Context is not a myth: Stewart Lee's "Carpet Remnant World", Tim Maughan's "Havana Augmented" and notions of society

I've been talking a lot recently about the values that writers impose on the stories they tell and what effect that has on the story, and I realise that part of my obsession with this idea comes not from narrative fiction but from stand-up comedy. Exploring the notion of idealised societies and how we behave in collective groups is a theme that runs through Stewart Lee's Carpet Remnant World, a two hour comedy routine in which Lee, in character, attempts to tackle a serious issue but serially fails to develop the idea in a coherent way because he's constantly being distracted by the day to day problems of touring and looking after a small child (no clips, you need to watch the whole thing for it to make any sense at all).

But idealised notions of society are what writers in the realm of speculative fiction are all dealing with. What makes these visions utopian or dystopian is how humans collectively behave within those societies. In Carpet Remnant World, Lee gives us a few examples taken from the news, juxtaposing the hysterical, vengeance-fuelled celebrations of some Americans on the death of Osama Bin Laden with some observations on the religious rules of islamic societies. He roves around British prime minister David Cameron's idea of the "big society", the degeneration of the postwar social fabric under Thatcher (via the framing devide of an imaginary Scooby Doo movie), the shifting nature of development and regeneration of urban spaces, the effects of social media, in particular Twitter, and then finally, the more fantastical and abstract ideas represented by the titular "Carpet Remnant World". Within a lot of this are the questions what does this society or social structure stand for, and what does our behaviour within that social space say about us and how well we uphold those supposed values?

The problem with some of these films and stories like 300 and King Arthur that I've been talking about recently is that the values are pasted on, out of context and there is an internal contradiction between the stated values (i.e. freedom) and the behaviour we're actually presented with (often despotic) when a more interesting story would be to look at what you actually have and show us a bit about why those people are willing to fight for it.

A good example of a story that grapples with this is the story Havana Augmented by British writer Tim Maughan. The story is set in a Cuba that is even more than now a socialist island in a sea of free market capitalism. Freedom is still an issue here, as it is in the two other stories that accompany it in the Paintwork collection, but the implications of that freedom are more clearly explored. The kind of freedom Maughan is interested in manifests itself in the ownership of public space, something the kids in Havana Augmented engage with with their AR robot street battle games (and which the characters of Paintwork deal with via street art -- the other story, Paparazzi, looks at the romanticisation of medieval fantasy and reminds the reader of whose backs the freedoms of the privileged few are built on). Rather than simply being a battle against the communist establishment for the kids' right to, y'know, have fun'n'that, Maughan instead looks at how commercial entities exploit kids like his heroes in ways that are damaging to the wider fabric of society. Crucially, the protagonists of Havana Augmented reach the culmination of their arc not by embracing some nebulous notion of freedom, but by thinking in tune with their environment -- not just by their local knowledge of the battlefield, but by thinking like Cubans, protecting their shared values against an invading ideology that comes wrapped in the flag of liberty but promises only a new kind of subjugation.

In a larger and less benign scale, Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl pulls off a similar trick of getting int the mindset of a different culture and making decisions they make that run contrary to our own established way of thinking seem internally consistent and understandable. Having the larger canvas of a full novel to work with, he's able to draw more fully on the environmental and political world in which his characters live in order to sculpt their actions and reactions.

As I've said before, it's thrilling to be able to read something and see a person act in a completely alien way to your own way of thinking, yet at the same time have that decision completely logical. Speculative fiction is all about this kind of thing, but you see it just as much in contemporary drama that deals with cultures that you are unfamiliar with. The Wire is an excellent drama for a number of reasons, but one of them is that it presents you with characters behaving in horrendous ways but every one of them is scrupulously logical, and more often than not, David Simon & co. have a parallel example of the same logic in play in a different, perhaps more familiar arena. The viewer is never let off the hook.

Where foreign drama doesn't work, something similar is often at play. I often found myself baffled by the behaviour of characters in the Hong Kong films I used to watch as a teenager, because they were acting according to Chinese cultural conventions that had no traction in the West. Chinese audiences were clearly expected to understand this as natural, but the film gave me no context to understand it. The scriptwriter wasn't making allowances for outsiders, and looking back, this made me doubly conscious of the way American films presuppose American values without giving them context, especially given that American cultural products are made with the expectation of international consumption (something Asian works often aren't). Waving the word "freedom" in people's faces without giving them an idea of what that freedom is meant to mean is just as nonsensical as waving Japan-centric notions like honne & tatemae in someone's face and expecting them to get it immediately.

It's not impossible though. All cultures understand freedom, although they might have different notions of what it means, and the contrast between one's true feelings and the face you wear in public is far from unique to Japan. Cultural notions are often slippery, but there are usually ways into them if contextualised sensitively.

