Russo-Japanese War 100 years on

On a long and busy day, this brief Kyodo News article on the Japan Today news site caught my eye: "Descendants of Russo-Japanese War commanders to meet in Nagasaki". The article, with a dateline of Sasebo, where the Japanese Self-Defense Maritime Forces maintain a base near the city of Nagasaki on the southernmost main Japanese island of Kyushu, said two great-grandchildren of the commanders of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) will meet in this city next Saturday to talk "about peace and friendship on the centennial of the Sea of Japan Naval Battle".

I knew that most of the anniversaries were supposed to be observed earlier this year, in particular in January for the siege of Port Arthur and in May for the decisive Battle of Tsushima. Understandably there was little motivation in Russia to commemorate the event. The loss was so traumatic for Russians, it triggered a march against the Winter Palace in St Petersburg in January 1905, one of the seminal events that sparked the bloody Bolshevik Revolution 12 years later. The Japanese, meanwhile, were too polite to celebrate a major victory, which signaled in many ways Japan's rise as a global power at the start of the 20th century.

While Russians in general have much respect and admiration for Japan and the Japanese, in general, they are still sore about losing this war, the first lost by a European power to a non-European power. The merest slight is enough to trigger literally violent reactions among Russians, even those normally not given to khuliganizm (hooliganism or mischief). Take for example the case of the riots that erupted in central Moscow on 9 June 2002, when Russia lost to Japan 1-0 in Yokohama in the World Cup.

The Moscow Times in a report the following day said at least one man died and dozens more injured in the worst street violence the capital had seen since the bombing of the parliament building in 1993. The crowd, made up mostly of young men, set fire to cars, broke windows and beat up anyone from fellow fans to police officers in the area intersecting Tverskaya and Mokhovaya streets. "Some 7,000 to 8,000 fans had gathered at Manezh Square, a stone's throw from the Kremlin, to watch the afternoon game on one of several huge screens set up by the city government," the report said. Many fans were drunk and prone to violence even before the start of the match. The melee began during the second half of the match, soon after the Japanese had scored. This caused the crowd to start tossing beer and vodka bottles in the face of Russia's impending defeat.

By early evening, several hundred rioters moved up Tverskaya Ulitsa smashing store windows and glass advertising stands. Most windows on the first two floors of the Moskva hotel were broken, as were several windows at the State Duma and the historic Yeliseyevsky food store on Tverskaya. Half a dozen restaurants on the fashionable pedestrian strip Kamergersky Pereulok were also vandalized.

At least seven cars near the Duma had been torched and dozens throughout the downtown area had been overturned or smashed.

As of 10:30 p.m., some 60 people had been detained and about 50 hospitalized, Interfax reported, citing police and health authorities.

"The fans' actions were barbaric," Deputy Mayor Valery Shantsev told reporters. "We put up these screens for them, like in civilized places, but it turned out they were not ready for this."
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Shantsev said the city would reimburse car and store owners whose property was damaged during the rampage. But victims of the violence said this could prove difficult, as many police officers refused to fill out reports or document the damage.

A number of witnesses and news reports said that some rioters were screaming out racist and neo-fascist slogans. The crowd included some vocal supporters of Alexei Podberyozkin's nationalist Spiritual Heritage movement and other waving the ultra-right's yellow, white and black flag.
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State-run RTR television, which often displays a pro-Kremlin stance in its news programs, tried to shore up some political capital after the riot. Commenting during the Vesti program, anchorman Yevgeny Revenko pointed out that the violence broke out meters away from the Duma, where just last week deputies gave initial approval to a controversial bill on extremism, which human rights activists have condemned as a potential Kremlin tool to suppress public protest.

Having said all this, however, there is little clear connexion between Japan's victory over Russia in the football match and the century-old war. No, this is not the Football War or La Guerra de Fútbol - even though the adversaries here are less fanatic about football that El Salvador and Honduras were in 1969. (One of history's quirky footnotes, which seals a country's reputation in a not very positive way, this conflict - also referred to as the Soccer War, for youse Yankees - notched a decidedly unfunny death toll of 5,000 military and civilian deaths. The war lasted only 100 hours, a peace treaty was not signed until 1980. The original territorial dispute was resolved by the World Court in 1992.) The involvement, however, of xenophobic right-wing groups (which specialise in remembering and capitalising so-called historical insults, no matter how slight) and the beating of four Japanese students who were attending the 12th Tchaikovsky music competition at the nearby Moscow Conservatory of Music even before the match do make it likely that some Russians still do take umbrage at this monumental defeat.

