Word: dammed
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...Access to adequate, unpolluted water is increasingly being viewed in development circles as a basic human right, something that governments must ensure. As Mary Robinson, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the dam commission: "In an age of globalization, greater efforts can and must be made to reconcile the need for economic growth with the need to protect the dignity of individuals, the cultural heritage of communities and the health of the environment we all share." For billions of people, that - like water itself - is a matter of life and death...
...Dam is a third-grader in Seoul who, like many eight-year-olds around the world, is nuts about Pokémon. But unlike most kids, he's conflicted. He knows the popular animated characters come from Japan. He has also learned in school how Japanese soldiers brutally invaded and colonized his homeland back in 1910. After his mother reminded him that every Pocket Monster sold helped Japan get richer, Doo Dam successfully resisted buying any Pokémon cards. "Japan is bad," he says. "No one nation should be above another nation...
Hair curlers and Pocket Monsters, comfort women and labor camps. Like young Lee Doo Dam and retiree Park Sung Pyo, much of Asia sees Japan as a country with a split personality, a hard-to-understand culture that inspires contradictory sentiments. It represents evil. And fun! Fear. And awe. No matter what the impression, the stereotypes fail to capture the nuances of the culture - or the postwar relationships that have evolved between Japan and its Asian neighbors. Instead, the images of Japan - the warmonger, the economic powerhouse, the rich sugar daddy and the epitome of teen cool - are like...
Little Lee Doo Dam is just one example. He may have managed to hold out against Pokémon, but then the newest Japanese fad hit - the Digimon cartoon series. Doo Dam caved - like most of his buddies who have helped make the comics the top-selling children's books at Seoul's giant Kyobo bookstore. "It's fun and there is no Korean comic to match it," he says. "So I think it is O.K. to read Digimon. Even if it comes from Japan...
...slowly Hessler comes to realize that compared with the turmoil of the past 60 years--war, revolution, a famine that killed 30 million, the Cultural Revolution and the recent opening to the outside world--the disruption of the dam is relatively minor from the Chinese perspective. And he sees that the quaint old houses built on the cobbled streets leading up from the Yangtze--the structures Western tourists like to photograph--are in fact dirty, cramped and without running water or toilets. Many Chinese prefer to move to the industrial new towns built in all their tasteless utility. Writes Hessler...