This idea of sensitivity is one that Stewart Lee returns to at the end of Carpet Remnant World. Given that he has spent the whole of his two hour show deliberately sabotaging his own attempts to discuss the concepts of idealised societies, he indirectly (and probably unintentionally -- Lee would perhaps shy away from such a trite observation) makes the point that all societies are imperfect, and his failure to discuss it in a coherent way is simply an echo of that. Against a utopian cityscape composed of rolled carpets of varying sizes, he delivers the line: "a ragbag of seemingly disparate and unrelated items, people, concepts, things, can, if stitched together in the correct order with an degree of sensitivity, give the impression of being a satisfying whole." And in a way, what Lee has done with his comedy show is the same as what a good speculative fiction writer would do. He's taken no concept for granted, he's broken down every idea into its constituent parts and left you with no room for lazy assumptions, and at the same time, by showing us the "Carpet Remnant World" in which his character lives, he's made sure that this arrogant, neurotic comedian living in fear of his own death (or worse, irrelevance) now not only makes sense to us but commands our sympathy.

King Arthur, 300, and freedom

Last night I watched two terrible films that were both interesting in a similar way. Zack Snyder's adaptation of popular reactionary bigot Frank Miller's comic book 300 was an objectively horrible film, but managed to turn out the better of the two by virtue of its sheer stylised, exaggerated grotesqueness and audacity. The trees made of dead bodies, the utterly ridiculous depiction of Persian emperor Xerxes as a towering, growly voiced, extravagantly pierced monster, the way the Spartan soldiers insist on doing all their fighting in their pants, the better to show off their immaculately sculpted pecs, all these aspects place the film in a realm beyond any need for even the illusion of reality. The claustrophobic chromakey backdrops and humourless, pretentious, childish dialogue are no better for being in such a context, but at least they have a context. They fit into some sort of overarching framework of poor artistic decisions and are piece with the flawed whole.

What's interesting about 300 is the way the conflict is constantly pitched as one between freedom and tyranny, with King Leonidas and the Spartans depicted as defenders of liberty and Xerxes and the Persians as dusky invaders. However, loudly and frequently as the Spartans may claim freedom as their goal, the image of freedom Frank Miller creates looks suspiciously like fascism. The Spartans are a military people, with the structure of the army the only social unit depicted as pure. The political machinations of democracy or something like it (Sparta was an oligarchy, strictly speaking) in the form of Dominic "Detective McNulty" West's Theron, a character absent from Miller's original comic, is shown as irreparably corrupt, in a way that only the swift justice of the blade can cleanse. In many ways, the Sparta of 300 is very similar to the militaristic world of Starship Troopers, with citizenship conferred as a reward for military service and women taking a more active role in society. However, where a master satirist like Paul Verhoeven was able to turn Robert Heinlein's moral world on its head, a screen stylist like Zack Snyder can only polish Miller's essentially fascist tale into a shinier, more crystalline form of its own fascism.

This is where Frank Miller probably deserves to be given a bit of leeway, because while he's clearly a reactionary bigot, he's not an outright nazi. He's aware of the contradiction between the fascism inherent in Spartan society and the notion (advanced by Diodorus) that they were defending freedom, and like any good writer, he finds that contradiction interesting. Unfortunately, while Frank Miller is an excellent artist, he isn't a good writer. He's a little boy whose love of bold moral generalisations and heroic posturing overwhelms his ability to explore moral ambiguities, and the movie production only simplifies it further.

The 2004 film King Arthur comes from the stable of producer Jerry Bruckheimer, a man whose cinematic oeuvre has never knowingly overcomplicated an idea where slam-the-audience-in-the-face-with-an-iron simplicity is an available option, and like 300, it's a horrible film with something strangely out of place to say about freedom.

Again there's an appalling script, which serves to undermine the efforts of most of the cast -- Clive Owen as Arthur is particularly hamstrung by the quality of the lines he's expected to deliver, although Stellan Skarsgard as the psychotic, racist leader of the Saxon invaders steals the film. The infantile script does serve one function though, which is that also like 300, it underlines the simplistic message of freedom that the film wants to push. In fact, even more so than 300, it underlines the message, scratches it out in bold and highlights it in fluorescent marker pen. Arthur's men are fighting for their own freedom from their indenture to the Roman army, and as the film progresses, Arthur comes to see his fight as one for the freedom of all Britons from both the departing Roman occupiers and the invading Saxon hordes.