There are other questions. I wonder if the crowd would have been allowed by the police to reach unmanageable levels if President Vladimir Putin had been at the Kremlin, just a 100 meters away. As it was, Putin was in St Petersburg at the time. Now of course such widespread public disturbance is almost unthinkable. This is less of a testament to the efficiency and effectiveness of Moscow police than an indicator of increased confidence and, arguably, improvement in the lives of Muscovites.

Then again, who knows, football hoodlums would behave in the same way, even in such "more developed" countries as Britain and Belgium. Fortunately we will never know how Russian football fans will behave this time since Russia failed to qualify for the World Cup in Germany next year after drawing 0-0 with Slovakia in a match in Bratislava on 13 October.

Heavy snowfall blankets Moscow

I've just talked to my Inessa, who's now at home studying. She proposed that we see a Charlie Chaplin film while munching takeaway pizza. We have so little time now, we resort to stealing snatches of it instead of making it. We've been having a bit of difficulty adjusting to each other's schedule, mainly due as I see it to a sense of overambition or optimism on our parts to squeeze as much as we can into a 24-hour day. For the meantime, we have reached a modus vivendi. Tonight, at least, I've agreed to go to her flat so that we can spend a bit of time together side by side. Admittedly this is not the kind of quality time I have in mind whenever the idea of being together pops into my workaholic mind. For the moment there's little else to do but to carry on, or as Americans say, get over it. (Maybe I should just read up a bit on Kazan, where I plan to spend our second long weekend in the coming fortnight.)

Anyway, today was marked by at least a couple of things. The first was the logical conclusion to my report yesterday about the first snow falling and a freeze settling over the city. Still it took me by surprise in the morning, when I peered out to the backyard from my kitchen window: masses of the white fluffy stuff falling from the heavens. It didn't stop until way past lunch hour. From my oversized wooden-framed Soviet-style windows at work I glanced occasionally at the seemingly interminable descent of snow, snow and more snow.

"It's beautiful," remarked my boss' teenage son, now back on a weeklong furlough from final year lyceé in Sophia Antipolis, a technopark founded in the 1970s between Nice and Cannes on the French Riviera. "Especially when the snow's freshly laid, before it gets covered with footprints," said Fidel, sounding almost wistful - suprising for a young man his age who normally eschews putting on overt displays of sentimentality. "But don't you think it's also lovely when there are solitary prints leading out the gate?" I countered, pointing at the visitors' entrance. "Yeah, Darius'", he retorted, somewhat recovering his bluster in referring to the house Yorkshire terrier (named after the first and most accomplished in a line of Persian kings, added to their family after my boss' previous posting in Tehran). Pronounced properly of course in Farsi as "Dâriûsh".

By late afternoon, snow had turned into sleet and by early evening, rain. Even though I found my car covered with snow, it was easy to slide it off Balios as the drizzle had made the snow water-logged and heavy. On our sidelane puddles formed in the depressions between the pavement and the road itself, making it inconvenient and uncomfortable for pedestrians.

The second event was choir practice. As I may have mentioned, I attended chorale rehearsals last week for the first time in five weeks. There I met Anne and Ian, two Scots newly arrived in Moscow. Apart from Andrew, there weren't any tenors around so it was rather difficult to conceal myself in that rather sparse gathering from Sasha's increasingly shrill expressions of displeasure. This time, even though I had to hurry home to feed Mishinka first and to get my music notes before going to the Gymnasium No 14 along Novinsky Bulvar, I still managed to arrive at rehearsals at 19:15 - quite an accomplishment all considered. In fact the choir was still doing the usual warmup vocalizations, which I never really caught last season because we were perennially at least a half-hour late for practice.

