Anthems - Japan - Afterword

After my last post, a friend wrote me to point out that the Japanese don’t officially have a national anthem.  Nor do they have an army, or navy, or nuclear weapons; they have a “self-defense force.”  I lived on an airbase in Japan.  I knew about the Japan Self-Defense Forces.
 

And (my friend went on), produce from the Fukushima area is safe.  The government says it is, so it must be.

Well, according to Wikipedia (that source of all alleged truth), the anthem was officially proclaimed the national anthem by the 1999 Act on National Flag and Anthem.  I went back to check, on the chance that perhaps it had been proclaimed something else, maybe the Official National Patriotic Song or Tune.  But of course Wikipedia can be wrong.

I won’t say anything about nuclear weapons or Fukushima (“Fortunate Island?”); I’m not up on that.

But the comment on the “self-defense force” (and yes, the comment on Fukushima, obliquely) reminded me of the fabled indirectness (“obliqueness?!”) often attributed to the Japanese; and curiously, that reminded me of the British.

I intended, at the time, to say something about what seems to me the indirectness of the Japanese anthem.  Paradoxical, since I claimed the words were so to the point.  And yet…whereas other anthems might go on at length about the glories of their countries (not mentioning any names, but pick any one that describes, at length, vast geography or glorious history), the Japanese anthem is perhaps the shortest in its lyrics.  May your reign endure a thousand, eight thousand generations; till the pebbles grow into boulders lush with moss.  It is direct, but to me seems to understate, imply.  Perhaps that’s just my aesthetic viewpoint.

I wanted to go on and say something about indirectness in the Japanese language; but, of course, as soon as I decided to do that, I realized, alas, that I could not think of an example.  My humble inadequacy!

Still, thinking of the Japanese and the British, who I’ve often thought of together (both imperial island nations, on uneasy terms with the Powers of the Mainland)…  I’m told that Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado was a great hit in Japan (which I can’t quite imagine).  Queen Victoria allegedly was delighted to hear that Gilbert had decided to lampoon another country besides England.  Yes…

Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood describes an English friend who had to bring home news of a relative’s death and begins by saying, “There’s been a small accident,” then continues on with, “No, he was injured I’m afraid…slightly…well, a bit more seriously, actually;”  continuing on in that vein before finally admitting to the poor man’s demise.  Indirectness…

Thinking of imperial powers…and of our own fabled Pentagon chiefs who think up clinical terms like “collateral damage”…one must of course remember that indirectness can be either polite or…deceitful.

Meanwhile, I still like the Japanese anthem, whether it’s “official” or “national” or an “anthem!”

Anthems (6) – Interlude “Down Under” (New Zealand, Australia)

I’d never heard the anthem of New Zealand or Australia, so I went on YouTube to see what they sounded like.
 

I have to admit, I started out fairly non-committal.  But anthems can be sung at all sorts of tempos and in all sorts of styles; I reserve judgment.  Both anthems, at first, seemed okay but not terribly inspiring.  Both now are growing on me.

As I’ve said, national anthems are meant for the people of the nations in question; an outsider will never react the same way as a native.

I was intrigued by some of the comments I noticed on YouTube.  One person called one of the anthems a dirge.  This was understandably met with some indignation from a loyal citizen.

I began with the intention of avoiding the confusing of these two countries.  People here, in the U.S., forever connect them, I think; and they do both share British heritage; yet they are quite different, both in history and geography—and I always stress this to my friends here.  Yet the more I listen to the two anthems, the more I seem to confuse them.  I’m going to have to work on this!  Perhaps—again—because the recordings I’m listening to are sung in a similar, rather “pop” style.  But also, perhaps, because I sense they both have something, again, of the Anglican-style hymn in them.

The sense of the Australian anthem is that Australia is blessed with many riches, let’s do good things with them.  I’ve always felt this was a good approach for a national anthem.

