Emperor Hirohito You Don't Judge Me Cause if You Did Baby I Would Judge You Too

Shoichi Yokoi

- Oct 9th 1997

THE hiding place on the Pacific island of Guam where Shoichi Yokoi lived for nearly 27 years was destroyed by a typhoon. Never mind, the replica that has replaced it looks just as inhospitable to the many Japanese who come to marvel how their compatriot survived. Only in January 1972, when he was 56, did Sergeant Yokoi of the Japanese Imperial Army abandon his jungle life after being spotted fishing by two local people, and, as he said, after being urged by the spirits of his dead comrades to come out of hiding.

He was taken to hospital, where the doctors wanted to X-ray him. Unfamiliar with modern medical equipment, he told them, "If you want to kill me, kill me quickly." The doctors calmed the living fossil who had adapted to the jungle, living on fruit and nuts, with fish and the odd rat or frog for protein. When his army uniform rotted away, Mr Yokoi dressed in clothes that he had woven from tree bark. It was helpful that he had been a tailor in civilian life.

He returned to Japan, 31 years after he had left, to a flag-waving welcome, but he was a reluctant hero. "I have a gun from the emperor and I have brought it back," he said. He apologised that he could not fulfil his duties. "I am ashamed that I have come home alive."

His was the guilt of the survivor. Of the 22,000 Japanese soldiers defending Guam, some 19,000 were killed when the Americans regained the island in 1944, and 2,000 survivors fled to the jungle. Most gave up when Japan surrendered in 1945, but Mr Yokoi and a few others did not, apparently unaware that the war had ended. His two remaining colleagues died in 1964, leaving Mr Yokoi on his own for another eight years.

An oddity of history

While admiring Shoichi Yokoi's resourcefulness as a Japanese Robinson Crusoe, the post-war generations have not shown much sympathy for his grief that, by eventually returning, he had let down the army and Emperor Hirohito. Among older Japanese there may be nostalgia for the imperial days, but to most modern Japanese emperor worship is an historical oddity: fewer than half of the Japanese polled cared a cent about the ascension of Akihito, Hirohito's son, to the chrysanthemum throne in 1990 after his father's death. But to the likes of Mr Yokoi, doing the bidding of the emperor, a descendant of the Sun Goddess, was a religious duty relayed by his more worldly army superiors. As Muslims pray facing towards Mecca, so Japanese schoolchildren at that time turned towards Tokyo in morning assembly. These were the days of the kamikaze pilots who were prepared to crash into oblivion, because that was the emperor's command. In Saipan, families hurled themselves over a cliff shouting loyalty to the emperor, rather than be captured by the advancing Americans. (So-called Banzai Cliff is another place that draws astonished Japanese tourists.) Only after the war, at the behest of the Americans who thought that emperor worship contributed to the Japanese view of themselves as superior to other races, did Hirohito renounce divinity in his "Declaration of Humanity".

Although Mr Yokoi was the most famous of the old warriors to return from the jungle, there were others who refused to believe that Japan could have been defeated. Two years after Mr Yokoi returned, Hiroo Onoda, a lieutenant, was discovered in the Philippines with two other Japanese soldiers. His rifle (unlike Mr Yokoi's) still worked and he had potted a few locals over the years. The strength of his commitment to emperor and country was, if anything, even fiercer than Mr Yokoi's. Only when his former commander was flown to the Philippines was Mr Onoda persuaded to surrender.

Mr Yokoi adapted to the hustle of modern Japan remarkably quickly. Nine months after returning he was married. He became a pacifist, wrote the first of his two books and became a television commentator on survival tactics. He even stood for election to Japan's upper house of parliament in 1974.

Yet he was unhappy with many aspects of Japan. The country was experiencing heady economic growth. What had happened to its old qualities of elegance, harmony and simplicity? "Golf courses should be turned into bean fields," wrote Mr Yokoi. The Japanese people should live simply, frugally and without waste. Mr Yokoi was, according to the slogan of his election campaign, an "endurable-life critic". His view of life contained much wartime puritanism: "Don't eat excessively. Don't wear too much. Don't be vain, use your brain." Evidently, Japanese voters preferred not to, and Mr Yokoi was not elected. Undeterred, he continued to preach the virtues of autarky.