What pleased me a lot was seeing Nicole and - yes - Jennifer back. Nicole, of course, has always been here, working now for the British Embassy. But she hadn't been to rehearsal herself for two weeks. As for Jennifer, it was a surprise to see her visiting from Kiev, where she moved to in July. Apart from them, Andrew was there, as well as new members from France, Finland and Norway. Tom, our American baritone, was so surprised to see so many tenors at one time. I hadn't seen Stéphane for a while as well. It was just like in the early part of the year, when I first joined. Quite a warm feeling it gives you.

Neo-Cromwellian way forward

As a follow-up to that question I raised a couple of weeks ago about over-consumption, I stumbled on this article on The Observer Online that took my questioning a notch further: living a simple life as the New Puritans. "A generation of young, educated and opinionated people determined to sidestep the consumerist perils of modern life. So if you own a 4x4, spend all your time shopping, or are simply overweight - watch your back," says the subtitle of article written by journalist Lucy Siegle about a new moral minority.

According to the Future Foundation, the trends forecaster that coined the term, Britons are "increasingly curbing our enthusiasm for profligate consumption, and health and environment-threatening behaviours." Sure, I'm all eyes as I continue reading down the article. "Gone is the guilt-free pleasure-seeker, to be replaced by the model well-meaning citizen, the New Puritan - a tag interchangeable with neo-Cromwellian, if you really want to seal its 17th century origins - who thinks through the consequences of activities previously thought of as pleasurable and invariably elects to live without them."

Any sensible person in this day and age would probably agree with the principles of this movement, if one can call it such. In many ways my riling against the me-generation and the society of instant gratification as symbolised by the United States has been distilled in purer form in this new movement. I personally subscribe to it. It is, however, important to note that this code of conduct does not stop at being personal or private decisions; they would only be effective, the Future Foundation explains, if the curbs are also "extended to other people's behaviour, and wherever possible enshrined by legislation - for New Puritans do not fear the nanny state". Whoa - move aside Singapore, the anti-consumerist Commonwealth is here! It's like saying, it's no longer enough to talk about faith as internal; if we truly believe, we should now all go out and fulfill an Evangelical type of global commission here.

There are certainly elements of this movement that I heartily approve of, in particular the attack on the aptly described "menace" of the Sports Utility Vehicle. "Part of the New Puritan brief is to penalise those who make poor choices on behalf of the rest of society - in this case the gas-guzzling, emissions-generating Montessori wagons that choke our town centres." The article goes on to describe a well-organised and -supported band of SUV vigilantes in Paris, a sort of earthbound Yamakasi against the Cheyennes, X5s and Explorers of the banlieus. Les Dégonflés (The Deflated), as they are called, quietly run round in the middle of the night deflating the tyres of SUVs and splattering them with mud. Why, this is a tactic straight out of my own book. Something I secretly wanted to do myself but just never had the gumption to. (In Britain, the equivalent is called the Alliance Against Urban 4x4s, which takes a less violent tactic using fake fixed penalty notices.) If they had such a band in Moscow, 40 SUVs a week would probably not be enough.

What are the specific articles of faith of the NP or neo-Cromwellian? Sure, the intensity varies but I suppose the basics cover the following: no binge drinking, smoking, buying big brands, flying on cheap flights, eating junk food, sleeping with multiple partners, wasting money on designer clothes, growing beyond one's optimum weight, subscribing to celebrity magazines, driving a flash car, or living to watch television. Although I safely clear the bar on at least half this list, it would be a painful cut to adhere to the rest of it. Lisa Siegle says the list is "likely to grow longer", with 80 per cent of people agreeing that alcohol should not be allowed at work at all; 25 per cent saying snack products should not be offered at business meetings; more than a third agreeing that we should think twice before giving sweets and chocolates as gifts to family and friends, and a further 25 per cent thinking that 'the government should start a campaign to discourage people from drinking alcohol on their own at home' (a figure that rises to 41 per cent in Scotland).

Argh. In a way we've been living for far too long on a post-modernist Sodom and Gomorrah, in which the Pleasure Principle served as the main creed. The article continues:

These are sobering thoughts for anyone connected to the pleasure market. But if you possess a shred of New Puritanical sensibility you're likely to think that the big brands - the junk-food peddlers, alcohol promoters, cigarette pushers and even the supermarkets - had it coming. That for too long these kinds of businesses reaped vast profits while riding roughshod over community spirit, public health and morality. The lack of a liberal backlash against increased policing of previously uncontroversial pleasures is significant, too. And it's a trade-off the New Puritans are clearly willing to make: extra nannying for extra peace of mind.

This is actually the sign of a maturing civil society, according to Dr Peter Whybrow, director of UCLA's Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behaviour, and author of American Mania: When More is not Enough, which charts what happens to society when we are pushed to the limits of our physical and mental tolerance.

'Civilisation offers no gifts to liberty,' he quotes from Sigmund Freud's Thirties essay, Civilisation and Its Discontents. Whybrow suggests that we use America as a cautionary tale, 'an indication of what happens when citizens turn into consumers, solely driven by immediate reward, and when consumerist impulses become substitutes for communities.'
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So, with a few grand gestures and some high-profile converts New Puritanism offers a powerful escape route from our impulsive, reward-driven lifestyles. It might just have the potential to stave off the horrors promised by an out-of-control consumerist culture in which, according to agrarian essayist Wendell Berry, 'The histories of all products will be lost. The degradation of products and places, producers and consumers is inevitable.'

Consider the New Puritan philosophy from this point of view and it can look like a blueprint for a rather noble kind of empowerment. Our New Puritans become less like neurotic killjoys and more like early adopters, with an enhanced ability to recognise the pitfalls of contemporary life. A battle is shaping up between the New Puritans and the old guard libertarians, but at the moment it's a vastly uneven one. The New Puritans might be a trend, but it's still a small one, swimming against a seemingly inexorable consumerist river.

But New Puritans shouldn't be deterred. As Oliver Cromwell, their ancestral spiritual leader, put it: 'A few honest men [and let's add in women for contemporary relevance] are better than numbers.

I think I'd have to re-examine my own lifestyle to find out what changes I would have to make. At the moment it seems I'm only paying lip-service and not really making the hard decisions. In fact after taking the diagnostic quiz to find out my degree of Puritanism, as it were, I found out I came out middling on most choices. Not impressive at all. Wouldn't make it as a Yamakasi SUV tyre-buster. The verdict, in pastel colours, came out this way: "There is no doubt that you mean well and are flirting with the temperate outlook, but you are still too frightened of being thought of as extreme. In your heart of hearts you know that we eat too much refined sugar, possess too many appliances and watch too much bad TV, but you cannot bear to acknowledge the demise of libertarianism. However, you show promise; all you need is the courage of your convictions."

Consumption as cause of death

It's been a while since I logged in, mainly due to work but also because of a self-imposed moratorium on blogging for two weeks while I tried to produce a first chapter that would assure my name was recorded in the graduation rolls for next year.

Anyway, I still won't be able to write for a few more days at least. Have to take off for St Petersburg in a matter of hours for work. In fact last night I had to stay at the office pretty much until 1 am, writing and polishing. Intended to go again primarily to answer questions sent in by Sankt-Peterburg Vedomosti (St Petersburg Bulletin) for the occasion. Before clocking in, I thought of going to Auchan, the French hypermarché in the Kommunarka district on MKAD ring road and Kaluzhskoe Shosse (better known to commuters as the one reachable by those eco-friendly IKEA shuttle buses from Metro stations Yasenevo, Tyoply Stan and Anino) in the Moscow beltway. It had been a while since I last went; I can't remember exactly when, but at least six months back for certain.

There is quite a bit of economisation to be made by a good day's shopping at Auchan, especially if one stocks up for a whole fortnight or, as one of my colleagues has consistently done after arriving two years ago, for the whole month. In fact it claims to offer a wide range of goods at 20 percent less than prices elsewhere (in this case, it appears to refer to its Moscow competitors - Sedmoi Kontinent, Perekryostok, Ramstore and Kopeika. Understandably a lot of Muscovites troop to this temple of consumerism especially in the weekends. Still my Inessa and I thought that if we went in the morning, we'd have a fair chance of running down a grocery list in around 90 minutes. In fact, up until the turn to Mega's parking lot I told her, her classmate Nastya and Vanushka that we wouldn't have to fight for shopping carts immediately after leaving the car. Well, shopping at Auchan has gotten faster and more furious since the last time I was there.