Another similarity with 300 is the depiction of Kiera Knightley's Guinevere, like Lena Headey's Queen Gorgo, as a strong, active woman, willing to fight for her land. In Hollywood nowadays, women can't be damsels in distress, and the Celts and Picts seem to have had their fair share of warrior queens from which her role could be mined. In fact, the historical accuracy of the story is one point where King Arthur gives a fair shake. The setting of the story around Hadrian's Wall may not have been accurate -- the location of the Battle of Badon Hill is unknown and has been identified with anywhere from Scotland to Bath -- but the general situation described by the film, featuring conflict between Romano-Celts, Picts and Saxons is more or less as it happened, and if any Arthur figure ever really did exist, it's in this world that he probably would have lived.

Also, here, as in 300, the notion of freedom is delivered directly through the dialogue, as if speaking directly to the audience, without context, and without any notion of what this freedom actually entails. Arthur is a soldier of an occupying military power, and his devotion to the teachings of Pelagius aside, the Roman Empire was hardly an upstanding model of freedom (a point, to be fair, that the film tries to make further down the line, but it's nevertheless hard to imagine how Arthur could be surprised by this revelation). The Saxons are defeated and Arthur, a military commander, is simply declared king of the Britons, so what is this freedom that is being spoken of? Freedom to be ruled by one king rather than another? What King Arthur is really about is nationalism, another relatively modern idea that the filmmakers have decided to pin on the Arthur legend.

In both films, there's something terribly jarring about hearing the language of Western notions of freedom in the mouths of people who would likely have seen those notions in very different terms, if they had understood them at all. The way that both films are so direct in how they articulate these ideas of freedom and liberty is also interesting. The contemporary Western concept of liberty is delivered as something so natural to these people that no possible disagreement is even considered except from the mouths of tyrants. It seems like a neurotic response from Hollywood to the shaken certainties post-9/11 of America's role as a beacon of liberty, or maybe the malaise goes back even further, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the loss of the tyrannical "evil empire" of the Soviet Union for America to define itself against. In either case, it's hard to see a Hollywood film of the 1950s delivering such a stern lecture on freedom to its viewers. Epics like Spartacus, Ben Hur and El Cid (I nearly added the explicitly propagandist 1944 Henry V to this list, although it benefitted from having a scriptwriter of rather higher calibre) all dealt with similar conflicts, but didn't feel the same need to shout their message into the audience's faces. For all its historical inaccuracies, Hollywood used to know how to have fun.

Abenomics and the nuclear debate

When the nuclear power plant in Fukushima started to go into meltdown after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, something strange started to happen to people. Men and women who had never before in their life thought about nuclear power except in the wooliest of terms (and I count myself among them) suddenly became experts, scouring the news media, Wikipedia, and whatever they could find on Google for information, and words like microsievert, bequerel and caesium 137 entered the daily vocabulary of millions of people looking for something to explain the crisis, reassure them, or simply justify their reaction.

It didn't really help though, and rather than illuminating the discourse, these words, facts, and often non-facts, became weapons in a dispute between people whose positions as proponents or opponents of nuclear power were already fixed. Here in Japan, it took on a more personal dimension, as a person's fear or faith became an identifying mark, a litmus test providing a window into a person's moral character, science as a set of dueling swords to be wielded in support of the most emotional, unscientific motivations.

And with the recently elected Liberal Democratic Party's economic policy, we're seeing a similar, if less widespread thing. Like the nuclear crisis, the post-2008 global economic crisis has started to make experts of all sorts of people for similar reasons, as they seek explanation or just to bolster their emotional prejudices. It may not be as dramatic as a nuclear meltdown, but terms like quantitative easing, expansionary austerity, and liquidity trap, with which few people pre-crisis would have had more than a passing familiarity, became far more commonplace.

In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's sweeping changes to the nation's economic policy, encapsulated in the ugly and misleading compound term "Abenomics" have acted as a lightning rod for comment in a similar way to the nuclear crisis. An article from Reuters on April 29th collected a number of criticisms, ranging from the wise-sounding but ultimately meaningless statement that "there are no simple solutions or shortcuts" to the utterly bizarre remarks by former finance minister Kaoru Yosano that, "Since ancient Greece and Rome, most policies that excited people ended in failure. The fact that people are pleased and in a festive mood seems to prove this policy won't work."

One of the catchiest soundbites to come out of the article was Yuuki Sakurai of Fukoku Capital Management's claim that Bank of Japan policy was like "shooting a sparrow with a cannon." It's a nice image, and again it sounds wise, although comparing an economic slump now more than twenty years long with a sparrow might seem to some to rather underestimate the scale of the actions required to deal with Japan's economic woes. In a way though, as with the nuclear power argument, its the debate over Abenomics that is what's really trying to hit a sparrow with a cannon.

