http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bird5aug05,0,760322.story

The myths of Hiroshima By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin KAI BIRD and MARTIN J. SHERWIN are coauthors of "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer," published earlier this year by Knopf.

August 5, 2005

SIXTY YEARS ago tomorrow, an atomic bomb was dropped without warning on the center of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. One hundred and forty thousand people were killed, more than 95% of them women and children and other noncombatants. At least half of the victims died of radiation poisoning over the next few months. Three days after Hiroshima was obliterated, the city of Nagasaki suffered a similar fate.

The magnitude of death was enormous, but on Aug. 14, 1945 — just five days after the Nagasaki bombing — Radio Tokyo announced that the Japanese emperor had accepted the U.S. terms for surrender. To many Americans at the time, and still for many today, it seemed clear that the bomb had ended the war, even "saving" a million lives that might have been lost if the U.S. had been required to invade mainland Japan.

This powerful narrative took root quickly and is now deeply embedded in our historical sense of who we are as a nation. A decade ago, on the 50th anniversary, this narrative was reinforced in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first bomb. The exhibit, which had been the subject of a bruising political battle, presented nearly 4 million Americans with an officially sanctioned view of the atomic bombings that again portrayed them as a necessary act in a just war.

But although patriotically correct, the exhibit and the narrative on which it was based were historically inaccurate. For one thing, the Smithsonian downplayed the casualties, saying only that the bombs "caused many tens of thousands of deaths" and that Hiroshima was "a definite military target."

Americans were also told that use of the bombs "led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands." But it's not that straightforward. As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has shown definitively in his new book, "Racing the Enemy" — and many other historians have long argued — it was the Soviet Union's entry into the Pacific war on Aug. 8, two days after the Hiroshima bombing, that provided the final "shock" that led to Japan's capitulation.

The Enola Gay exhibit also repeated such outright lies as the assertion that "special leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities" warning civilians to evacuate. The fact is that atomic bomb warning leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities, but only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed.

The hard truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, the man who first popularized this figure, later confessed that he had pulled it out of thin air in order to justify the bombings in a 1947 Harper's magazine essay he had ghostwritten for Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.

The bomb was dropped, as J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, said in November 1945, on "an essentially defeated enemy." President Truman and his closest advisor, Secretary of State James Byrnes, quite plainly used it primarily to prevent the Soviets from sharing in the occupation of Japan. And they used it on Aug. 6 even though they had agreed among themselves as they returned home from the Potsdam Conference on Aug. 3 that the Japanese were looking for peace.

These unpleasant historical facts were censored from the 1995 Smithsonian exhibit, an action that should trouble every American. When a government substitutes an officially sanctioned view for publicly debated history, democracy is diminished.

Today, in the post-9/11 era, it is critically important that the U.S. face the truth about the atomic bomb. For one thing, the myths surrounding Hiroshima have made it possible for our defense establishment to argue that atomic bombs are legitimate weapons that belong in a democracy's arsenal. But if, as Oppenheimer said, "they are weapons of aggression, of surprise and of terror," how can a democracy rely on such weapons?

Oppenheimer understood very soon after Hiroshima that these weapons would ultimately threaten our very survival.

Presciently, he even warned us against what is now our worst national nightmare — and Osama bin Laden's frequently voiced dream — an atomic suitcase bomb smuggled into an American city: "Of course it could be done," Oppenheimer told a Senate committee, "and people could destroy New York."

Ironically, Hiroshima's myths are now motivating our enemies to attack us with the very weapon we invented. Bin Laden repeatedly refers to Hiroshima in his rambling speeches. It was, he believes, the atomic bombings that shocked the Japanese imperial government into an early surrender — and, he says, he is planning an atomic attack on the U.S. that will similarly shock us into retreating from the Mideast.

Finally, Hiroshima's myths have gradually given rise to an American unilateralism born of atomic arrogance.