The New Zealand anthem has verses in English, but also in Maori.  The Maori, apparently, is now sung first.  This reflects, in multiple ways, differences between New Zealand and Australia.  At first I found the English lyrics a bit expansive—asking God to defend the country; speaking in the following verses of the desire for peace but expressing the willingness to fight for the land if it is threatened.  By comparison, the Maori lyrics seemed simple and straight-forward:  Bless us, God; may Good flourish.  Defend the Land.

But I only have the translation for the first Maori verse, so I’m at a disadvantage here.

I’ll be listening to both of the anthems more.  They are little-known in the U.S.  Check them out on YouTube.

What intrigues me most, at this point, is how I am mixing the two melodies up, in spite of my determination not to.  Is it me, or the music?

Book Review: The End of the Affair (Warning: Spoilers!)

(From the July South Bay Poly newsletter).

Book “review?”  Or merely a “light once-over?”

I began with enthusiasm.  Graham Greene gets the atmosphere rolling nicely.  World War II.  A man living on one side of the London “commons” has been having an affair with the wife of a “friend” who lives on the other side of the “commons.”  The narrator now thinks the woman is cheating on him, so he convinces the husband to let him hire a private investigator.  The woman often coughs terribly.  I immediately knew she would die of TB or something—and she does.

But in the meantime, she finds God.  She was baptized a Catholic when she was two.  She doesn’t remember, of course.  During an air raid, when the narrator is pinned under a door and appears to be dead, she promises God to reform if God lets him live.  He survives, of course (otherwise he couldn’t be narrating, right?).  Now the woman drops him and considers becoming a Catholic.  The narrator suggests that she has been sleeping around right and left (misogyny, I wondered?).

Now the woman has given up the narrator, and continues to have a “non-marriage” with her husband.  In many years of married life, she has never experienced an orgasm with her husband—though she did, apparently, and often, with the narrator.  But now she can get on with dying (aggravated by the narrator’s tendency to drag her out into freezing rain for gut-wrenching conversations) and becoming a saint.  By the end, she’s probably achieved three bona fide miracles—but not the one she really wanted:  Rather than bringing peace to the narrator, he still feels miserable.  Now if this had been a poly movie (a woman, two men, and God)…

Some people feel that spirituality and sexuality are like East and West—“Never the twain shall meet."  I disagree…  Anyway…I’m off to watch one or both of the film versions next.

Movie Review: Where Angels Fear to Tread (Oh This Should Be Poly!)

(South Bay Poly Newsletter, June 2012)

It’s a bit of cliché by now:  If polyamory were accepted, we’d lose the conflict in a large percentage of popular books and films.

Where Angels Fear to Tread, based on the 1905 E. M. Forster novel, would make a beautiful poly movie.  Phillip travels to Italy to retrieve the baby son of his dead sister-in-law from its Italian father.  Charlotte, a family friend, accompanies him.  Phillip’s upper class English family despises the father for being Italian and socially “inferior.”  But Phillip loves Italy and the Italians, who seem so “alive” compared to his own stuffy English background.

In the process of trying to retrieve the baby (an attempt which ends in disaster—the accidental death of the baby), Charlotte falls in love with the Italian.  She returns to England to avoid the possibility of ever seeing him again and acting on her feelings.  In the film (and this is apparently a bit different than the novel), it is hinted that she may marry Phillip.  Indeed, Phillip seems quite taken by Charlotte.  Charlotte feels ambiguous towards Phillip—but admits to being in love with the Italian.

But so is Phillip, perhaps!  When Charlotte says “I love him—Gino,” Phillip immediately replies:  “I love him too.”  What did this mean in 1905, when the book appeared, just ten years after the Oscar Wilde scandal?  We know now that Forster was gay.  Of course, the British of the time thought of male-on-male sex as always “perversion,” never love.

So the three characters might have lived happily together in Italy!  But Forster couldn’t have written that ending in 1905!  Indeed, he never “came out.”  Only after his death was his gay novel, Maurice, published, with the assistance of Christopher Isherwood.