Word: judgments
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...Temple of the Golden Pavilion is wholly Dostoyevskian - but he was obsessed with the notion of purifying the national character and returning Japan to its pre-Meiji era values. What is perhaps most surprising about Mishima is that his increasing political fanaticism barely tainted his artistic vision and judgment. The final novel in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, for my money his greatest work, was finished the week before he sliced open his belly with a sword. Mishima is among the most cosmopolitan of Japanese novelists, although his suicide tended to reinforce our stereotypes about exoticism, fanaticism and general weirdness...
...Christian, Shusako Endo was literally a man caught between Japanese and Western values. His early novels tended to be overly symbolic - volcanoes were always poised to rain down judgment on the unrighteous, but later works like Silence and The Samurai are superb accounts of East failing to meet West. Because of his Christian preoccupations, Endo has become one of Japan's best-known writers overseas. The most underrated of the great Japanese modernists in the West is Junichiro Tanizaki, whose portrait of a prewar Osaka family, The Makioka Sisters, is one of the landmarks of 20th century literature...
Such practices give full weight to the notion of media as institution. As judgment is passed from a standpoint as removed from experience as it is mediated by, well, media, one worries that much cannot be seen in the mirror. The quotidian fabric of facts which is the foundation not simply for media’s actual operation but of its very claim to authority is one such. How plebian these foundational questions seem; how ordinary! Yet it is very dangerous when an institution becomes sufficiently myopic that its own cryptic doings and intricate rituals are allowed to obscure...
...Actions like those described by Kerrey were not, for the most part, the product of poor judgment or malice on the part of field commanders. The principle of individual accountability notwithstanding, the ultimate moral responsibility for what happened that night in Thanh Phong - and in countless other Thanh Phong's, both documented and undocumented - lies less with those who did the actual killing, but with those who sent a half million young Americans on a moral, political and military mission impossible...
Seek is a wonderful travel book about traveling places people don’t usually go. In fact, in a way it is about traveling to places, physical and mental, that most people would rather avoid. Johnson comes, and he sees, and he writes about it. Sometimes he passes judgment. Unsurprisingly, he puts it best himself: “I want to float above the fray, want to be like Walt Whitman, ‘both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.’” Johnson’s only shortfall...