Institute for Nature Study, Meguro

For anyone in Tokyo interested in parks or other oases of nature in this metropolitan infinity, I would highly recommend the Institute for Nature Study. This nature reserve is five minutes' walk from Meguro station and right next to the Tokyo expressway, but to enter is like crossing a gateway between dimensions.

From the profusion of plants, bird calls, pond and insect life, and peaceful spiders on massive webs, it is quickly apparent that this must be one of the most biodiverse grounds in Tokyo. It is small enough to walk all the way around in one or two hours, but still lets you experience the sense that you've left the city far behind.

Well worth exploring. And if animals particulary interest you, go here and here too. I can assure you you will not be disappointed.

Sumitomo Chemical Factory

Photography was prohibited within the factory compound. Please suffice with a substitute courtesty of Sumitomo Chemical's website.

"Our business must benefit society, not just our interests."

In the history of the founding of Japanese establishments, there appear two categories. The first, into which most random examples fall, grew from the surge of the post-war decades. A tag of Est. 1960s or 1970s is impressively ancient; the 1940s or 1950s, prehistoric. And then there are the zaibatsu keiretsu: the enormous business conglomerates with histories as dynastic monsterweights with hands in as many economic sectors (and government offices) as have ever existed, dating in some cases centuries back into the Edo Period.

Sumitomo Chemical, founded in 1913 producing fertilizer from the emissions of copper smelting in Ehime, is a component of one such conglomerate, the eponymous Sumitomo Group. Courtesy of the UN University, I lately had the chance to take a tour their plant in Chiba prefecture, on the heavily industrialized east shore of Tokyo Bay.

The slogan I opened this with, an admirable credo which shines with magnificence, was therein asserted to our group in a series of presentations and company documentation over a complimentary bento lunch. And of course it immediately begs the question: how far does the company reflect it in its deeds?

I will admit straight away that I am the last person who can offer an informed answer, any more than a molecule can drift around the corner of a room for a few hours then judge if the country that room is in is well-governed. There are vast and multiple dimensions to "benefiting society": sustainability, labour rights, raw material extraction conditions and the ethics of business partners, among others. For a chemical company, sustainability is the big one, and thus receives the most attention in the documents: including sustainabile development, and the provision of cutting-edge mosquito nets in Africa and suchlike. All well and good if the accounts are true; but once more, I have no present way to judge.

With friendliness and professionalism, the tour guides duly directed us into a maze, or rather a city, of stacks, piping, railings, stairways, cylindrical and spherical containers, and miscellaneous unidentifiable paraphernalia in which the temperatures ranged from 1100 Celsius – in the case of a naptha cracking furnace – to close to a hundred degrees below zero for cold storage. All this constituted the processing sequence for the ethylene plant, whereupon I should emphasize that chemistry, hydrocarbons and all, has never been my strong point and much of what actually went on in this industrial behemoth's billion reactions was lost on me. But yes, looking through a window into temperatures a thousand degrees higher than those around you, separated only by a few centimetres of plastic, is cool.

And did I mention that this ethylene plant makes up one little corner of the smallest of the Chiba works' three gigantic compounds?

They make all sorts of things with these substances, a few of which we got a look at in huge rooms of heavy equipment in the central compound. Through 'injection moulding' they can apparently take the stuff pumped out by that ethylene process and shape it into a brand-new car bumper in less than a minute. Next door were machines to draw out resins into sheets of film, for use in household goods and agriculture; while the aforementioned mosquito nets are made with fibres that constantly radiate insecticide from their cores to their surfaces, thus remaining as effective as when first soaked through five years' of washing and use, and indispensable, so it was presented, in the drive to roll back global malaria.

I hope, sincerely, that Sumitomo Chemical are as good as their word, and produce and apply their goods with all the responsibility and ethical fibre they were keen to impress. Again, I cannot answer, only ask: and there is one thing in particular I would like to ask about.

Sumitomo Chemical is developing one of its largest and most profitable operations in Rabigh, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, as many know but few like to speak of, currently hosts some of the cruellest and most unconscionable abuses against humanity know to our kind: foremost among them sexual apartheid (i.e. the forcible separation of all males and females not related by blood) and a further range of gender-based atrocities, especially in regards to degrading the power and dignity of women. These and other repressions are enforced not only by law but by the bloodthirsty religious police, the mutaween; all to asserting a vision of Islam which, through their oil money and political and religious influence worldwide, actively seeks to scourge the Muslim world of the most beautiful parts of its diversity, and remake it all in the Wahhabi image.

(And just in case anyone missed how there are some things that no line of cultural relativism can defend, the latest example of this is the Saudi hand in the rise of Ansar Dine in northern Mali, where they have seized control of Timbuktu and set about demolishing some of the most renowned and venerable Muslim cultural heritage in the world. This is reflected, of course, in the systematic destruction of ancient Islamic heritage which Saudi Arabia has itself conducted in Mecca and Medina, employing exactly the same doctrines as a pretext.)

Ultimately this becomes a question to Muslims everywhere: how calamitous would it be, if a thousand years from now, humanity might hear of Islam and equate it only to the callousness of Saudi Arabia, because the Wahhabis managed to eliminate all historical record of any alternatives, and quite probably plunge the world into unimagined bloodshed and hysteria in the process? It is not a future anyone would want, and surely the time to resolve the madness on that peninsula is long overdue. The destruction of history may reach further than we can bear in its consequences: look at Qin Shi Huang in China, for example, and draw the line from his burning of books and burying of scholars to Mao's obliteration of the country in the Cultural Revolution, and China's ongoing struggle with the horrors first released on its people by those ancient Legalists.

