The Turtle House

Friday 3 September 2010

Kim Jong Un

There's not much info about him, but he's in his mid 20s, at the oldest, went to an international school in switzerland, and likes to drink and smoke and fight and have sex, just like Dad. He loves weapons, likes Mercedes Benzs, and hates Japan, so he's the obvious choice. The fact that his mum was a Japanese citizen, yet of Korean descent, adds to the complexity. China would prefer North Korea be ruled by a committee but Un, just now, is the annointed one; if he can stay alive. NK is a hard 'system of ascent'. You never know when your trusted Deputy is going to knife you in the Forum, just like in Rome, or in Australia; it's just that in North Korean royalty they use, like in Rome, real knives.

He'll have the same authentic legitimacy as the King of Saudi Arabia, or Jordan, or Dubai, or the Emirates etc so is already a 'world leader' in that real-power sense, with the 4th largest land army, even if poorly equipped, in the world. A million soldiers is a lot. A paramilitary of an extra 2 million is a lot too.It will be interesting to see what he does, being so young, quite bright, and fearing no one.It will be important for all of us to know what he does when 'the blowtorch is applied to the belly' of resource rich, densely populated, ideologically tectonic, North Asia. China will stand by him, if he survives. China and North Korea really are Bloody Brothers in Arms always. You can bank on that.

Asia

Asia is young. Cultures are indeed as ancient and direct as the Egyptians, and as bifurcated and reformed and mis-made as anything in the West, but the thing I notice most is the youth of people and the rapid and escalating modernity of all the cities, especially Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, and every city, every place, in China. These are just full of young people who have grown up with an appreciation of education and are going at it with great gusto in profoundly competitive systems that we western folk have never had to experience. From an outside perspective, its like the massive 'intellectualisation' of a giant region of the world.

Surviving the City

Yesterday was spent in the city, after trying to get into it for a few hours, then finally finding a way via a sideroute to a Skytrain station and from there into the centre. The roads were rot-thik with traffice for hours. It was a good day in town in that I knew my way around and zipped from sky-train station to skytrain station and down into the streets and round about, then met Wanyi and in the late afternoon we cruised the giant Kinokinuya Bookshop in Siam Paragon and I picked up some Yukio Mishima books to read: Thirst for Love, the Golden Pavilion, and also the first book of his big series The Sea of Fertility. Some deep and somewhat dark text. 50 years after being written, his works are still fresh, beautiful, and still as profoundly disturbing as well. Kinokinuya Bookshop is great and like other bookshops in SE Asia and in China, they seem to take up some of the roles of a public library -not that you can borrow books, but its quite the norm to sit on a comfy seat in the shop and read all day, study, make notes etc. I recall seeing this in a Beijing bookshop -full of after-school kids, cramped on every step of the stairway between the floors, reading reading reading. Its great, the silence of that studious intensity. I was thinking of the term: 'they're reading and reading as if there is no tomorrow' but really, they're reading and reading because there is a tomorrow, many tomorrows.