9 August 2021. Olympics | Bombs
Goodbye to Tokyo; What a nuclear blast does
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: Goodbye to Tokyo
The closing ceremony is over, the medals table is complete, but it’s worth dipping into an extraordinary piece of writing about Tokyo’s Olympic history (hat-tip to The Browser.)
Yu Miri is a Japanese novelist of Korean descent, and her novel Tokyo Ueno Station, which explores this long history, was translated into English last year. A long article in n+1 magazine by Miles Goodall explores the world of the novel and the history that Yu Miri uses as the context for it. A second novel, The End of August, also draws from this same well.
It is a history that, in its way, links the 1964 Games with the 2021 edition:
In January of 1964, (the construction worker) Kazu has just arrived in Tokyo by train, leaving his home in Fukushima to take a job building sports facilities for the upcoming Games. For the next fifty years, he lives as an itinerant laborer, until Tokyo’s bid for 2016 drives him, now homeless, out of his tent in Ueno Park and on to his death. Tokyo 2020 finds him haunting the park as a ghost. Ichikawa’s laboring hero—promised a share of the prosperity of the new Olympic city—becomes, in Yu’s novel, an emblem of the Games’ human cost.
She has some personal history in this story. As Goodall relates, she is “the grandchild of Yang Im-deuk, a Korean long-distance runner and Olympic hopeful who was forced to run for Japan when it occupied Korea.” Altough she was born in Japan, she is a second-generation “zainichi Korean, a descendent of colonized Koreans in Japan”. Korean immigrants, many of them undocumented, many managed by criminal gangs, also built the Olympic facilities for the 1964 Games. Where the Olympics goes, exploited migrant construction workers are never far behind:
Today’s Olympic winners are decided long before the Opening Ceremonies. They are, and have been for decades, the construction companies, the security firms, the TV networks, the athletic directors, the public officials, and the executive members of Olympic committees. These power brokers look a little different from the aristocrats of old, but their imperial character remains. Every two years, when the Olympic institution plants its flag in a new city, speculators from metropolitan Lausanne meet with profiteers in the new athletic colony. ...
Yu, a student of empire, recognizes the dynamic at play and directs our attention from the spectacle to the losers in the game. Look hard, she says, at what it means to “host.”
(Tokyo 1964 poster. Source: Wikipedia).
It’s a long article, but a rich one, and worth the effort. One of the stories it touches on is the ‘Pentathlon of the Muses’, an arts competition run by Olympic founder Baron de Coubertin between 1912 and 1948.
By 1932, one out of every five Japanese Olympians was not an athlete but an artist, with the team featuring celebrated printmakers Kōshirō Onchi (father of the sōsaku-hanga woodblock-printing movement) and Shikō Munakata (who later won multiple international prizes, including the Grand Prix at the Venice Biennale in 1956).... But where did this leave artists like Jiang Wen-Ye, a composer from colonial Taiwan, representing imperial Japan?... Jiang titled his submission Formosan Dance (Taiwan no Bukoku) after his colonized homeland. Uniting European musical impressionism and traditional Chinese scales, the piece is hardly avant-garde in sound or structure, and its politics may have been too subtle for the all-German jury, but it stands apart by representing nations (Taiwan and China) that had no official artistic ambassadors.
Of course, the Olympics has always had problems with politics, although it stepped back from political conflicts this time. The British football team was allowed to take the knee, two Chinese competitors weren’t sanctioned for their Mao badges, and the gay black American medallist was not punished for crossing her arms on the podium in a gesture of intersectional support.
The article also references Tokyo Olympiad the film made by Kon Ichakawa. (It has a bit part in Muri’s novel). The ‘director’s cut’ ran to 168 minutes, and was a bit too artistic for the Japanese Olympic Committee, which cut it to 93 minutes. (Kurosawa had previously been dismissed from the project).
The full version is now online, and sounds glorious. Goodall summarises it this way:
Ichikawa continues to spare attention for workers at the Games, from cooks at the Olympic village to ground crews at the stadium. “They, too, are participants in the Olympics,” says the voiceover. ...
Ichikawa’s masterpiece is the marathon. It is this twenty-minute sequence that captures the tension between success and struggle core to the film and to the Games. As the runners exit the stadium, passing under a subway car and into the urban outskirts, they start to drift apart from one another, taking on an increasingly internal competition... Off to the side, a half-built high-rise stands unfinished, another crane waiting. Volunteers set out water and sponges; health officials run about with stretchers. Ten runners don’t make it to the end of the race.
As Goodall says, Ichakawa focuses “on losers as well as winners, loneliness as well as unity, conflict as well as celebration”
It was the 76th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki yesterday—the Hiroshima anniversary fell last Friday, so it seems a good moment to visit the website of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
Last year, to mark three-quarters of a century since the A-bombs fell, the Bulletin re-published an article written by Lynn Eden, which imagined a single nuclear bomb falling on Washington DC. It’s worth saying that when she talked to an American nuclear planner, he asked her why she was focussing on one; the Americans had targeted Moscow with around 400 nuclear missiles.
But even with one:
The detonation of a 300-kiloton nuclear bomb would release an extraordinary amount of energy in an instant—about 300 trillion calories within about a millionth of a second. More than 95 percent of the energy initially released would be in the form of intense light. This light would be absorbed by the air around the weapon, superheating the air to very high temperatures and creating a ball of intense heat—a fireball...
Within minutes of a detonation, fire would be everywhere. Numerous fires and firebrands—burning materials that set more fires—would coalesce into a “mass fire.” (Scientists prefer this term to “firestorm,” but I will use them interchangeably here.) This fire would engulf tens of square miles and begin to heat enormous volumes of air that would rise, while cool air from the fire’s periphery would be pulled in. Within tens of minutes after the detonation, the pumping action from rising hot air would generate superheated ground winds of hurricane force, further intensifying the fire. Virtually no one in an area of about 40-to-65 square miles would survive.
And that’s just the start of it.
(The history of the Doomsday Clock. Source: Wikipedia).
In case you haven’t checked the time on the Doomsday Clock, it’s currently at less than two minutes to midnight. (It seems a long time since Pete Wylie sang ‘Seven Minutes to Midnight’.) Although the number of nuclear weapons has fallen since the end of the Cold War, arms control treaties are being allowed to wither, and the risk of accidental nuclear war remains high.
Although we’re rightly concerned about climate change, nuclear weapons could just as well do for the species. We’ve probably escaped this so far because we’ve been lucky. There’s a reason that it is one of the destructive risks discussed by Martin Rees in his book Our Final Century, as he rehearses the reasons why humankind might not survive the 21st century.
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