27 March 2008
  
Bakudan


  
 Just what I needed this morning. I had no more turned on the stupid computer in the darkness than I read the words: “Colombian authorities said they seized up to 66 pounds of uranium hidden off the side of a road in southern Bogotá on Wednesday.”
  
 The FARC- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia- apparently planned to use the material to make a dirty bomb. There was no commentary on where they intended to detonate the thing, either in the capital or for export to Uncle Sam.
  
 There is nothing about these things that is going to cause a mushroom cloud, nor acres of mass destruction. Even so, it is going to make things uncomfortable for the neighborhood where the thing goes off, and clean-up is going to be a painful and lengthy process.
  
 The analogy is not Chernobyl, and certainly not Hiroshima or Nagasaki. But it certainly shows that this future into which we march is going to have some nasty surprises.
  
 That may be why the past, with its known evil and excess has a certainty about it that was frankly horrifying at the time, but has mellowed in contrast with what might be lurking around the next corner.
  
 Whiskey, for example, and cigarettes. Those were the first two items after food itself that made a conquered life livable. There is no more central a nexus to the human experience than these, particularly if you throw sex into the equation as an enabler to all of them.
  
 That is why Tom’s letter’s about a distant time are so fascinating. He  was dispatched to the police force in Yokosuka, and what fueled the sailors and the Japanese who came in contact with them. There had been two major distilleries in Japan prior to the second war, and the drive to get them into production again was profound. The more famous of them is the Suntory concern, which is responsible for as much trouble as I ever encountered in dai Nippon.
  
 If you have found yourself out of American smokes and good ideas after midnight out in the Honch, and head down the Lucky Seven and Suntory route, you will know what I mean.
  
 Beer and rice wine are intrinsic parts of ancient Japanese history, but the arrival of whiskey with Commodore Perry is one of the places where the long story starts. He brought a full cask and 110 additional gallons of American whiskey as a gift to the Chrysanthemum Throne. There is no evidence that the golden liquid ever made it through the throng of courtiers to slake the Emperor’s thirst.
  
 Naturally, the imported stuff was the benchmark of quality in tobacco and liquor, since the materials available locally were severely constrained. Things were so bad that a lawyer who no longer had a practice tried to demonstrate that it was impossible to exist on the number of calories contained in the Government-issued food ration. Eschewing the black market, he publicly died of starvation.
  
 To dull reality, a local concoction called the "bakudan" ("bomb") was often consumed. It was made of methyl alcohol and assorted adulterants. It was not always fatal.
  
 There were nearly four hundred deaths associated with Bakudan ingestion in the first full year of the Occupation. There were other intoxicants available, some less lethal. One called "Kasutori" was so widely available that its consequences became synonymous with the culture of defeat.
  
 A prominent trader in illicit substances of the time commented in haiku that he  “drank trying to forget a life that hung suspended like a floating weed."
  
 That is the nub of the Occupation. The Black Market was the only alternative to starvation in late 1945, and dire times continued for the early years of the military occupation by the Americans.
  
 Many Japanese made vast fortunes in selling off military stocks of material from the old military establishment. When those were depleted, it was a logical step to appropriate the larder of the conquerors. The system of informal distribution was well established, and the only trick was the liberation of the product from the custody of the Americans.
  
 Or rather the first step was to transfer the goods from some Americans to other Americans. The ration control system was the means to protect the system from abuse, and of course became the nexus for the fraud itself.
  
 When the Meiji Emperor died in 1912, there were several companies manufacturing distilled spirits. After 140,000 died in the massive Kanto Plain earthquake in 1923, whiskey production began in earnest.
  
 Not that there is any connection, of course, or at least not directly. But when you consider that the dirty bomb that is so terrifying today would have the long-term consequence of increasing thyroid cancer, the prospect of a natural catastrophe that killed 140,000 people in the blink of an eye gives one pause.
  
 The past holds it horror, just as the man-made storm that caused vegetable gardens to occupy devastated lots in downtown Tokyo right near the Shinbashi Station. It is just bearable because it happened somewhere else, and not to anyone we know.
  
 Naturally, that could change in an instant, and why it is so much easier to look backward.
  
 In any event, in an atmosphere of great change, we have Kiko the New Woman; Tom, the military cop; Kiboto the Wire-man, and an assortment of Americans and Japanese who are about to stumble into a bonanza created by a war that is happening to someone else.
  
 Life was no longer a floating weed. It was about to turn into a roaring torrent.
  
 Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
 www.vicsocotra.com