There are apparently some claiming that it's the magic bullet to solve all Japan's economic problems (I have yet to see any evidence that this is anything other than a straw man used by critics, although it's probably fair to say that within the LDP, there will be party shills willing to parrot this line) and there are certainly many who seem implacably opposed to Abenomics in its entirety, and its within these arguments that the scalpel rather than the cannon needs to be employed.

First, what does Abenomics promise? Well, primarily, it seems to be a plan by the bank of Japan to target higher inflation rates and expand the monetary base, combined with promises of greater public investment. In theory, and economists like Martin Wolf at The Financial Times and Paul Krugman at The New York Times have been calling for policies like these for a long time, this combination of higher inflation and greater public investment, if sustained credibly, should be able to stimulate demand put the economy back on a growth track without resulting in catastrophic hyperinflation or Greece-style debt disaster. There's nothing intrinsically new in it, since the policies basically conform to the Keynsian IS-LM economic model that has been a pretty accurate predictor of economic events since the crisis (and this is why I say "Abenomics" is a misnomer), but it's certainly a big step by a major economy in the current climate.

So what doesn't it promise? Well, for a start, inflation targeting can only work if investors trust the Bank of Japan to continue its expansionary monetary policy until growth is well underway, something previous BOJ chairmen have consistently failed to do. Despite current chairman Kuroda's insistence that he will do what takes, it might fail if people simply don't believe him. Also, the policy has nothing to say about how the fiscal stimulus will be targeted. It's widely suspected that Abe's government will use it like a bribe to bolster their position in key electoral areas, and to put money in the pockets of their friends. In macroeconomic terms, this shouldn't matter to the overall economy, but individually, region by region, worker by worker, this is important. Also, there are issues like the increase in sales tax, which may stimulate consumption in the short run, but which is a regressive tax that will hurt the poor more than the well-off. And then there's the vague sounding promises of "structural reform," which is so often a buzzword for relaxing environmental regulations and limiting employment rights, especially in view of the recent praise Abe has heaped on Margaret Thatcher.

Abenomics also has nothing to say on the biggest problem facing Japan's economy, namely the growing shortage of Japanese. Without a sudden boost to the birthrate (not going to happen) or a more relaxed attitude to immigration, the Japanese economy is on a long term relative downward trend. More can be done to maximise the participation of women in the workplace, something that all parties claim to support, but concrete action on which is rarely forthcoming, but in the end, immigration is the elephant in the room.

Just as the nuclear debate turned into a binary for or against slanging match, leading to important discussions of the extent and enforcement of safety regulations, the unhealthy way energy companies, government and media are intertwined, and Japan's commitment to the longer term fight against global warming being lost, discussion of Abenomics is so often depressingly black and white, obscuring the real issues surrounding its execution and longer term economic policy.

A guide to Akihabara

I wrote an article for MTV 81 about Akihabara the other week and you can check it out here. It's not an exhaustive investigation since it's really aimed just at new visitors, and it's not really a critical analysis in any way since it's written for MTV, but it might be useful to some people. I'm hoping to make it part of a longer series of articles about the local scenes of various other parts of Tokyo, with pieces to follow on places like Harajuku, Shibuya, Shinjuku, Koenji and Shimokitazawa.

Also, if you want an alternative to the focus on Akihabara, this fine piece by Colony Drop's own Sean O'Mara for Otaku USA is a super introduction to rival otaku culture spot Nakano Broadway.

Bad economics, anime and fantasy

Alright, so anime isn't the first place most people would think of turning for plausible economic narratives, but recent world events have triggered off a half-forgotten memory in me and got me thinking about anime anyway.

The issue I have in mind is the debate over the amount of US debt held by China and the extent to which this makes America China's bitch. The correct answer is (1) China has bought quite a lot of US debt, but the majority of it is still held domestically, i.e. the US is mostly in debt to itself,  (2) It gives China no influence whatsoever over the US because China needs that US$ denominated debt to maintain its own export-driven competitiveness, and (3) Even if China decided to take a hit to its own economy just to spite the Americans, someone else would just pick up the slack -- US debt yields are actually running in negative figures once adjusted for inflation due to the huge demand for government bonds in the face of uncertainty-plagued private sector investment scene. Basically, if China sold off all its US debt, it would no effect on the US economy except to raise the value of the RMB against the dollar, making Chinese exports less competitive and giving a small boost to the US economy.

OK, so that aside, why the relevance to anime? Well what this situation describes is precisely the moment when the plot of the 1998-99 mecha series Gasaraki stopped making any sense. Japan also holds a lot of US debt, and part of the plot of Gasaraki centred round an old Japanese Yoshio Kodama style figure, who stands up to the big bad Americans by threatening to sell off Japan's US debt. There then follows a rather cheesy scene where the Americans say that would hurt Japan too, and then the old guy claims that Japan's national character would save it, while America would descend into chaos, to which the American reluctantly agrees.

