Thursday, May 26, 2005

Under the Gaze of Who’s God

In the history of human beings, urban civilization began in Mesopotamia through development of agriculture but not based on practice of hunting. Pride you might feel when growing and harvesting plants might be very different from that you feel when killing game.

Yes, it began in the place now called Iraq, so this is for Iraqis and those who are humbly concerned with Iraq.

Now a spotlight is on a widow whose husband, a journalist well known by people concerned in Japan, was slain while driving back to Baghdad from Samawah after gathering information in the town and a base of humanitarian relief operations of Self-Defense Force of Japan. Both her husband and her nephew working together with his uncle were shot and killed. An Iraqi driver was spared with some injury.

They were two of five Japanese, so far reported officially, slain in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad. As the two journalists were not a big supporter of the Japanese government sending self-defense force to Iraq, the government didn’t show big sorrow for them though it might take some special care for the widow.

Her husband was a seasoned journalist whose career seems to have been characterized and destined since his assignment to Vietnam in 1972. In these last days, he was based in Bangkok.

He was such an old journalist that actually said that he was not a samurai when he was somehow poked fun at by Iraqis who shouted at him, “Aren’t you a samurai?”, while they were caught by, and staying down in the middle of, shooting between US soldiers and Iraqi fighters on a corner of Baghdad.

After the death of her husband on a road back to Baghdad, she invited an Iraqi boy to Japan. Her husband had planned to do so to cure the boy’s eye that had been hurt by some accident in the war. She might simply carry out the intention of her late husband, but it was well televised in Japan, and the boy was welcomed and successfully operated on his eye.

She became very famous since then. And, to my astonishment, she appeared as a reporter in a TV documentary where she was dispatched to the U.S. and interviewed a mother of a US soldier killed in the Iraq war as well as a veteran soldier who had lost his leg and sight in the war. She also visited a camp of the third infantry division in a certain state to interview soldiers. It was all broadcast in Japan.

At the last scene of the TV program, veterans who had served various wars marched in a small town of a certain state. She watched their marching and said, “Oh, America has been making war all the time.” Of course, she must know it as knowledge before visiting the US for the program. But, she said so explicitly to a TV cameraman or to audience at home in Japan.

It is said that her husband had planned to retire from his job as a free journalist traveling all over the world and collecting news materials at war fronts, and that fatal coverage tour to Samawah would have been the last one for him in a different way.

She might take consolation enough by helping an injured Iraqi boy and interviewing Americans involved in the Iraq war.

Now, if you are arrogant, you won’t think about the God and mind your neighbors. You only use your brain hard to get what you want. Not what the God wants and your neighbors want. That’s why arrogance is one of the significant sins.

However, to my astonishment, when I first observed the journalist working in Iraq on TV, I didn’t realize he was an experienced journalist. He looked like a very ordinary, old Japanese who by some chance came to Iraq while U.S. forces were advancing to Baghdad. It is partly because I didn’t know him by his outlook and he looked very plain without a trace of arrogance sometimes found in others in the same trade.

I also remembered a scene televised. As the old journalist was not admitted to the base of Japanese-Self-Defense Force in Samawah, he showed his book with his picture on to a Japanese guard to prove who he was without arrogance.

It is almost 4,000 years since Abram left a city of Mesopotamia according to the will of his God. He even changed his name to Abraham. Yes, even today, for man to leave those holy places might be reasonable expression of awe to Abraham’s God.