Oppenheimer warned against this "sleazy sense of omnipotence." He observed that "if you approach the problem and say, 'We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us,' then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed…. You will find yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster."

The high carb, high fat diet in America is causing Asian American health to go bonkers. In all the ethnicities, Asian Americans have higher rates of diabeties than other groups.

This often attributed to several things. First, the change in diet in America, where our bodies don't have the generations of McDonalds in our system. If y'all notice, American plates usually have the meat as the main dish on the plate. Stuff like this.

The other is that we look thin, so often physicians don't check Asian Americans for diabeties. Therefore, it often becomes too late to prevent it.

In addition, many people don't realize that a bowl of rice has the same amount of sugar as a can of coke. Often times, most people are not informed about the health facts about Asian foods.

Anyways, back to moderation, and remember to keep in shape.

A Sad Vigil for a Happy Wanderer

By Tamara Jones
Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, July 15, 2005; C01

LONDON -- Minh Matsushita was a man forever in motion, an adventure always in progress. His passport was a pocket-size accordion of pages bearing faded stamps and mysterious visas.

Even as his boyhood friends from the Bronx settled down, got married, pursued careers and started families, the 37-year-old Matsushita just kept reinventing himself. He might be a beach bum in San Diego one year and a tech geek in Manhattan the next. You could find him snorkeling in Australia, or hiking across minefields in Cambodia.

Dude, what are you doing?, friends would remember asking time and again, when he would alight between trips on someone's back porch to drink through the night and tell his tales. Minh always smiled, shrugged and gave the cavalier answer his buddies came to think of as his personal motto: "No worries, man."

For the past 18 months, Matsushita had been living out the dream of the perpetual wanderer, exploring remote corners of the world as a tour guide for an Australia-based agency called Intrepid Travel. Leading tourists on treks through the jungles and paddies of Southeast Asia, he also found for the first time in his life something more than adventure.
He fell in love.

Rosie Cowan was a young Englishwoman and fellow tour guide with the same restless spirit and derring-do Matsushita embraced, someone whose idea of a good time might include locking herself into a diving cage to swim among great white sharks off South Africa.

When their respective contracts with Intrepid came to a close, Cowan and Matsushita decided to stop living out of rucksacks, for a while at least. She moved to London. A month ago, he followed. They found an apartment and reentered the real world. Matsushita quickly landed a job as a recruiter for an Internet company.

And then on a bright summer morning a week ago, he dressed in a blue pinstripe suit and set off on what should have been the most ordinary journey of an extraordinary life: taking the subway to work.
No one has seen him since.

Yesterday, the London coroner officially declared Matsushita dead, the lone American among 54 people presumed killed when a series of four bombs exploded July 7 across the capital.

A week after the attack, fewer than half of the victims have been identified, a delay police blame on the painstaking task of collecting and processing evidence from the twisted wreckage of buried subway cars, where they have found no bodies intact. There are only pieces that first must be photographed, then placed in body bags, then photographed again before being brought to the surface for closer examination and identification.

Waiting breeds reckless hope and useless anger. It convinces the friends of a missing hairdresser and the roommates of a lost Polish accountant that their loved ones survived and are wandering the streets of London somewhere with amnesia. It pushes the anguished mother of a young Nigerian oil executive to rail against terrorists near the bus stop where her son likely died. For a while, it made David Golovner think, wildly, that he could pack a miner's hat in his suitcase and join the search for his best friend Minh Matsushita beneath the streets of London.

For the past six days, Golovner, 36, hunkered with Matsushita's parents and two siblings in a borrowed London house, waiting not for a miracle, not even some undefined sense of closure. They waited instead for a death certificate. They wait now for a body to take back home.

