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イラク人質事件での出来事を淡々と記述し「ブッシュ大統領でさえ（日本のこのような前近代性に）びっくり仰天するでしょう。すべての国が米国と同じ価値観を持っていると考えるのは間違っているのです。イラクでもそういう考えで臨まねばなりません」という。書いているのは保守派でタカ派のリチャード・コーヘン。日本人であることが恥ずかしくなること請け合い。
The Cultural Divides of War
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, April 27, 2004; Page A21
It is said -- actually, he's the one who said it -- that President Bush barely skims the newspapers and instead gets briefed by his staff. If that's the case, then Bush probably missed the story in the New York Times about how, when three Japanese were freed by their captors in Iraq, they returned to Japan and were greeted not with yellow ribbons but with scorn and anger. In Iraq, knives were held to their throats. In Japan, the fear is they might use them on themselves.
The three were kidnapped in early April near Fallujah and released about two weeks later. In the interim, they were seen on TV with their captors, who threatened to kill them unless Japan pulled its troops out of Iraq. Even as that was happening, though, some in the Japanese government and the press were, as the cliche goes, blaming the victim.
For what, you might ask? For three reasons, we are told. For endangering Japan's humanitarian mission in Iraq. For disobeying a government advisory and going to Iraq in the first place. For putting their own goals above those of the nation. The public censure was such that the families of the hostages received harassing phone calls even while the three were still in Iraq, and politicians dumped on them even before they were pronounced safe. A helpful government sent a plane for them -- and then billed them for the flight. An American would be pardoned for paraphrasing the ever-wise Dorothy: This was not Kansas.
It was, in fact, a different culture. It was one in which its people dressed like us and worked in companies like our own and was so Western in some ways it was downright avant-garde. And yet under that facade is a culture that retains its uniqueness. The superficialities can be deceptive. Commenting on the hostages, Colin Powell naively told the Japanese they should be "very proud that they have citizens like this." Very proud, though, is not what Japan was feeling. The uninquisitive Bush, his briefing limited to the very brief by his very briefers, might well have uttered a deep and profound "hmmm" had he come across this story. If Japan, so Sony and so Honda, was at the same time so strange, then what does this say about Iraq? Yet motives and goals are ascribed to Iraqis because, in the words of Bush himself, they are just like us in ways that count the most.
Just like us, they are supposed to cherish freedom. The president tells us that this is God's gift to them. "I say freedom is not America's gift to the world," Bush told Bob Woodward. "Freedom is God's gift to everybody in the world." This is a formulation the president has often repeated but it is one based, at bottom, on the expectation of shared values -- that Iraqis are, in this regard, like Americans.
Nothing in that statement shows a humble allowance for the vagaries of culture -- for whatever it is, for instance, that either sanctions or extols suicide bombings, to pick an extreme example. I don't know if "freedom is God's gift," but I do know that some people are willing to sacrifice their lives to deny it to others. In their own minds, they do God's will by blowing up innocent people.
In the Balkans last summer, I became fascinated with the young people who flocked to the seashore for a good time. They dressed like us and they danced like us -- but were they like us? Just a few years before, people like them were capable of waging a civil war of awful brutality. Would they do so again? Is the emergence of a near-universal youth culture a bond or will it prove as evanescent as class ties were to the soldiers of World War I? Despite what they supposedly had in common, the working classes of Europe butchered one another in the trenches.
The one remaining permissible prejudice is the one against discrimination of any kind. We are taught that all people are the same, that all distinctions are invidious. This is PC goop or religious tripe. A proper respect for the role of culture is hardly bigotry. We are not all the same. In America, hostages such as the ones taken in Iraq would be welcomed home with yellow ribbons and a spangle of kitsch. In Japan, they are shunned and berated.
Too bad George Bush doesn't read newspapers on his own. They can teach a lesson. The story about the hostages in Iraq was only partially about Japanese culture. By inference, it was also about American assumptions.
cohenr@washpost.com
ｩ 2004 The Washington Post Company
題名には必ず「阿修羅さんへ」と記述してください。