Home > Special Reports > WTC > This Page
       |
|
How did Japanese Netizens Respond to the World Trade Center Attack? Masahiro Morioka I first got to know the terrorist attacks when reading a post from an American person uploaded on a message board. I watched TV all over the night. The scene shocked me. Then I heard President Bush saying, "Make no mistake: The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts." I was again shocked by Bush's words, "hunt down and punish." My first reaction was that if the United States hunts down and punishes those terrorists abroad, then this means a kind of personal punishment by the US, not an act of justice that should be achieved by the international community. American news media started talking about retaliation and war under the name of "justice." I did not agree with the terrorists, but at the same time, I did not agree with the statement that the US should strike back the terrorists and the countries that would harbor them. On Sep.14, a Japanese translation of a statement, written by some of the US staff members of War Resisters League [Eng], was delivered to my email box by an unknown person. They were saying, "Let us seek an end of the militarism that has characterized this nation for decades. Let us seek a world in which security is gained through disarmament, international cooperation, and social justice not through escalation and retaliation. We shall live in a state of fear and terror or we shall move toward a future in which we seek peaceful alternatives to violence, and a more just distribution of the world's resources." This statement uttered by the US citizens moved me a lot. On Sep.17, another email was delivered to me. It was a Japanese translation of a letter from Greg Nees, former U.S. Marine Sergeant, to the President of the US. He said in his letter, "I beg you, let not one more innocent life---American, Israeli, Palestinian, Afghan or any other---be lost. ...... What right can we claim that allows us to take more innocent lives? Is that not also a form of terrorism? Will we rise above the level of those who attacked us?" [Eng] This letter again moved me. I am running a Japanese website, Life Studies Homepage, which is one of the most visited academic site here. I thought of making a special page for gathering information about the WTC attack and the retaliation by the US. One of the reasons was that I couldn't find any information in Japanese newspapers about anti-war movements in the US, hence that people here probably did not know them. Another reason was that I wanted to know how netizens here and abroad thought about it. I surfed around the net and found out that there had already been some Japanese websites especially for the WTC attack. All of them were anti-war websites. They were collecting articles saying "No" to terrorism and retaliation. They were frustrated by the fact that Japanese mass media only copied and pasted the articles in US newspapers and CNN, and did not present their own analyses on this event. Actually, it took lots of time until mass media recognized the pile of rich information and links on the Japanese anti-war websites. The majority of Japanese netizens' websites on the WTC attack was created to present their objections both to terrorism and to retaliation. They paste the words such as "love and peace" and John Lenon's lyrics,"Imagine," on their homepages to show their attitudes toward retaliation and war. Probably the WTC attack reminded many netizens of two tragic events in Japanese history: atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and Hanshin Awaji Earthquake in 1995. The former killed more than 300 thousand ordinary citizens. And the latter killed 5000 people, which was nearly equal to the number of WTC victims. The main characteristic of these two events was that the lives of many people were taken "instantaneously," very similar to the event on Sep.11 in the NYC. One was made by US forces, and the other was mainly by natural phenomenon. We know two "instantaneous tragedies" in our history, and this time we watched one more instantaneous killing of 5000 people in NYC. When I heard Bush's words "hunt down and punish," I automatically and naturally imagined those who would be killed by high-tech attacks by US forces in Afghanistan. I presume such sentiments lie under the anti-war websites in Japan as well. Global Peace Campaign was one of the earliest websites protesting against retaliation [Eng/Jp]. They received a letter from Greg Nees, mentioned above, and planned to publish his anti-war letter as a full-page ad in New York Times. They started a fund-raising campaign through their website just after the WTC event. For only two or three weeks, more than 100,000 dollars were donated. Finally, together with Veterans for Peace, USA, they gathered enough money for the ad, and the letter from Greg Nees was published in New York Times, Section A, page 23, Oct.9 [Eng]. 47% of total givers contributed from Japan, and 44% from the USA. They are now planning to publish another ad in Los Angeles Times. Their website has both Japanese and English pages. They have some volunteer staff members for translating Japanese articles into English. The Japanese pages contain messages from the staff, lots of voices from the readers, and links. There was a message board, but it was closed because "flaming" occurred among the participants over the topic. I want to show one of the examples later. Another earliest group was Give-Peace-a-Chance.jp, which started its peace walk campaign just after the WTC event [Eng/Jp]. They gathered citizens through their website and walked around the Shibuya area, downtown Tokyo, calling for peace. A series of peace walks and other campaigns succeeded around Japan . Many volunteers got together to make their website as a networking base for Japanese anti-war movements. Their website has a list of ongoing peace walks and other campaigns in Japanese and English. They also created a digital yellow ribbon image for peace and put on their homepage. Their site has a list of projects, links to the major anti-war sites, a mailing list, and messages from the readers. [See other campaigns Eng] Alternative Mailing List [Jp], run by JCA-NET [Eng/Jp], an independent website for grass roots activities, played a key role for sharing information inside and outside Japan on this event. Just after the attack, members started to post a lot of information. For example, ant-war statements from the International Action Center and the Green Party of the United States were posted on Sep.12; the latter was the Japanese translation from the original text. The Japanese translation of a statement from War Resisters League, cited above, was posted there on Sep.13. A plenty of information, including anti-war rallies and meetings, came to this mailing list, and then spread out into the net. Among the earliest there were several links-oriented sites. One of the characteristics of Japanese anti-war websites would be that they have lots of related links not only inside Japan, but toward around the world. They surf around the web and find important articles and messages in English and/or other languages, then sometimes translate them into Japanese for a very short period of time. We exchange the information on message boards and/or mailing lists. We have some automatic translation software programs on the net, but they do not