(Water, water, and water around heated Tokyo)100.76 Degrees Fahrenheit in Japan
Today, it is a national holiday in Japan.
Yesterday, Sunday, I was sitting on a bench before a pond.
I heard two old men walking behind the bench asking an old staff of the park management to press a shutter button of a camera for them.
Another old man in a very summer fashion sitting on a bench off mine looked like somehow suspecting me as I wore a suit jacket.
I pulled out a camera from the pocket to take dragonflies flying busy on the surface of a big pond on a hot Sunday evening.
Indeed, this evening I may go to a public swimming pool nearby.
SECTION I: THE HOTTEST TOWN’S OMEN
Yesterday, a western Japanese town recorded a temperature at 38.2 degrees C or 100.76 degrees F, the hottest in this summer in Japan.
I have been once to this town in Ehime Prefecture on the Shikoku Island, some 800Km or 500 miles in the southwest of Tokyo.
There is a Mt. Fuji-like mountain in the town, though not so mighty-high at all.
Some Americans might still remember the Ehime-Maru tragedy that occurred in early 2001, (leading to the regime change in Japan to pave the way for Mr. Jyunichiro Koizumi's premiership so drastically).
Specifically in the tragedy, a Japanese fisheries high school had lost its training ship and some lives of students and sailors off the Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, due to a unavoidable collision with a US navy submarine with oil businessmen from Texas on board as civilian visitors to the submarine.
The Ehime-Maru, of course, was from the Ehime Prefecture.
This incident called the story "Moby Dick" to my mind, though, after the 9/11 Terror Attacks.
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It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:
"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.
"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL."
"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN."
Chapter One
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
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It is because "Ehime-Maru" sounds like "ISHMAEL", since the both were on a "wailing voyage" as I once wrote in EEE Reporter.
And, yesterday, one of my favorite towns in Ehime recorded the highest temperature in this summer in Japan.
Of course, I heard that Mr. Barack Obama recently visited Afghanistan and said that he would transfer some troops from Iraq to Afghanistan.
SECTION II: WITH AN AK-47 TO A 7-ELEVEN
Early this year, the New York Times focused on Iraqi-War veterans who committed murders after leaving the military.
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"Matthew knew he shouldn’t be taking his AK-47 to the 7-Eleven," Detective Laura Andersen said, “but he was scared to death in that neighborhood, he was military trained and, in his mind, he needed the weapon to protect himself."
Head bowed, Mr. Sepi scurried down an alley, ignoring shouts about trespassing on gang turf. A battle-weary grenadier who was still legally under-age, he paid a stranger to buy him two tall cans of beer, his self-prescribed treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
As Mr. Sepi started home, two gang members, both large and both armed, stepped out of the darkness. Mr. Sepi said in an interview that he spied the butt of a gun, heard a boom, saw a flash and "just snapped."
In the end, one gang member lay dead, bleeding onto the pavement. The other was wounded. And Mr. Sepi fled, "breaking contact" with the enemy, as he later described it. With his rifle raised, he crept home, loaded 180 rounds of ammunition into his car and drove until police lights flashed behind him.…
The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/us/13vets.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
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In this atmosphere of the society, there must be many housing-loan salesmen or financial-sector workers who would not care about lives and securities of poor American citizens who were tricked into contracting a sub-prime loan scheme.
Especially in the atmosphere as below reported:
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At the military blog Blackfive one reader's email to the website described the experience of greeting vets returning from overseas shortly before the Times article was published:
Our men and women came home last night to a happy, welcoming crowd, who were more than pleased to see them and thank them for their service to our beloved country. And this morning, those same men and women will see a local paper with a prominent headline implying they are murdering criminals let loose in our society.
