夢 Obama's election across the world.

I was hanging my Spidey suit out to dry one evening last week when my neighbor walked by with his dog and introduced himself.

He asked in Japanese if I was American, then whether I support Obama or McCain. When I said Obama, his response was immediate: "If Obama is elected, he will be assassinated." I raised an eyebrow, he explained: "In America, there are lots of guns." I didn't understand the Japanese word for 'assassinate', or was surprised he'd used it, so he held up his hand like a gun to show what he meant. "Like Kennedy, or King-san. Same thing. America is a dangerous place." I finished hanging my Spidey mask, shook the guy's hand and said I'd see him around.

Spiderman told my kids today about America's election, as I taught my last Halloween lessons in costume. I told them Obama had been elected, by 7 million votes, and about the Obama and Sarah Palin jack-o-lanters my Dad carved for last Friday night. I told them the most popular Halloween costumes in the U.S. are monsters, super-heroes, jobs like policeman, doctor and teacher, and this year, Obama and McCain costumes. (Obama costumes sold more than McCain's, according to the BBC). The kids seemed pretty excited at the idea of America's first black president. One second-grade girl, Megumi-chan, said she wanted to vote for Obama too. Her teacher had to tell her she can't vote for President, because she's Japanese. It was sad. At lunch one of the 6th graders asked me a lot of questions about America's political system and history, and quoted Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" (just that sentence, not the speech...). His teacher seemed interested, too, to teach me about Japan's political process, parties, and legislature, and to ask me about ours.

I got a cellphone e-mail after school from my Korean friend Minhee in Japanese, congratulating America on Obama's election. The subject line said 夢 yume: dream. Her message, in emoticons, Japanese characters, and one English sentence, said:

オハヨー [pink music note] [Ohayo = Good morning!]

オバマの当選おめでとう [yellow star] [Congratulations on Obama's election]

We can do it!
感動的だったよ [This makes me believe "we can do it!". I was very moved. [smiley face]]

今日も頑張ってね [Today too, let's do our best, eh? [Minhee's signature winking girl with rabbit ears]

Getting Minhee's message made it worth living abroad on Obama's election night. The excitement being generated by one man in Chicago is palpable on the other side of the globe.

* * *

The school nurse this morning at Nakagawa Shougakko seemed moved by Obama's victory, and envious of me as an American. She told me that Japan's prime minister (大統領　daitouryou; same kanji as "daimyou", feudal lord) is not popularly elected. "Citizens don't choose our leader in Japan," she said in Japanese. She added that she wants to see change in Japan, but it doesn't happen here.

Japan's prime minister is chosen by the Diet: The head of the party with the most seats in the two-house legislature becomes president of the country. These representatives are elected by the citizens, but only about 50% of Japan's eligible voters tend to show up, and the same conservative party, the Liberal Democratic Party (自民党　Jimintou) has run Japan's government continuously since World War II. Almost every prime minister since the war had been a bureacrat in the pre-war government, or a descendant of one, the same aristocratic old boys' network, and the government is overwhelmingly male. Only 7.5% of the Diet is women. In the 2002 election, 10% of the candidates were women but only 5% got elected, despite more than half of the voters being women! In the time from 1989 to 2001, when America had 3 presidents, Japan had no fewer than TWELVE prime ministers-- each forced to resign after a few months or years because of corruption scandals or a vote of no-confidence. Pork-barrel meetings behind closed-doors among old men in suits is really how politics are done in Japan. The Japanese people seem generally apathetic. Almost no Japanese people I've met have political opinions. Most, when you ask, will tell you straight: "I don't care about politics" or "I'm not interested in government."

At taiko practice last night, I asked my friend Yasu why Japanese people aren't more political. I asked in particular about Japan's "Peace Constitution" (平和憲法), which has barely been modified from the version written by the Americans 60 years ago. Yasu shrugged and said "We don't care. It's so old." So it is... but there was a time when it wasn't old, and no one seems to have cared then either. The Constitution is a living document, anyway-- it's the basis of Japanese law. But honestly, no one here cares. "Popular sovereignty" isn't a felt ideal in Japan-- personal freedom and responsibility isn't a political tradition here, and the people here don't seem to feel civic responsibility, or political power. Nationalistic, sometimes racist pride at the purity of the Japanese race, yes, but not civic responsibility, not active involvement in the political process.

Many Japanese politicians don't even have responsible political views. Many are outright right-wing nationalists, and revisionist history deniers-- and few in Japan seem bothered by this. The Prime Minster at the time when we were born, Nakasone (still a popular political figure), said in a speech in 1986 that Japanese are more intelligent than people from multiracial societies, because unlike the U.S., their blood is not tainted by Hispanics and blacks. Nakasone also was the first PM to visit Yasukuni Shrine, which honors war dead from WWII including convicted war criminals, angering Koreans and Chinese and blurring the line back into official state Shinto. The current prime minister, Aso Tarou, refuses to acknowledge the Korean "comfort women" who were kept as prostitutes by Japanese soldiers in the War, supports the textbook revisions (教科書 作る買い、kyoukasho tsukuru kai) to omit teaching the history of Japan's wartime atrocities in schools. Some of his ministers have denied the Nanjing Massacre, including his tourism minister who was dismissed a month ago for saying that "Japanese don't like foreigners" and that Japan is a proudly mono-ethnic society. The mayor of Tokyo, Ishihara Yoshitsune, is probably the most disturbing. He has repeatedly said that Korea wanted Japan to take it over during its occupation from 1910-1945, and suggested that many Asian countries are better off now, having been Japanese colonies, whereas European and American former colonies are floundering. He also believes that the U.S. used the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima rather than on Germany for racist reasons, ignoring the not insignificant fact that atomic bombs were not tested until July 1945, three months after Germany surrendered. Ishihara is allowed to say racist nationalistic nonsense like this, and nobody within Japan speaks up. Nobody cares.

The nurse's Obama enthusiasm today made me appreciate how rare our "we the people" politics truly is. I feel lucky to have been born American.

Democracy as Science: truth is provisional

Absolutes are anathema to scientists, and liberals. James Madison, the great experimenter-founder of America, stitched the ephemerality, the mutability of all truth into the very fabric of our government, in what Joseph Ellis calls the "evolutionary revolution" of America's founding (American Creation, 3-19).

When I read about James Madison's political philosophy last month in Ellis' American Creation ("The Argument" p. 87-126), I realized that Madison envisioned politics as a scientist would. He founded American government on progressive renewal-- the belief that principles must be challenged continually in order to remain vital, that conflict would stabilize not weaken a democracy, that no politics of individual liberty remains free if it calcifies into conservative doctrine, but must be kept "true" by being debated, questioned, tested. As in the peer review process of science, where any theory is validated with experimental evidence and old theories are continually tested, clarified, sharpened, modernized, by new experiments, American politics should be forever a work in progress.

Obama, as an expert on constitutional law, understands this:
"Its not just absolute power that the founders sought to guard against. Implicit in the Constitution's structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth — the infallibility of any idea or ideology, or theology, or 'ism', any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course."
(From The Audacity of Hope, quoted here.)

Science's assumption about the nature of "truth" is that it doesn't exist. All facts are provisional on experimental evidence. This is why it is silly when Creationists argue that evolution is "just" a theory. That's right, it is a theory, as is all of human knowledge-- but it happens to be a theory that is supported by more empirical evidence, replicable experimental evidence, than, say, the "theory" of Intelligent Design (which isn't a theory because it poses no testable hypotheses to verify). Churchill might have said about natural selection what he did about government: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried". Yes, it's just a theory, inferior perhaps to absolute truth, but it is better than any other theory we've come up with yet-- including the theory of an absolute truth. Scientific "knowledge" is a liquid rather than a solid form of fact, adaptable rather than brittle. It is a body of temporary claims, that today's scientist realizes may be overturned, or better put, re-framed, by the discoveries of tomorrow. We work to make our picture of the world ever clearer, recognizing that the scientists of the future will see a different world than the one we see now, and will adapt our contribution to that newer, more modern reality.

Madison envisioned American politics like this, as a laboratory, "an institutionalized forum for everlasting debate" (125). He came to believe that the best resolution to the argument over central versus state sovereignty was to leave it unresolved, forever . In fact to institutionalize the conflict, to make the tension permanent. That way, competing factions would continually negotiate compromise between two opposing visions of America, allowing neither to dominate unchallenged. John Adams used the same logic in distributing powers among the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative branches of government, and in keeping the Judiciary independent of the federal government. A distributed network of competing interests insured against consolidation of power, and against political stultification. Ideas that are being constantly debated-- "peer reviewed" in the science language-- never have the chance to calcify into unquestioned facts or political cudgels.

"The genius of Madison's argument," as Ellis writes, "for a version of sovereignty that was at once shared and divided raised the wholly pragmatic and politically painful compromises reached at the Constitutional Convention to the level of a novel political discovery: to wit, the notion that government was not about providing answers, but rather about providing a framework in which the salient questions could continue to be debated" (p. 123).

The role of government: Not to provide answers, but to provide a framework in which the questions can continue to be debated. Discussed. Sounds an awful lot like the kind of world Obama sees.

Hopefully we'll all live in that world, starting tomorrow.