They resigned themselves to Matsushita's loss soon after arriving in London on Saturday morning. Why else would police come to swab the mouth of his mother, Muoi, for DNA, to collect his hairbrush, his toothbrush, his razors, any ordinary thing they could find in his apartment that might yield Matsushita's fingerprints or genetic material? Why else rouse his dentist back in New York on a Sunday night to send records?
"We're all exhausted," explains Golovner, the designated spokesman, a political analyst for the Bronx borough president. Cowan is too shaken to talk about it, he explains. Matsushita's mother is starting to cook for the grieving household, a good sign, Golovner thinks. They're all longing to go home, to end this limbo part of it all.

His memories drift to other summer nights, when Matsushita, always the organizer even in high school, would plan keg parties in the park. It was never just a few kids and a single keg, Golovner remembers, laughing, "it would be, like, 10 kegs and a hundred kids." They had air-guitar contests.
"If we'd had a garage, we'd have been 'Wayne's World,' " jokes Golovner.
Matsushita never wanted the party to end. When they were older, he was the one always buying more food, ordering more rounds at the bar, just so everyone would stay longer.

"He'd come home and want to go out, and we'd all be, dude, we've got kids now!" Golovner says. Minh would shoot back, "Man, you guys are boring the hell out of me."

Reality set in earlier this week when Golovner went with Cowan's sister, Lulu, to the family assistance center authorities had set up in London. There was a white tent with tables and two officers inside. There were forms to fill out, questions to answer again and again. What was he wearing? Any jewelry, any wristwatch, any scars, any piercings? They were sent into the building, where another pair of officers asked much the same questions, in more detail. What color was the suit?

The details that would define Matsushita in death were flat and one-dimensional, predictable, prosaic, so very much not like Matsushita himself.

No one would know that he loved thick steaks and cheap beer and heavy metal music from the '80s and rafting on wild rivers. No one would know that he diverted tourists from the prescribed itineraries to introduce them to the kids he befriended in Cambodian orphanages. Or that he himself had fled war-torn Vietnam as a little boy with his widowed mother and the Japanese American businessman she would marry, Minh's adoptive father. His family has set up a fund now to benefit the orphans, with Intrepid Travel promising to match any donations.

"He was amazed and bewildered that these kids who had nothing were always happy and smiling," Golovner says. His friends asked why he kept going back, why it didn't depress him. Matsushita struggled to explain how their pure joy made him happy, gave him hope. They had already found what he was searching the world for.

No one was surprised, really, when Matsushita decided to reinvent himself yet again. That he traded his shorts and Tevas for a pinstripe suit.
That he traded grand adventure for great love.

That he would saunter off on a summer morning, no worries, and never return.

Manlin Chee is a lawyer that dedicated her life to helping immigrants come to America. She is also a nationally recognized lawyer for her work, much of which she did pro bono. She also mostly helped Muslims.

So this is where the story turns ugly. In March 2003, she was on a nationally televised panel speaking about the Patriot Act. She said that the Patriot Act is violating the foundation of what this country is based upon.

Now, a few weeks after, the FBI started investigating her. They went through everything they had on her, and found nothing...so....

They set up two sting operations. Over the course of a few months, two FBI agents stalked her and basically withered her consciousness down until she helped them file illegal immigration papers.

Now the question begs why? Yes, she broke the law, but why would the FBI start their investigation and stalk her until she broke? Now the other question that comes into mind is the timing of this. They started right after she went on that panel to discuss the Patriot Act.

So it begs the questions whether the motivation was that she was a threat to the country or a threat to the patriot act?

I mean, if I were the police/FBI/whoever has judicial powers, and I just got all these wonderful powers granted to me to use, would I want to give them up?

-Snoopy

Check it out

The study done at Princeton finds that ending affirmative action would devestate under represented groups. BUT the study also found that ending affirmative action would raise White students enrollment by .5%. That is 1/2 of a percentage increase.

Therefore, it concludes that basically, all the people who are claiming reverse discrimination in admission policies are mistaken and probably would not have made it anyways.

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So...in San Fransico....Chinese corpses....Displayed as art?

'The Universe Within'

Do I need to state how wrong this is?