It's pure nationalist fantasy, but more than that, it's economic nonsense. Despite the slightly different circumstances (America is in a liquidity trap now, which explains the high demand for government bonds), it still makes no economic sense. Even if no one else wanted it, the Fed could simply buy up the debt, and as long as America had control of its own currency, it could just (inflation allowing) print more money to pay for it.

There is a historical precedent for debt being used as leverage over another government's policy though, but it's one going in the other direction, where the US threatened a large sell-off of British and French debt in response to the Suez Crisis, forcing a military withdrawal. The circumstances were very different in the case of the Suez Crisis though, for example Britain was still relatively recently out of the Second World War and was far more reliant on imports, which would have been devastated by a sudden devaluation of Sterling.

OK, so I'm a bit of a nerd about this, but in issues of economics and politics, I can't help sometimes being fussy about how these things work. When I play roleplaying games and every time I walk from one town to an other, I'm beset every dozen steps or so by increasingly fierce and violent beasts, I wonder how the economy can survive under such a serious threat to trade. I don't understand why the economy of Middle Earth isn't completely under the control of the eagles, since their ability to travel swiftly, even carrying large cargoes of goods, between the mining regions of the northeast, the agricultural regions of the west and the whatever-it-is-Gondor-produces region of the southeast would surely make them the wealthiest and most politically influential power in the world, especially given the well documented difficulties in traversing the Misty Mountains. Spice & Wolf would have been perfect for me, if only it had just got rid of the wolf aspect and simply been a documentary about medieval trade in a fictional universe.

I suppose the problem I had with Gasaraki, a show which otherwise made an admirable attempt to deal with sensitive political issues in a mature, balanced way, was that it transparently used nonsense economics to further a nationalist agenda, whereas your usual, run-of-the-mill fantasy or sci-fi simply ignores economics because it's primarily interested in telling an escapist adventure.

Debating the "comfort women" issue in Japan

Over the past couple of days Twitter has been abuzz with debate over the recurring issue of "comfort women" -- the predominantly Korean women coerced into prostitution by the Japanese army during the Second World War -- and their claims for acknowledgement and compensation. This time round, Hiroko Tabuchi of The New York Times was on hand to provide translations of some of the arguments against the women's claims and their comments reveal part of the uglier side of Japan -- the part that those of us involved in one way or another with trying to give Japanese culture a boost always find thoroughly dispiriting.

Before I get into the arguments, though, a warning. I use terms like "morality" and "national conscience" in here, which I'm not entirely comfortable with and which I usually approach with extreme caution in other people's writing. However, for want of better words, I'm forced to use the inadequate tools with which my vocabulary has provided me in the hope that I don't lose too much in terms of clarity.

First, I'm not going to debate the fundamental facts. There are primary documents available to peruse on this site, and if someone still wants to just flat-out deny that anything happened… well, if someone really doesn't want to believe something, they'll always find a way of not believing it. This blog is predicated on the reality that forced sexual slavery carried out on behalf of the Japanese army did occur. That's my position, that's the position of most reputable historians from what I can gather, and that's the position of the firsthand data so take it or leave it.

What I'm going to focus on instead is some of the arguments that fly forth from the denialist side whenever this issue or similar ones relating to war crimes, even painstakingly documented ones, come up. There are obvious similarities with Holocaust denial, Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide, and all manner of other crimes.

Because people in many countries are in some degree of denial about atrocities in their own past -- Britain and France have ugly colonial legacies and America has its own violent horrors in its westward expansion -- and taking a look at the arguments made in these various cases it's clear that the process of denial takes similar paths.

One of the most common arguments is precisely that: the fact that many countries have done horrible things in their pasts. There are three parts to this dynamic.

1. It's an argument that seeks to mute the impact of a crime by spreading the blame. It doesn't seek to legitimise the act so much as muddy the waters, to give the impression that in "other times" things were different and to give the impression of a moral grey area. By making the issue appear too morally complex, most people will either back off, or…

2. It forces critics from overseas onto the defensive. "But what about YOUR COUNTRY? What about what YOU did?" goes the cry. This argument forces the opponent to either admit moral equivalence or go on the defensive, thus evening out the field of battle as it were. This sort of argument is known as "whataboutery" and was first coined (I believe) due to the constant use of these "what about…" arguments in debates over sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

3. It implies that their country and their country alone is being unfairly victimised. "Why are WE being picked on when other countries also did bad things? Why are you not picking on THEM for what THEY did?" This argument attempts to usurp the mantle of victimhood from the actual victims of the crimes, as well as subtly implying an agenda that seeks to attack the speaker's own country for unspecified but probably nefarious reasons.