I digress, and return to our friends at Sumitomo Chemical. "Our business must benefit society, not just our interests." Thus: do men and women have equal opportunities to work at the facility in Rabigh? Does the company protect their right to associate and work together? What protections have those employees from the mutaween? What use is made of the company's corporate clout to help the humans of that region forge a better future?

There is no middle ground to operating in a country like Saudi Arabia. One either contributes to rolling back the Wahhabi programme of purging the love from humankind – thereby improving society; or, one acts complicit in it, and thus has a hand in society's descent into madness. In this case, which has Sumitomo chosen?

Of course I have no idea. Anyone in the area up for taking a look around in Rabigh and finding the answers?

Transition Town

Behold this fine fellow. Yes, those are centimetres on the scale, not millimetres.

You may wonder where I encountered this impressively proportioned comrade. The answer: Fujino, a town with a special story to tell, in the mountainous west of Kanagawa. I recently had the opportunity to visit this community, along with a group of UNU colleagues.

Dhalpuri

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. For me, cooking is not typically of the former.

Nonetheless, this day I committed to an exercise in globalization, creating one of my favourite items from Guyana using Japanese ingredients and equipment.

Dhalpuri is unleavened Caribbean roti (of South Asian origin), with a stuffing of ground yellow split peas along with cumin, pepper and garlic. Lacking a mill and tava, I sufficed with a food processor and a frying pan over a stove. It raises interesting reflections on the geography of cuisine: crowded and compartmentalized Tokyo leaves little room for the great communal cooking devices found in the kitchens and yards of Guyana's houses - the cassava processing apparatus of interior households alone would occupy more space than the average inhabitant of Tokyo lives in. Conversely, the tiny microwaves or toaster ovens here might quite amuse a Guyanese!

The process took two hours and made one heck of a mess, but from the outcome rose the taste of some of the most impressive memories I hold.

With my most honoured friend in Tokyo, I toasted Guyana over this product and dedicated this meal to my students at the Bina Hill Institute in the summer of 2010. May success, good fortune and the best of fulfilments be currently finding the journeys of each and every one of you.

Conflict and Peacebuilding in East Timor

 For those interested in the kinds of things I have been doing at the UN University...

 

How well has the causality of the conflict in East Timor been reflected in its UN peacebuilding experience?

Ai Chaobang (a.k.a. John Ashton), 11 February 2012

Introduction

1 – 1975-1999: The Causes of Conflict in East Timor

2 – 1999-2012: Peacebuilding

a) Security

b) Governance

c) Justice

Conclusion

Introduction

In December 1975, the world turned its back on East Timor. Twenty-four-years of Indonesian occupation visited brutality of demonic proportions upon its people: one of the worst genocides of the late twentieth century, in which over two hundred thousand Timorese, a third of the population, were killed.¹ It was answered, extremely belatedly, with the largest, furthest reaching and most committed international response in the history of United Nations (UN) peacebuilding.

The UN is now thirteen years into its intervention in East Timor, or in what, to the intervention's credit, became in 2002 the independent state of Timor-Leste. However, despite considerable success against astonishing odds, peacebuilding in East Timor has not been an unmitigated success. Today the outlook for Timor-Leste remains uncertain, its stability and prospects still appearing to hinge on the continued UN presence.

This analysis has two parts. In the first I explore the background to the East Timor conflict, in search of the causes of its traumatic violence in both the original conflict and the persisting unrest which still brings strife to its pursuit of peace. In the second I consider the UN peacebuilding exercise in depth, and ask whether it has sufficiently taken those roots of conflict into account. Through this I advance that the experience in East Timor offers lessons by which the UN might improve its peacebuilding exercises in future; but that the obstacles have been less due to faults in the UN organization, and more the responsibility of its member states and the international paradigm they yet uphold. For indeed, it was this paradigm, of states which choose to act on the world only in terms of their own "national interest" calculations, and which struggle to see through value frameworks other than their own, that was ultimately responsible for East Timor's nightmares; and this choice of paradigm which, although the UN's foundational principles reject it, made East Timor all the more challenging to raise from the wreckage to which the very same choices reduced it.

(Click below for the rest of the paper.)

Takao and Jinba

A mid-spring day with a forecast of 80% chance of continuous rain is the perfect occasion for hiking in the mountains. In this case, the mountains of the Takao-Jinba Prefectural National Park on the western outskirts of Tokyo.

Takao-san is one of the most popular hiking destinations here, with easy access and multiple routes to the top. From the summit a ridge goes up and down through forests, over streams, and in and out of generally pleasant surroundings with such things as monkeys, wild boar, and colourful wildflowers. Cooler than the lowlands, a lot of late-blooming sakura still flourished, while most of those flowers have already shed their petals in the city below, giving way to leaves.

The ridge connects Takao with the Shiro and Kagenobu mountain peaks, and ultimately Mount Jinba, the highest of the four at 857 metres in altitude. On a clear day some of these offer panoramic views as far as central Tokyo to the east, and Mount Fuji to the southwest. Smothered in cloud and rain as it was on this occasion, we got an alternative view of haunted forests and white walls closing in all around, which in fact was no less special. Click below for photos.

Hanami

For a few weeks every spring, the pinks and whites of sakura (cherry blossoms) bloom across Japan. These hold ancient and enduring cultural significance for people in this country, who over the last few days have started gathering in astronomical numbers to partake in hanami (flower-viewing).

These photos were taken in Kitanomaru and Yoyogi Park, in places saturated with impassable oceans of people.