How about how Germany put Jewish bodies up during WWII?!

Anybody remember that?

How the @%#^ are Chinese corpses art?

Check it out

An interesting thought crossed my mind today as I was in a work-related meeting with several of my fellow co-workers.

There were three white women, one Hispanic man, one black woman, and myself, an Asian American man.

During the small talk and friendly chatter someone brought up that their husband was a poor driver. Then other women in the group began sharing their experiences with their husbands at the wheel and how poor their driving was. Anecdotes were shared about how scared they were to ride alongside their husbands because of the dangerous driving. Someone said, "My husband's so aggressive when he's behind the wheel -- it can get pretty ugly really fast, I'm amazed that he's still alive!"

"Really? Don't you ever complain?" asked someone.

"Of course I do, but he says that's always the way he's driven a car all his life."

It occurred to me how similar the stories were about how poorly and even dangerously these men drove their cars and suv's. It also dawned on me that these were all coming from the white women in our group and that their husbands were also white. Also that there must be a considerable number of poor drivers out there on the road at any given moment, drivers from all races and ethnicities.

There is a stereotype that Asians are particularly poor drivers irregardless of evidence strongly pointing to the contrary. Whenever Asians behind the wheel make a simple human mistake on the road a lot of rage becomes directed at them fueled by the myth of the poor Asian driver; more so than the mistake would warrant. Otherwise sensible Asian drivers become the targets of unnecessary road rage and confrontation at what would otherwise be a small mistake anyone could have made under the same circumstances. That these women shared these stories only brought to my mind the privileges that their husbands have when they drive inconsiderably or just plain irresponsibly, to not have their entire racial/ethnic group labeled as exemplifiers of bad driving.

An article written by Brehm and Kassin in 1993, concerning stereotypes and social psychology describe what is termed "outgroup homogeneity bias." It is the perception that we all understand the nuances and differences, or the individuality of persons in our shared perceived groups (the in-group). Yet this recognition becomes blurred and vague when perceiving any persons deemed not included in our group (the out-group). This leads to an overestimate of the number of people in the out-group that fit any particular stereotype, and is the reason why stereotypes are birthed and attributed to groups as a whole from the example of a few or even a single person from that group. "Social categorization" or "the classification of persons into groups on the basis of common attributes" (Brehm & Kassin) becomes the other side of the coin in this type of generalizing that is so problematic in forming these stereotypes. In effect what stereotypes do is attempt to define for the person or people attributed them who they are and how they should behave as opposed to letting that person define who they are themselves. As a result of the "outgroup homogeneity bias," people are swift to generalize from one individual to an entire group of people.

Hearing the conversation about these poor drivers reminded me of this article and its social implications on other subjects besides poor driving and the stereotypes associated with them when there are Asians behind the wheel. It's the little things that add up and attach weight to a long day. The African American actor/comedian Richard Pryor put it best when he said something to the effect of, "you know it's hard enough being a human being...without having to deal with the day-to-day added burden that comes with racism."

The following is the Commencement Speech given by Jeff Chang to UCLA's Asian American Studies Department Graduating Class of 2005.

Before we get to the speech here's a little tidbit about the speaker Jeff Chang taken from UCLA's website (http://www.ssc.ucla.edu/aasc/change/jeffchang.html):

ABOUT JEFF CHANG:

Jeff Chang (UCLA Asian American Studies MA Alum, 1995) has been a hip-hop journalist for over a decade. He has written extensively on race, culture, politics, arts, and music.

He began working as a hip-hop journalist in 1991 with URB and The Bomb Hip-Hop magazines, and has written for the Village Voice, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Los Angeles Weekly, Vibe, Spin, The Nation, Mother Jones, and the Washington Post, among others. He was a Senior Editor/Director at Russell Simmons' 360hiphop.com, and a founding editor of ColorLines magazine.