All of these points are attempts to divert the argument away from any discussion of the actual events and the evidence and testimonies of the victims, and the answer to all three of these points is basically always going to be a variant on, "Yeah, but we're not talking about what those countries did," followed by a repeated assertion of the actual issue under discussion.

There are also a couple of specific arguments particular to Japan and the comfort women issue that I've seen come up.

One is that the South Korean government is just using it as a stick to beat Japan with for political gain, particularly at election time, and that no matter what Japan does, they're never going to back off. This is a tricky argument because on the one hand, it's clearly true, but on the other, it's another attempt at distraction because it really doesn't matter.

It's an argument that only makes sense if you think that the only reason for Japan to acknowledge, apologise to and compensate women who were forced to work as sex slaves for its army would be in order to gain something in return (in the form of increased national good will or whatever) rather than out of any sense of basic justice and morality. Put another way, it shouldn't matter as far as Japan and its own national conscience is concerned that South Korean politicians are using the issue for political gain -- that's Korea's own ethical issue.

Another argument I've heard is that the comfort women were employed by private brothel owners and weren't being run by the military, so as a result, the Japanese government has nothing to apologise for. This legalistic argument is more blatantly desperate and seems designed mostly to satisfy the conscience of the speaker. Perhaps it's an appeal to the neoliberal capitalist in the listener, but it's hard to find anyone else really being convinced by it.

In capitalist terms, if the military has a certain level of demand and the supply is limited, the supplier is clearly going to be under enormous pressure to meet that demand. If the military decides to look the other way and not question the legitimacy of the source, the military is a co-conspirator just as any company caught handling illegally-obtained goods would be.

To take another example, my home town is Bristol in the United Kingdom. Growing up in Bristol, one of the first things I learned about local history was that the city's wealth in the early colonial era was built largely off the back of the slave trade. Initially, corrupt magistrates would manipulate petty criminals into going to the American colonies as indentured servants, taking a cut off the unscrupulous traders' profits as they sold the prisoner's contract to plantation owners across the Atlantic. Later, when demand became too high even for these practices, the trade expanded to the transport of black slaves from Africa. In all these cases, these were private transactions, not government policy, and yet the city of Bristol and the country as a whole were responsible every bit as much as the wealthy businessmen who profited off the slave trade.

It might be fashionable in these post-Wall Street Crash and post-Blackwater days to argue that governments aren't responsible for what happens under their watch, but when they set the rules that allow injustices to occur, they are responsible as if they pulled the trigger or wielded the baton -- or the whip -- themselves.

The most common argument, however, is the one that goes, "It was a long time ago. I didn't do any of these things. Why should we still feel the guilt for these crimes committed by past generations?"

This brings up the awkward morality of the Old Testament "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation", which I'm going to just lay aside here, partly because the Old Testament is full of crap no one needs to listen to, and secondly because this is a quote from a self-confessed "jealous God" who was probably a bit upset at the time. It's pretty obvious, I think, that we don't need to punish children for their fathers' crimes in every situation.

In the case of the comfort women, there are two points that put this argument on shaky foundations though. The first is that many of these women are still alive now, and who is going to acknowledge, apologise to and compensate them if not the country in whose name their mistreatment was carried out? Secondly, many of the men who carried out this mistreatment, whether directly or indirectly, are still alive, and many of them (and their families) have done very well thank you very much since the end of the war.

It's certainly an argument you can make that as modern Japan didn't commit these crimes, it shouldn't be held responsible for paying. However, I think that as these arguments so frequently find themselves accompanied by denials and diversions of other sorts, the people making them secretly know that if the comfort women's stories are accepted as true, the moral weight of acknowledging and compensating the victims would indeed lie on their shoulders. To play a little whataboutery of my own, one needs only to look at Germany to see a very different approach (the Contingent Refugee Act of 1991, for example, removed many immigration barriers to Jewish people, leading to a large influx of Jewish people from former Soviet states that had previously been ravaged by the Nazis).

Some of this is no doubt down to straightforward, ugly nationalism, but many of the people who come out with these kinds of responses are perfectly ordinary, not particularly politically motivated individuals. I'm inclined to put some of the blame on films like Isao Takahata's traumatic animated feature Grave of the Fireflies -- a very effective, alternately horrifying and beautiful film, but also a deeply manipulative one -- for colouring many Japanese people's image of the war with deep hues of victimhood, focussing attention and images of the war almost entirely on the suffering endured by children and families at home and, along with sanitised schoolbooks, providing little wider sense of the Japan's role in the war as a whole.

