It's odd seeing your news from somebody else's perspective. It's something Americans don't get much of a chance to do, geography being what it is on this side of the world. To get a foreign viewpoint here, you really have to make an effort, even with the Internet. On newstands in Europe, foreign papers are everywhere, and the news comes in several languages. Each country puts a slightly different spin on their neighbor's stories. I'm as guilty of this as the next Yankee (if there's any real guilt involved), but every now and then, it's good to be reminded that not everyone frames the view in the same way it's presented by American media.
I had one of those Aha! moments yesterday, leafing through the latest issue of Kyoto Journal, a quarterly I've started picking up on a fairly regular basis. The journal's tagline is "Perspectives from Asia" and it covers more than just Japan. It's something like a cross between National Geographic, Orion, and a literary magazine. There's always amazing photographs in it, and articles about some aspect of Asian culture somewhere, and, often, about the cross-pollination of societies in Asia. This was in issue #59. I'd just seen the cover of the latest Time Magazine with a focus on Hiroshima, so that was somewhere in the back of my mind when I leafed through and saw a picture that looked vaguely familiar. It was a group of people walking along a dirty, paper-strewn street, all of them almost unrecognizable under a dark patina of filth. It made me stop because there were no Asians in the photo, at first glance. That's not unusual in Kyoto Journal; it's all in English and there's usually a feature on one Westerner who's had a special relationship with some part of Asian culture, but there was just something odd about the picture that made me really look at it.
It actually took several seconds of laboriously connecting the dots for me to put together that it was a photograph of people fleeing the World Trade Center on 9/11. Part of what threw me is that it was in the middle of an article on haiku, and we all know that context is everything, but it was also a photograph I hadn't seen before—and believe me, I've seen a lot of them, thanks to the Internet, not just the iconic ones used over and over in the media. (There are links to a couple of amazing and heart-wrenching collections on my 9/11 Blog.) And on second glance, there were a couple of people who might have been, oh, Filipino or SE Asian But right up front were two black women. The apparent cultural dissonance kind of rocked me back on my heels for a second and I had a weird moment of protectiveness, a feeling of "hey, that's our suffering being depicted there!" that was less recognition than it was a flash of outrage at the perceived appropriation.
Which is a patently ridiculous reaction and also interesting in light of the fact that there's another article in same magazine called, "Reporting Reality," an interview with Hirokawa Ryuichi, founder of the Japanese photojournalism magazine, Days Japan, in which there are also a series of pictures by him taken in Afghan refugee camps and Iraqi hospitals of the victims of U.S. bombing raids and the wars there. In the interview, he talks about covering the wars and yet not seeing the kinds of photographs he was taking—of the civilian casualties, the so-called collateral damage—strictly as reportage. Of course there are other news agencies besides our own reporting events. (Sadly, according to Hirokawa, very few of them will run stories on the civilian victims of war, but that's another issue entirely.) The point is that Americans don't see them often, and when it's someone else's viewpoint, in the context of someone else's culture, it's often startling.
It also sets the event itself in a different context. Americans see a lot of images of people in other countries suffering from the ravages of wars and natural disasters, but it doesn't happen on that raw scale to us that often, barring the odd tornado or hurricane. Even then, the cost in human lives is generally in the double digits, if that high. We have good warning systems and the densely populated places are generally evacuated before there's a huge loss of life. It's viscerally wrenching, and a little freaky, to find yourself viewed through someone else's eyes as a victim culture. Nobody likes to seem helpless or traumatized, no matter how much pity or empathy it evokes.
What that change in viewpoint really does, though, is make you realize that everyone suffers the same way. The expressions on people's faces are always the same, no matter who has taken the picture, or who is the subject.
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