an unforgettable image of an alien but strangely familiar dystopia.
Kazushi Ono, who is also the artistic director of the New National Theater Tokyo, showed his maestro skills with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, who achieved the difficult task of putting this complexly rich contemporary music into reality.
The singers did their jobs superbly well. The character of Johnson sung by Seth Carico left a particularly persuasive effect.
The production was simply beautiful, creative talents led by Lydia Steier successfully made this world premier of A Dream of Armageddon into a historic event.
There would be two more performances of this masterpiece.
The Osaka referendum on whether or not to abolish the City of Osaka and give rise to new integrated government system was a big news in Japan yesterday.
The Ishin party (Japan Innovation Party) pushed forward the plan, and lost the popular vote by a small margin.
Osaka is known as the laughter capital of Japan, with comedians from Yoshimoto dominating the media. The political turmoil surrounding the referendum would have been a golden opportunity to make comedy, with the colorful personalities of Mayer Matsui and Governor Yoshimura providing vivid materials.
So it is really weird, to say the least, that there is a total absence of comedy dealing with situations running up to the referendum, especially in the mainstream media such as television. Instead, the Yoshimoto comedians are largely seen as endorsing the policies put forward by the Ishin party, which dominates the local government.
Rooting for politicians without making comedy out of them, let alone criticizing them, does not seem to be within the job description of comedians. The status quo of "comedy" in Japan, especially those associated with Yoshimoto, is strange, to put it mildly.
Now that the Osaka referendum is over, perhaps we need a referendum of Japanese comedy next.
Borat's performance reminded me of the pro wrestler Tiger Jeet Singh, in that Borat completely set the pace and dominated the scene.
This would be only possible with meticulous calculation and unshakable self confidence. Huge respect for Borat, and the man behind the character, Sacha Baron Cohen.
The act by Borat's daughter, Maria Bakalova was also superb.
The upcoming U.S. Presidential election might turn out to be as complex and incomprehensible as the covid-19 pandemic.
To start, because of the asymmetry between both parties towards mail voting (Democrats more inclined to vote by mail), there might be an initial red mirage, with Mr. Trump appearing to win before the counting of the mail votes starts. Mr. Trump might declare victory prematurely.
Even if Mr. Trump loses the popular vote (and electoral college vote), he might not concede defeat and bow out graciously.
He might refuse to leave the White House, in which case, I read on the web, the secret service might have to physically escort him out as a civilian, an operation the venerable organization is reportedly simulating and rehearsing already.
In addition to that, there might be some resistance from Trump supporters, the nature of which is anyone's guess at the moment.
Taken together, the outcome of the election might be very unpredictable, even if Mr. Biden wins the election.
I watched Mr. Trump's performance in CBS's 60 Minutes on its website.
I did not think that questions from the host Lesley Stahl were particularly biased or hard.
It seemed rather that Mr. Trump was set on denying the whole direction of the show from the beginning.
When a person does not have the capacity to absorb information which might not necessarily agree with his or her views, people around would gradually hesitate from expressing these ideas.
Ms. Lesley Stahl did not shy away from making her case, but I wonder how many in the White House would have been bold enough to face Mr. Trump with adversary views.
For a robust policy making, it is necessary to assimilate multiple views. The attitude and tone of Mr. Trump in the 60 Minutes program cast some serious doubts about how his administration has been on the diversity of ideas.