There's also the tendency of those of us from the West to view national trauma as something to be purged through a kind of bleeding of the national conscience. A sort of therapeutic introspection to purify the national soul, whereas Japan perhaps prefers not to hang out its dirty washing in public. It's a different way of dealing with trauma, and one shouldn't be too quick to dismiss it. In this case, however, there are real victims, still living and breathing, and still desperate for acknowledgement.

Worldwide, Japan is one of the countries viewed in the most positive light by foreigners, and attitudes like these are a rare stain on its international image. More importantly though, regardless of how it benefits (if at all) Japan and perceptions of it in the world, it should be a matter of basic decency and sense of justice that this cycle of denial is broken.

Ideology, Terror and making fantasy relevant

One of the dangers of fantasy or science fiction writing is for the author to imagine an alternative world too much through the filters of the prevailing attitudes of his or her time or social circles.

For a science fiction writer, it's often necessary to stay in closer touch with the here and now, since much of sci-fi involves extending current trends into the future and developing them to their logical conclusions. The trick there is to recognise how attitudes will differ while making sure that the path by which society got to that place remains visible and relatable to the present day.

Fantasy has a couple of characteristics that make it a bit different. Firstly, it's much more about world building, in that the author doesn't have a set of established historical, geographical and cultural data that readers share and on which he or she can build the story. The fantasy author must build the entire geography, history and set of cultures from scratch (by and large they will pick and choose fragments from history and legend, but they still can't rely on the reader's familiarity with the background). Secondly, fantasy is a fundamentally conservative genre. Settings are largely based on historical or mythical themes, science is primitive or non-existent, society in a fantasy world usually has to deal with different challenges to modern industrial or post-industrial societies.

The result of these two factors means that the social and political world of a fantasy novel would likely be utterly alien to a modern day reader. The values of the people in it would reflect different social priorities and any insertion of the attitudes of the writer's own time will look clumsy at best and utterly shatter the fourth wall at worst. The ending of Philip Pullman's otherwise wonderful His Dark Materials trilogy with its "Republic of Heaven" premise is a classic example of this, because Pullman's own modern day liberal-left sensibilities jar with the alien world(s) he's spent the past several hundred pages constructing.

Obviously that doesn't mean that fantasy can only be written by right wingers. Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series is legendarily awful in large part because he can't let go of his own Randian wingnuttery. Where Pullman perhaps unwittingly allows a glimpse past the curtain, Goodkind places the ideological stage machinery front and centre. Pullman also has the advantage that his fantasy is rooted in a more fluid, technological universe in which social and political change are ideas that are by no means anathema to its existence. It doesn't quite work but it doesn't fail so utterly and completely.

But if you're writing about an archaic seeming world with a largely rural population, who the fuck is going to care about ideas like liberty, democracy and self-actualisation? Could an ancient or medieval society, even a magical one, even function along those lines outside of the city-state setup? Inserting those values into a fantasy novel is like giving Frodo Baggins a Segway to help him across the Plains of Mordor. 

We have of late been living in a society where those values are taken for granted though, and it's easy for them to slip unquestioned into our literature (and especially our Hollywood-dominated cinema). It also means that the values of the bad guys, which were born out of 19th century antipathy towards despotism, 20th century fears of fascism and communism, and 21st century anxieties about religious fundamentalism, also too often pass unquestioned. In fact Lord of the Rings itself never even bothers to explain what life under the rule of Sauron would be like. He's evil and that's that, just go ahead and imagine your worst nightmares (which at the time basically meant Hitler).

Taking on and providing analogues to real world political and ideological conflicts isn't a bad thing of course. The West's model of liberty and democracy and the sense that the march of these ideals is inevitable and unstoppable is challenged by places like China that have far less interest in democracy and yet seems to be doing very well thank you without it, so there is great value and probably more than a little interest in exploring alternative models of society in order to question and probe our own model. As I mention earlier, those kinds of questions are part of the job description of a science fiction author, and while it's a thornier problem for fantasy authors (given that escape from the real world is pretty much their raison d'etre) it can be done, particularly if the writer is skilled at mining historical sources for relevant but also convincing allegories.

That isn't often what the writer's looking for though. The writer is usually, whether they realise it or not, looking for a quick fix: a Big Bad that will get the audience on their side. They may think they're being challenging by dealing with an "issue", but they're not really challenging anything, and both the writer and audience are able to feel comfortable in their horror and revulsion. It's easy to look at the systematic murder of groups of people or the ethnic cleansing of populations and say, "No matter what your explanation, that's just wrong." Moral certainties like that are comforting.

