Letter from Boston

Politics Close To Home

By MASAKO YAMADA

I walked into my lab one morning to see two of my groupmates arguing. They were debating whether the NATO bombings in Serbia were justified. One of them supported NATO's decision while the other was against it.

The argument was quite heated, and even though I left the room several times over the next couple of hours, they were still arguing each time I came back. They are both from small countries in what was once Eastern Europe, and it's clear that they have both experienced firsthand some of the hardships that come from growing up in that region. For this reason, their argument seemed especially personal. I suppose it's impossible to be objective when public policy affects you so personally.

Nevertheless, since they are both reasonable guys, they brought up statistics and drew their facts from multiple news sources to try to make their points. The good thing is that they did not treat any one source as the authority. I don't think Americans place as much trust in newspapers as Japanese people do, but news organizations such as The New York Times and CNN are still very well respected. However, most of my friends, including these two guys, do not take the oversimplified news clips from such sources at face value.

I think I'd find it incredibly difficult to form an opinion even if I did know all the facts!! Many politically active young students have expressed sheer outrage over the bombings. They have written political editorials to newspapers or have conducted demos in public places. However, I personally know many students who are not swayed by this kind of activism. They either quietly support NATO or express ambivalence, or even indifference.

Indeed, although many of my friends knew about a demo being staged in front of the Boston Public Library, most of them didn't go. I myself went to the demo to watch the activists, but I really didn't have any political motivation. I was curious to see what would happen, but I can't say that I was a supporter or an opponent of the cause. The demo was rather small, and I got the feeling that perhaps some of the participants were ambivalent as well.

I usually tend to keep quiet when arguments over wars and politics erupt around me. In this way, I think I'm similar to a lot of Japanese people of my generation. The older generation suffered a great deal from the war, and I learned from them that war is bad. However, I don't think I've learned much about analyzing the delicate gray areas of conflict and I find myself unable to make complex arguments that put many conflicting circumstances into context. I don't think I'm a particularly indifferent person, but I often feel disconnected from military events.

This is partly because of my lack of historical knowledge but it's also partly because my day-to-day life has been so far removed from military activity. My friends from countries such as Russia, Germany, Austria, France, South Korea and Israel always seem to have more to say about such issues than I do. Not only is their historical knowledge more nuanced and deeper than mine, but most of them have served mandatory military service in their countries. All of my friends who have served in the military say that they hated it. Many of them did noncombat training, but that didn't make the experience any more fruitful. If anything, they seem to have come out of training less nationalistic than they were before entering.

There's nothing I can do about my lack of worldly experience, but I have been trying to learn about such things from other people. I have friends who are from cities in Serbia that have been bombed, such as Belgrade and Novi Sad. They give the news an urgency that I don't feel when I skim through the New York Times in the morning. These are moderate people who simply do not want to see their families destroyed. I do not know any Albanians or Serbian nationalists, but I know they must have their own stories, too.

Even with firsthand information from different sources, it's still very difficult to make sense of everything that's going on in the world at any given time. I do wonder whether all of this information will make me more confused, or whether it will lead me to an opinion of what is right or wrong.

Shukan ST: April 16, 1999

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