Is the New York Times guilty of cursory reporting, or does the article simply highlight a truth that's hard to swallow? It's clear many veterans (at least those with an online presence) are outraged, but for others it's yet another wake up call that the war is never simply left on the battlefield for returning vets. One thing is certain: the dialog over this article has already gone way past the actual focus of murder to now include the very way veterans are seen in our society.
http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/soldiershome/archive/2008/01/14/article-on-veterans-committing-murder-stirs-debate.aspx
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SECTION III: OVERESTIMATED MERIT OF THE U.S.
In terms of intellectual and human properties, Japanese conservatives look more mature than Japanese liberals, since liberals in Japan mean those who would vote for, or come into line with, the Japanese Communist Party or the Japanese Social Democratic Party, if not North Korea.
Japanese Liberals love the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory no matter if they believe it or not, since they hate the U.S. just like some Japanese nationalists.
But, there is a special kind of conservatives who overestimate a merit of the U.S. so eccentrically.
First of all, they think that the rich and super rich Americans are cleverer than Japanese businessmen and politicians, since America is larger, richer, and militarily more advanced than Japan.
So, whenever the U.S. Government fails in diplomacy, economy, and national security, they think that the rich and smart American leaders have failed by intent or for a certain secret purpose.
When the U.S. Government is attacked by Islamic terrorists, they think that it cannot be possible that the rich and smart American leaders fail in protecting the nation; so, it must be playing their own work, namely a conspiracy.
When the U.S. Government is losing military and political hegemony globally as the sole superpower, they think that it cannot be possible that the rich and smart American leaders fail in protecting their hegemony; so, it must be playing their own work as they like multi-polar world than mono-polar world, namely pretending to be failing in bolstering the mono-polar dominance so far sustained with a little help from the U.K.
Yet, only with a few exceptions, those Japanese liberals and excessive admirers of the US economic and military power do not say that the subprime loan problem is what the US Government, namely, the Bush Administration has caused by intent or for a certain secret purpose, though Mr. George W. Bush might have been misinformed by Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Bernanke.
The fact is: The US leaders could not prevent the tragedy of the subprime loan problem, as they could not prevent the 9/11 Terror Attacks and the shift to multi-polar world, since these incidents are all inevitably on a trend of history their ability cannot cope with.
No American elites, including Bliderbergers, are smarter than history.
That is why President Mr. George W. Bush was very cooperative with Japanese Prime Minister Mr. Yasuo Fukuda in the recent G8 Summit Meeting held in Japan.
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In my views, America is just like a young man who came back home after having accomplished his mission in Iraq and went to a 7-Eleven with an AK-47 machine-gun...however eventually settled in to a normal life as an ordinary citizen without possessing an automatic rifle after some judicial process.
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Free to start life over, Mr. Sepi stepped tentatively into adulthood. Settling in Phoenix, he enrolled in automotive school and got a job as a welder for a commercial bakery. Once in a while, he said, a loud noise still starts his heart racing and he breaks into a cold sweat, ready for action. But he knows now how to calm himself, he said, he no longer owns guns, and he is sober and sobered by what he has done.
"That night," he said, of the hot summer night in Las Vegas when he was arrested for murder, "if I could erase it, I would. Killing is part of war, but back home ..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/us/13vets.html?pagewanted=9&_r=2&hp
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Indeed, a young US soldier came back home from Iraq to kill a gangster near a 7-Eleven shop and eventually to start to live as an ordinary worker, citizen, consumer, taxpayer, and voter.
The Obama Administration or the McCain Administration should pull out troops from the Middle East and Afghanistan to take on gangsters in the housing loan sector and the financial or oil-speculation sector in New York and so on if not in Las Vegas.
They must do so, since Moby Dick is now invading the sea of American houses and financial instruments while the global temperature is rising and the oil reserves are dwindling.
(Don't be a midnight desperado if working so late in Las Vegas or around the cool Tokyo Bay;
http://home.att.ne.jp/star/ELS/desperado.html )
Matthew 24:32 Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh:
Mark 13:28 Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When her branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is near:
Luke 21:30 When they now shoot forth, ye see and know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand.