Al-Qaeda as “Bandits”

I’ve read the book Eric Hobsbawm “Bandits,” again.

In this book he wrote about the history of “Bandits” around the world. He insisted that groups that were called “bandits” appeared in the age between the demise of tribal societies and the formation of modern capitalized society.

He described the phenomenon “bandits” as follows.

Social banditry of this kind is one of the most universal social phenomena known to history, and one of the most amazingly uniform.
…
… this uniformity is not the consequence of cultural diffusion, but the reflection of similar situations within peasant societies, whether in China, Peru, Sicily, the Ukraine, or Indonesia.
…
… Socially it seems to occur in all types of human society which lie between the evolutionary phase of tribal and kinship organization, and modern capitalist and industrial society, but including the phases of disintegrating kinship society and transition to agrarian capitalism.
…
At the other end of historic development, modern agrarian systems, both capitalist and post-capitalist, are no longer those of traditional peasant society and cease to produce social bandits
…
… In a broader sense ‘modernization’, that is to say the combination of economic development, efficient communications and public administration, deprives any kind of banditry, including the social, of the conditions under which it flourishes.

When I read this passage, I was reminded of Al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda has two faces. The first is the globalized organization using the Internet to instigate terrorism, and the second is the aggregation of small groups revolving in remote areas, such as the tribal area in Pakistan and the mountain area in Afghanistan.

The second face of Al-Qaeda has many features in common with “bandits,” which Eric Hobsbawm focused on. His study showed that “bandits” couldn’t be wiped out by officials but they disappeared through losing their social and economic basis. In fact, Al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan is surviving even though the U.S. Army attacked them using their modern weapons.

It might be more efficient to eliminate Al-Qaeda through realizing “the combination of economic development, efficient communications and public administration” in these areas.

Although I don’t know well about the progress of the study about “bandits,” it must be quite important to deal with Al-Qaeda, especially, the study about “bandits” in the globalization and the Internet age.

I Found Spring Coming in Cold Winter

Last weekend, it was really cold but sunny, so I took an hour walk to Mejiro-teien, which is a small Japanese garden.

Since I got started on Instagram last year, I have been enjoying taking photos. The sunny day was good for taking clear photos with my iPhone 4S.

When I arrived at Mejiro-teien, I couldn’t find anything to take a photo with. There were no flowers blooming and no leaves on the trees.

After I looked carefully at some details, I found a bunch of small buds on branches. I zoomed in on the buds as closely as possible to capture the vitality, which was condensed in them.

Spring was coming even in cold winter.

"If winter come, can spring be far behind."

How to Look for a Book in the Stone Age

I have written a series of entries, which I call “the Stone Age series.”

Everyday life has been changed drastically by the spread of the Internet, but sometimes I feel that the life with the Internet is so natural, because I forget the life before the Internet. In order to remember how was the life before the Internet, I wrote some entries about it. In these entries, I call the age before the Internet “the Stone Age.”

In the Stone Age, we could survive without the Internet and cell phones. I wrote about the devices that we could use in the Stone Age in the entry “I could survive in the Stone Age.”

In these days, people managed to meet friends with public phones and “real” message boards. If you interested in how they met friends, please read my entry “How to Meet a Friend in the Stone Age.”

Today I’d like to write about a way of looking for a book without amazon.com.

If I were looking for a newly published book, at first I went to a bookstore. Now, in the Iron Age, I can check the stocks in a bookstore with the Internet, but at that time the only thing that I could do was just going to a bookstore. If there were no stocks of the book that I was looking for, I went to another bookstore.

I don’t have to worry that the digital book that I want to read will be out of print, but paper books often became out of print so quickly. In the Stone Age, I had to buy the book that I would read someday as soon as possible, and there were a pile of books on my desk, which I myself didn’t know when I could read.

Paper books are heavy and bulky. It was really hard to bring a shopping bag that was full of books from a bookstore to my house. My room was filled with a lot of books, which I could no longer put together. Sometimes I bought again a book that I had already bought, because I couldn’t find it from a pile of books in my room.

In the Iron Age, I can get a book just with “1-Click” from Amazon.com on my kindle.

The Ideal That the Country Japan Was Founded on

I don’t know why NHK broadcasted the series of Oliver Stone’s documentary “Untold History of the United State” at the end of the year. Anyway I watched Episode 7, which was about the Vietnam War.

Of course, Oliver Stone severely criticized LBJ and Richard Nixon. From my stand point of view, they should be blamed for mismanagement about Vietnam War, but at the same time they also made some achievements, for example LBJ’s the Great Society’s programs and Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.

It is interesting for me as a Japanese to know that Oliver Stone and Ronald Reagan seemed to believe in the same justice of America. Ronald Reagan insisted that his policy embodied the ideal of the U.S., but Oliver Stone thought that he betrayed it. In the documentary, Oliver Stone quoted the words of John Adams, which represented the ideal that the U.S. was founded on, in order to blame Richard Nixon.

There are many people who criticized the government and politicians in Japan, too. But both of them don’t seem to have the common ideal, just like what Oliver Stone and Ronald Reagan do. Japanese people ever have had the ideal that the country Japan is founded on, haven’t they?

American people think the United States of America as an artificial product, which was made in order to achieve their ideal, but Japanese people think the country Japan as a natural product, which has existed for many years.

Democracy is the ideal for the United States of America, but it is just one of the political systems for Japan. Winston Churchill said,“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” Japanese people could understand what he meant.

I wrote, “Is Japan really a democratic country? The answer is that "yes, it is formally." in the entry “Is Japan Really a Democratic Country?”

Although Japan is now a democratic country, Japanese people don’t believe in the ideal of democracy. There is a country that doesn’t have the ideal that it was founded on.

A Hot Spring in Snow

Every winter vacation, my wife and I went to a hot spring to recovery our exhaustion, which has accumulated for a year. This year, we stayed at a hot spring inn in Kaminoyama, Yamagata prefecture, which was full of snow.

I love a hot spring in snow, because the contrast between the warmness of a hot spring and the chillyness of the snow is really nice.

Yamagata prefecture is on the Sea of Japan, where snow falls heavily every winter season. Tokyo, was clear and sunny, but after crossing Ou Mountains, it turned to be a snowy world.



Just after arriving at a hot spring inn, Meigetu-so, I rushed to a public bath.

It is wonderful to see snow falling while taking an open-air bath. The hot water warms my body and at the same time open air cools my head, so I can stay in the hot water for a long time. Fallen snow absorbed noises, and I listened just to hot water spring.



After taking the bath, we drank a lot of sake with nice fish dishes, while seeing snow falling in a warm room. Fish caught in the Sea of Japan is much more delicate and delicious than in the Pacific Ocean.

I feel like making harder next year, now.