In 1993, he co-founded and ran the influential hip-hop indie label, SoleSides, now Quannum Projects, helping launch the careers of DJ Shadow, Blackalicious, Lyrics Born and Lateef the Truth Speaker. He has helped produce over a dozen records, including the "godfathers of gangsta rap", the Watts Prophets.

After being politicized by the anti-apartheid and anti-racist movements at U.C. Berkeley, he worked as a community, labor and student organizer, and as a lobbyist for the students of the California State University system. He received a bachelor's degree from Cal and a master's degree in Asian American Studies from UCLA and published scholarly articles on culture and race relations in Hawai'i and Los Angeles. He was an organizer of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention and serves as a board member for several organizations working for social change in youth and community organizing, media justice, culture, the arts, and hip-hop activism.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
Can't Stop Won't Stop:A History of the Hip-Hop Generation
by Jeff Chang
Introduction by DJ Kool Herc
St. Martin's Press
560 pages
ISBN: 031230143X
Visit the book's website: http://www.cantstopwontstop.com/book.cfm


THE SPEECH:
(copied & pasted from: cantstopwontstop.com)


To Dr. Min Zhou, Dr. Don Nakanishi, the Asian American Studies department faculty, the Asian American Center staff, Dr. Sue Ann Kim, Dr. Kay Song, Irene Soriano and the student graduation coordinating committee, and most of all, to the 2005 graduates of the UCLA Asian American Studies Department, please let me extend my heartfelt gratitude for being granted the honor to speak to you this afternoon. To you graduates, let me offer a hearty congratulations on your great achievement.

You are graduating into a dangerous world, a much more dangerous world than the one I graduated into 10 years ago.

During the time you have studied here, you have witnessed the unveiling of the U.S. as a warfare state. Indeed, the last three decades of wars—in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, in domestic wars on graffiti, on drugs, on gangs, and on youth—seem but a prelude to this imperial moment.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, the kind of politics that conditioned the emergence of the hip-hop generation—namely the politics of containment and its twin, the politics of abandonment—are on view daily.

The logic of abandonment that left the Bronx and Watts to burn now leaves Kabul and Baghdad shattered. The logic of containment that has led to the incarceration, disenfranchisement, and dehumanizing of 2 million people in the U.S. takes on an ugly, globalized form in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

War is the backdrop to even the most pressing local issues. The plague of joblessness, the resurgence of gang violence, the explosion of interracial and interreligious tensions, and the debt-driven real estate speculation that is driving massive racial displacement are all effects of war.

Every day we ask ourselves the question: how do we begin to turn back such catastrophic trends?

In a single, startling line of hope, Arundhati Roy has written, "Another world is not only possible, she is on her way."

But what will that world look like? And will Asian Americans be there to help midwife her birth?

ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES AND TRANSFORMATION

Twenty years ago, I took my first Asian American Studies course at UC Berkeley, a freshman composition class. On the first day, the teachers told us the theme would be "transformation".

Now when you take an Asian American Studies class, things happen. Some people get very good grades. Other people get a lot of phone numbers. But everyone undergoes some sort of transformation.

You start thinking about the way you grew up, how you were socialized, who influenced you. You remember the first time you were made to feel different, and the way you reacted. You look at the dry cleaner, the bus driver, the waitress, the seamstress, your parents, your grandparents, your siblings and cousins, all a little differently.

Sometimes you develop a profound rage that you feel you have to unleash.

You walk into an Abercrombie & Fitch store and you can't believe they're selling t-shirts that say "Wong Brothers Laundry Service: Two Wongs Can Make It White".

You watch a sports show and you can't believe a basketball superstar is insulting another by making fun of his Asian accent.

You turn on your favorite hip-hop radio station, and you can't believe the African American host is defending a racist song about the tsunami by saying Asians who don't like the song probably think they're superior to Blacks.

Sometimes you stay there in your anger. Your first rage is so powerful, it's blinding.