In time (or just after the hour mark) my Inessa and I had gotten pretty fed up with all the jostling, shoving and nudging through the crowds at almost every aisle. The original plan to finish at around 1 pm evaporated in the buying frenzy that whipped the crowd up into a tizzy. We were as guilty as everyone.

Still we wondered, even if savings were to be made, how smart is the regular consumer in not rationalising these false savings by buying more but pretty much unnecessary merchandise. My ducky calls it the Diet Coke-Big Fries Paradox: people make a big fuss about buying Diet Coke but don't think twice about loading up on chips. (Traditionally, this paradox has gone by the saying, "Penny wise, pound foolish". Another example is the almost religious avoidance of full cream milk (around 3.2 percent fat content) for low-fat or skimmed by most of the developed world. Having assuaged their conscience, regular consumers load up on a lot of unnecessary food, including deadly carbs.)

The day's shopping pushed me to realise something that has long troubled me about our contemporary lifestyle. Perhaps it's Mitsuo Aida, Japanese poet and calligrapher, subtlely reminding me again and again through his wall calendar that this "take no prisoners" ethic of acquisition could very well lead to the return of consumption (and here I do not mean it in the Madame Bovaresque sense of tuberculosis) as a leading cause of death in the 21st century.

Are we not, as human beings, dooming ourselves with our mass or conspicuous consumption? Are we buying more simply because we get more value for our money? Do we really need that extra shower gel flavour? Or the space-tech three-blade shaver? Or is Mr Gillette just getting the best of us? In connexion with this I read an article just now on the New York Times about the rapacious marketing strategy of the colour printing industry. What is astounding is how much colour ink actually amounts to, ounce per ounce. Here's part of that NYT article.

[F]or about $200 you can get the Hewlett-Packard Photosmart 8250 that in just 14 seconds spits out a photo that equals the quality of those coming back from the photo finisher in an hour. For the same price, Canon's iP6600D prints a borderless 4-by-6-inch photo in 46 seconds, but also prints on both sides of dual-side photo paper.

The catch is that after you make an initial investment, you are going to pay at least 28 cents a print, if you believe the manufacturers' math. It could be closer to 50 cents a print if you trust the testing of product reviewers at Consumer Reports.

In the meantime, the price of printing a 4-by-6-inch snapshot at a retailer's photo lab, like those inside a Sam's Club, is as low as 13 cents. Snapfish.com, an online mail-order service, offers prints for a dime each if you prepay. At those prices, why bother printing at home?

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It does not take an advanced business degree for those consumers to see how printer manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard and Canon make their money. They use the "razor blade" business model. It is named from the marketing innovation of King C. Gillette, who in the early years of the last century sold razors for a low price but made all his money on the high-margin disposable razor blades. Printer manufacturers also use this tied-product strategy.

Printers return relatively low profit margins. But the ink, ounce for ounce, is four times the cost of Krug Clos du Mesnil Champagne, which sells for around $425 a bottle. Ink is about the same price as Joy perfume, considered to be one of the more pricey fragrances, at $158 for a 2.5-ounce bottle.

Intuitively of course we know that the printer manufacturers were banking (literally) on the killing they'd make in selling disposable ink cartridges. Now it seems there's even a class action suit was filed earlier this year against Palo Alto-based Hewlett-Packard. In fact this is one of the flagship issues in fair trade campaigns. But just how much they were profiting from this (to a sickening degree, it's now clear) was never all that stark - until today.

Here in Moscow, the buying frenzy will likely get worse before with little relief in sight: apart from its branches in Marfino, Khimki, Krasnogorsk, Mytishchi and Maryino, Auchan announced earlier this year that it planned to open more hypermarkets - two in St. Petersburg, one in Nizhny Novgorod, one in Yekaterinburg and one in Tyumen. French retail giant Carrefour and German discount retailers Aldi and Lidl are also thinking of entering the lucrative Russian market.