work well, hence we have to translate by ourselves. Prema21net is a good example of this [Jp]. "Prema" means "love" in Sanskrit. It contains a plenty of information and links. Among them are: Japanese translation of the Statement of Rep. Barbara Lee on the floor of the House of Representatives Sept. 14, 2001, a letter calling for peace written by parents whose son was killed on Sep.11, an anti-war statement by Korean 533 groups for calling peace, a message from Dalai Lama, donation list for WTC victims and refugees in Afghanistan, and many other important sites. Other examples are Japan Catholic Council for Justice and Peace [Jp], Tetsuro Kato's Imagine [Eng/Jp], and a special page for WTC attack in my Japanese website for Life Studies [Jp]. Gen Nakayama's Chronique Philosophique is an interesting site that periodically uploads Japanese translations of related articles written by scholars such as Susan Sontag, Samuel Huntington, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Giorgio Agamben, and so on [Jp]. Many activist groups and academic associations published statements objecting to terrorism and retaliation. More than 60 statements appeared in September [See the list Eng/Jp]. For example, a group of 31 people, including well-known writers, journalists, professors, activists, and religious persons, announced the statement, "We oppose the U.S. war of retaliation and request the Japanese government to retract its support for this war" on Sep.18 (English translation:Sep.22) [Eng/Jp]. They said in this statement that they were shocked by the terrorist attack and they did object to this crime. But they were alike shocked by the US attitudes to this event, that is to say, meeting an act of terrorism with a full-scale war. "The perpetrators and accomplices of this crime should be brought to justice under the international laws and tried and punished by an international criminal court set up by the United Nations." Hence, they "strongly oppose this call for war and ask the Bush administration to immediately retract it." What they really fear is to "bring the whole world into an infinite chain reaction of violence and hatred." They represent the sentiments most Japanese netizens share toward the terrorist attacks and the succeeding events. Some grassroots activists were working as volunteers in Afghanistan before the event. Dr. Tetsu Nakamura, the director of Peshawar-kai, was among them [Jp]. He went to Afghanistan in 1984 as a physician, and began supporting Afghan people from 1986. Every year he treats 200 thousand people in Afghanistan. In addition to that, he and his staff have dug some hundred wells for providing fresh water. As a result of their effort, local Afghan people now have special feelings toward Japanese. Dr. Nakamura and his staff are now in Afghanistan, transporting a plenty of food into the area. His messages are being uploaded on some Japanese websites from time to time. Because his voices are sent directly to Japan, they sometimes convey precious information the international mass media never reports. Peshawar-kai is gathering funds for transporting food into Afghan on their website. Almost all of the Japanese websites concerning the WTC attack were ones that express compassion toward the victims and their families, and object both to terrorism and to retaliation. They cast doubt on Bush's statements on war against Taliban and air raids on Afghanistan. However, on their message boards, there were posted-messages that supported the US government policy. For example, a series of posts were made on the massage board of Global Peace Campaign insisting that their campaign was a kind of hypocrisy and it would have no effect on terrorism. One of the posts stated that people of the campaign were using the words "love and peace," but only chanting the words would not produce anything. "All you do is the same old anti-American movement aroused by jealousy against the prosperous America. It is the USA that protects the order of the world and our abundant life in this country. Can you abandon our present affluent standard of living? You are in the state of "peace senility (heiwa boke)." It is more effective to teach Arab people the supremacy of liberalism, democracy, and capitalism than such a peace ad in the newspaper." [Jp] Another post said, "Please do not scatter the illusory idea that repeating "peace" and "stop the war" will really stop the war. This time the victim was the USA, so please do not criticize American policy or American mass media. Please do not readily conclude from a one-sided perspective that this war means retaliation." [Jp] Generally speaking, a heated debate occurs over this kind of opinion, and it sometimes changes into "flaming" on a message board. In this case, too, such flaming occurred during the period of fund-raising campaign. The opinions of these critics have a small piece of truth, especially concerning the narcissism in the peace movement, but in general, I disagree with them about the effectiveness of a peace ad in newspapers. Even if the anti-war voices outside the US may grow stronger, the Bush administration would think of them as a "threat" from people in foreign countries. We need to support the peace activities inside the US, and help melt the masculine idea of the administration from within. This is one of the most effective ways of disarm the country that is dominating the world by military force and economic power. Anyway, anti-war websites, their message boards, and mailing lists played an important role for connecting people who were seeking information that did not appear in newspapers or on TV. It seems to me that a completely different air was flowing on the net. Through a discussion on the net, we learned that we should distinguish US policy from ordinary American people when criticizing retaliation because it is natural for an ordinary person to have the emotion of revenge after such a tragedy, but the government's foreign policy should not be based solely on the pile of people's such emotions. It is worth noting that a person got angry on a message board saying that American TV hosts frequently referred to "pearl harbor," "kamikaze attack," and "Hiroshima" as if the terrorist attacks had some connections to Japanese history and culture. Another person was also angry that an American TV reporter said the ground zero was just like Hiroshima. In Hiroshima more than 300 thousand ordinary citizens were killed and many others have continued suffering nuclear disease up to the present, compared with some thousand victims in NYC. People in Hiroshima must have had some complex feelings when hearing the reporter's words. Did the reporter have the imagination of taking the viewpoint of the citizens in Hiroshima when he/she stood on a new ground zero in NYC? Another thing that struck me was that bin Laden talked of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Al Jazeera. I had never imagined that the names of Japanese cities might come out of his mouth. I couldn't help imagining a ghost of the miserable 20th century filled with wars, retaliations, and corpses. Life studies in the 21st century should tackle the issues of war, retaliation, and the chain of violence in the world, together with the problems of life and death in our affluent society. [See What is life studies].
Links to this page
(c) 1999- International Network for Life Studies >> Back to Home
|