Sometimes you think about it a little more, and you wonder about the sweatshop workers being forced to manufacture those racist t-shirts. You wonder what kind of masculinity requires an athlete to mock his opponent in racial terms. You wonder what happened to make that Black radio host want to be so hurtful.

Sometimes you then acquire a deep sadness, a disabling melancholy that you don't feel you can overcome.

Asian American Studies is a different kind of intellectual experience. It always takes you somewhere, and it also never leaves you.

THE CRISIS AFTER MULTICULTURALISM

When I was at UC Berkeley during the 1980s, multiculturalism was our rallying cry.

At its best, rainbow multiculturalism unveiled race in the production of knowledge, culture, and power. And it proposed alternatives, such as affirmative action or independent community-centered arts. Jesse Jackson's presidential bids and Spike Lee's "She's Gotta Have It", the anti-apartheid movement and the redress and reparations movement, the push for diversity graduation requirements and Don Nakanishi's successful tenure fight—they were all part of this moment.

Times have changed.

I was part of the first cohort of graduate students to enter the Masters Program here after the Los Angeles Rebellion in 1992. Those riots shook Asian American Studies to the core. The idea of Third World solidarity that had guided us from the founding of Ethnic Studies seemed to be in ashes. And in many ways, we are still sorting through the rubble.

After the rebellion, multiculturalism was absorbed into global capitalism, made easy for consumption. Its insurgency was contained.

Now dark skins—like Jet Li or the Wu-Tang Clan—provide global entertainment. Alberto Gonzales and Condoleeza Rice—not Yuri Kochiyama and Philip Vera Cruz—are presented as American icons of racial struggle and success. Universities and corporations increasingly see the value in diversity in a globalized world. And, post-affirmative action, it is Asian American bodies who largely provide that value.

For us, the Duboisian question is turned upside down, and is made to haunt us: How does it feel to be a solution?

TOWARD ANOTHER WORLD

Cast this way, we cannot avoid our responsibility. We can only dispatch ourselves with clearer purpose, principle, and integrity.

If we were to describe the world that we want, would it be a world in which professional athletes are tested for accent sensitivity the way they are tested for steroids? Would it be a world in which Abercrombie and Fitch only sells us yellow-power t-shirts?

I ask, because this world is certainly possible. But it's not what we should settle for.

Hot 97 radio personality Miss Jones tore open unhealed wounds with her comments on Asians' supposed perceptions of superiority over Blacks. But how do we heal those wounds? Where did those wounds come from?

We cannot begin to answer these kinds of questions if we allow ourselves to be caged by our first rage, or incapacitated by our first sadness. That rage and sadness can block us from understanding our truer roles, our unfulfilled responsibilities, our necessary allies, and the larger forces at work against us all.

They prevent all of us from healing. They blind all of us to the possibility of another world. We need to act from love.

So the transformation that we begin in Asian American Studies does not end once classes do.

As the great Glenn Omatsu reminds us, the fundamental practice of Asian American Studies is to build community. Building community goes beyond centering the self. It is about imagining what it takes to revere justice, to respect difference, to reduce hurt, to correct wrong, to nurture growth, and to discover joy. It is about activating and propagating these values within a conception of "we" that continually expands, and is always concerned with caring for the least of us first.

For us, the possibility of another world can begin with the project of recuperating a progressive Asian American identity, one that stands against the totalizing push of global capitalism and the new imperialism, the disintegration of an anti-racist movement, and the destruction of other oppressed communities, particularly African Americans and indigenous peoples.

That possibility, in fact, begins with you.

To you, the graduates of Asian American Studies, here in this dangerous moment, I regret to say—and I am also happy to say—that we place a lot of hope in you. I regret it because it means in some sense we have not fully done our job. I am happy because I know our faith is well-placed.

We look to you to lead the way forward toward a new Asian American left, a new progressive movement, and the shining new world waiting to be born.

Thank you for this opportunity, and once again, congratulations on your most important achievement.