Cultural relativism can be understood as an automatic and even necessary response to a world that is becoming more connected, and more and more information and conflicting values are forced to coexist in the media and especially online spheres. Trying to reconcile all those different ways of thinking, sets of values and traditions is going to drive you insane, so it's natural to look for an out: to say, "Oh well, different horses for different courses." It's a kind of tolerance of others' differences, but it's also a distancing mechanism. It's a way of saying, "That's nothing to do with me."

The flipside of that of course is that pretty much everyone has a line they draw somewhere, where they say, "No, enough is enough. That's just wrong." At some level, your tolerance for other people's differences has to give way because you feel something they do or think has intruded on your own ethical, moral or ideological territory. For some people, for example a religious fundamentalist, this line is drawn widely and they feel very offended and put upon, sometimes to homicidal degrees, by all kinds of things other people do with their lives. But for almost everyone, there are moments where your own values, your own sense of identity, pushes you to intolerance.

These moments can be interesting for a writer, and the minds of people who do things we find unacceptable are fertile grounds for literature.

Most people who commit atrocities aren't like Sauron. Most people would agree that even the worst crimes against humanity are often committed by people who think they're doing right. What gets less attention is the fact that a lot of horrendous crimes are not only committed in a spirit of righteousness, but they're also quite logical.

Robespierre and Saint-Just were quite rational in their application of the Jacobin Terror and while the period is frowned upon by modern liberals, a look at the history of revolution and counterrevolution in many countries suggests that a period of terror to rigorously instill revolutionary values (Zizek takes it further, adding the idea of "divine violence", although the philosophy isn't as much of a concern to me here as the practical side) is an entirely logical response to the danger of reassertion of the old regime or the creeping return of their remnants through the weakening of revolutionary zeal. Similarly, the murder of the Russian royal family and the destruction of their remains was a logical response to the reality of such figures' symbolic power -- revolutions had failed in Russia before, and the punishments of the perpetrators had been severe. In both cases people did horrible things that nonetheless made perfect sense in terms of the situation in which they occurred and what the people were trying to achieve.

There is much controversy over the issue, but I'm going to stick my neck out and say that from a moral perspective, it's very difficult to defend Israel's actions in Palestine. Nevertheless, one could argue that from a strictly rational point of view, Israel doesn't go nearly far enough. What kind of Palestinian state could ever emerge from that situation that would be anything other than pathologically hostile to Israel? We may see Palestinians as victims and instinctively sympathise with them but Israel's own history shows us how easily oppressed can become oppressors. In the mind of someone like Benjamin Netenyahu he is not committing crimes, he is Doing What Has To Be Done. A more ruthless man might do more, as America did to its native population without apparently seeming to even notice it.

We live in a world where "terror" has become an evil in itself, a binary opposite of "humanity", but this is a function of our own comfortable lives and society (and one Robespierre and Saint-Just would have disagreed with fundamentally). For us there is no greater evil than the disruption of our peaceful existence. How easily might we slip into a new fascism all of our own if that comfort were threatened? For me, one of the most interesting and valuable avenues that the science fiction or fantasy author can explore is the minds and rationales of the people with whose values and actions we disagree or reject. Not in the sensitive, liberal-minded and relativistic way of "tolerating" them from a distance but to really get inside the heads of those who trespass upon the ideological ground that makes up our identity.

In this sense, fantasy, so often intellectually the idiot sibling of science fiction, can in fact provide a more subtle, allegorical comment on the world, challenging contemporary assumptions about The Way It Is and taking us ideologically on tangents from the straight lines that science fiction tends to draw into the future. Of course most won't do that, and undoubtedly many writers and fans in the genre are attracted to it precisely for the way it presents us with an established social hierarchy with simplistic and small "c" conservative values.

Even then, however, there is something interesting in showing us the thought processes and logical steps a king goes through in his decision to go to war or levy a tax, and then letting us see the effect that has on the peasant farmer. Does the farmer dream of change? If so, what sort of change can he envisage? As I said before, a modern liberal democracy would probably be low down on the list. Another, better king might be more like it, because this imaginary peasant's sense of the natural order of things would likely be just as limited by his experience as ours is by our own world. Where we usually hold fantasy at a distance like good social relativists -- "it's another place, they live differently there." -- and where bad fantasy writing allows modern ideas to unwelcomely intrude, an alternative model of fantasy literature can induce the reader to examine their own ideas by introducing recognisable problems into the world of the story but having the characters tackle them using a totally different set of ideological tools. Our response -- horror, pathos, amusement, anger, whatever -- is influenced by our consciousness of the gap between what we see or read happening and what our instincts tell us should be happening. Thus the writer is able to address contemporary values or issues by their very absence, sidestepping the awkwardness of inserting them into an arena where they don't necessarily belong.