Stale

I feel this lingering obligation to revisit 731, even though my impressions of the place have long since gone stale. Well, I've got a few minutes, and my laundry hamper's empty. Otherwise I'd probably snatch my blouses out and start running them under icy water-- China makes a domestic out of me every time I try to dodge the usual vocab lists and essay prompts.

So I figure, why not take the time to pound out some dada? I'm sure I can dredge up some angst, indignation, or ignorant presumptuousness, and serve them up warmed-over in some very ponderous sentences. Side note here, but I actually hate what China's doing to my writing style, which was admittedly always rather precious and brittle-- like those blue-eyed shepherdess figurines you see on retirees' mantle-pieces, all nostalgia and nausea. Fine Chinese prose is known for its succinctness, a compressed, high-concentration elegance like good brick tea. Not that I've managed to pick that up from reading motherlandic literature. (I cling to hope-- after reading White Oleander I emoted in sentence fragments and fragrant analogies for weeks.)

Instead, I find myself stalling, sometimes translating back from Chinese-- in which my style is arid, academic, and dead on top of being unsophisticated, wobbling between toddler and fossil to tragic aesthetic consequences, I'm sure. And I'm always untangling these syntactically ridiculous sentences that make me want to forfeit my right to the English language.

Blogging in this state of mildly farcical dissatisfaction-- no one angsts this much about their prose style, not even really me-- is actually kind of depressing. It draws attention to the floaty faux-profundity of my thoughts (How very small my mind!) as well as the pretentiousness of my prose (Stop that alliteration!). I go back and cut out words, and still there's this mass of modifiers and tongue-tied imprecision, growing out like a cancer. This is, I guess, a kind of stylistic anorexia-- resenting my sentences for their flabbiness, trying to starve them down. (I can't.) Healthier than some alternatives, I guess, since China makes me feel virtuous when I don't eat. (I do.) Not that I actually want to churn out Good Modern Prose-- what n+1's Elif Batuman calls "a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and vivid nouns". I'm with Batuman. Thank you, Hemingway, for being publishing's Kate Moss.

So I just quoted a literary journal in a blog post. And wrote too much about my tendency to write too much. And none of it was about Japan.

I should probably go back to the tea treatises tonight-- no more time for groundless ruminations on one of the most soul-crushingly depressing topics available to the East Asian intelligentsia. So I'll just say this, all pigheaded obviousness and fortune-cookie cliche:

It makes no sense to conflate the policies of the WWII-era Japanese imperial government (and the often reprehensible conduct of the associated military personnel-- ugh, total war) with the character of the Japanese people today. I hate that sentence, but whatever. It's not the same nation. Japanese schoolchildren-- against my expectations, actually-- are briefed about the atrocities in the classroom, and I'm told that Japanese newsrooms positively hum with debate about the extent of civilian culpability in the war crimes of the imperialist era. By raising its children to hate blindly-- broadcasting exploitation flicks set in Nanjing, boycotting Japanese goods-- China won't accomplish anything but win Japan's bewilderment and contempt. They're forcing the mask of enmity over Japan's face-- if we become what we pretend to be, don't we also become what others insist we are? It's especially annoying now that the generation flinging insults and accusations back and forth don't have any authentic memories of the war. They're mining TV show caricatures in order to manufacture evidence of one another's cruelty and incompetence.

I'm aware that talking about "China" and "Japan" as implicit monoliths is imprecise and stupid. It's a shortcut, a metonym, or something.

Dana and I talked about this on the bus over to 731. We were more or less in agreement about China's stubbornness-- Sichuan's being rebuilt using Japanese dollars, my one-on-one professor says. I claimed it had something to do with the old Confucianism-- the rectification of names. What China wants is for Japan to make everything right by calling a spade a spade. That's a crude oversimplication, sure. But would it kill Tokyo to use some more emphatic rhetoric in the various expressions of "remorse" they've already released? Maybe I don't understand because that's the way of the US-- this masturbatory performance of GUILT, theatrical and choreographed as a dance. I'm a consequentialist. Writing a poem about the Trail of Tears is easier than making change. (But is it easier than blindly tossing money at a problem? Also, I hate it when I find myself talking about "change" in such fuzzy, rhetorically shallow terms, as if I'm writing a pat political poem of my own. Blame it on ignorance-- I've got no idea what sort of change should be made.) You can bow your head before all the shrines in the world-- such actions are often significant as signals broadcasting the acceptance of accountability, and as gestures of humility. But they're not actually useful.

But I sometimes feel this stupidly personal sense of victimhood when someone brings up Manchukuo or Nanjing. My identification with China is visceral and blood-deep, even though intellectually I don't think much of the nation-state as a marker of identity. And I also have this weird thing about the medical profession-- romanticizing it to the extent that I could never be the doctor for fear of tumbling down dear old pedestals, venerating the Hippocratic Oath as a sort of personal Nicene Creed (even though I interpret it in this possibly problematic, lunch-buffet way-- support legalized abortion and euthanasia, after all). So I view the 731 experiments with the appropriate amount of horror, even if it's a horror of the intellect rather than of the tingling spine. Medical expertise was perverted for murder, shattering the doctrine of nonmaleficence which I'm wont to hold sacred.

Room 11, which I think of as the Redemption Room, holds artifacts related to the testimonies of former 731 personnel, who renounced their past crimes, released previously suppressed information, and tried to atone. They did things like give up their pensions, seek solace in Buddhism, allow themselves to be grilled by Chinese journalists. But I'm still wondering how they could have lived on after working 731. Primum non nocere.