In his later years, Mr Yokoi faded from public life. He took up pottery and calligraphy, grew organic vegetables and became ever more disenchanted with modern Japan. "I'm not happy with the present system of education, politics, religion, just about everything," he said. After several years of illness he died of a heart attack. And perhaps there was heartbreak, too, as he looked back fondly at his "natural" life in the jungle.

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THE first of Roy Lichtenstein's comic-book paintings were produced to please his children. Or so he said. But he also said on another occasion, "I wouldn't believe anything I tell you." He, in common with many artists, would have preferred not to have talked much about his work. The language was all in the painting. But when he became famous there were interviews to give. "So what started you into this comic-book theme, Mr Lichtenstein?" "It was my children." It might even have been true. At least the story offered a clue to a vast American middle-class audience eager to understand the new pop art so as to discuss it in a seemingly informed and sympathetic way.

Unlike the abstract impressionists who had preceded pop art, it was clear that Mr Lichtenstein could draw. Not for him the abstractionists' random brush-strokes and drips; he had a meticulous line and a careful use of colour. Before he became a pop artist, he had an oeuvre of representational painting that anyone could appreciate. He was an artist to respect. You could warm to him. He had fought in the war. Then, in 1965, Life magazine asked: "Is he the worst artist in America?" The question was not so much a provocation as confirmation that he had become the most famous artist in America.

His name was made in two tumultuous years: from a show in the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1962 to his public epiphany by Life and others. Critics at the Castelli show were both approving and hostile. But everyone agreed that marrying comic images to fine art was sensational. He had started something. A genre was born. Every artist seemed to turn to pop. Andy Warhol tried to rival him with his paintings of tins of soup, but Mr Lichtenstein was the pioneer. He was able to give up his part-time teaching jobs. In the next three decades he never stopped experimenting in various media, including sculpture, and became rich as his work sold for increasing, and eventually astronomical, prices. But it was for his work in the 1960s that he has a place, of whatever size, in the history of art.

America v France

For most Americans the news that Roy Lichtenstein had died this week came in a tribute by President Clinton. America has been both proud and defensive about the flowering of its art in the post-war years. New York, it was said, had replaced Paris as the innovative centre of the art world. Plucking up its courage, America sent to Paris and other European cities a number of exhibitions of its best and brightest, taking the precaution of secretly bribing some critics and other influential people to give them a good reception. But for all this care, masterminded, it is said, by the CIA, Paris has mostly given American art the raspberry.

The likes of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko are seen as unworthy successors to Matisse and Braque. And Marcel Duchamp and other Dadaists had elevated the banal objects of everyday life to art back in the 1920s. The French view is not shared elsewhere in Europe. Mr Lichtenstein, particularly, is liked for his sense of fun. Sometimes he has seemed to be mocking the era of art in which he had been so successful. His father, a property dealer, had told him stories of the peculiarities of the marketplace, and no market is more peculiar than art.

Mr Lichtenstein reflected that you could hang a rag on the wall of a gallery and it would be taken seriously as a work of art. He seemed to be lampooning his success with his picture captioned, "Why, Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece! My, soon you'll have all of New York clamoring for your work."

He once said that his own work was too despicable to hang. Who would want to have in their living room a huge comic picture of a fighter pilot saying "Whaam!" (one of Roy Lichtenstein most famous pieces)?

His technique was certainly not despicable. His art school training, followed by experience as a draughtsman, was evident in the precision of his work. He started with small pencil sketches which he enlarged on to canvas with a projector and then filled in the colours. He used stencils and other mechanical aids to help with the shapes. Assistants helped with the boring bits. These are the techniques of commercial artists who produce magazine covers and advertisements. In this sense Mr Lichtenstein was the most successful commercial artist who ever lived.

Mere workers at the coal-face, the artists who laboured away on the comic books that Mr Lichtenstein copied, did not think much of his paintings. In enlarging them, some claimed, they became static. Some threatened to sue him. Whatever the justice of their complaints, in fact Mr Lichtenstein did them a sort of favour. Comic books these days are often taken seriously, the subject of theses (or a sign of growing illiteracy). But this is to miss the point of Roy Lichtenstein's achievement. His was the idea. The art of today, he told an interviewer, is all around us. It is not Impressionist painting. "It's really McDonald's." Of course, you don't have to believe everything he said.

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Ganesh Man Singh

- Sep 25th 1997

ONE of Ganesh Man Singh's special difficulties as a politician in Nepal was that his chief opponent, King Birenda, was widely regarded as a god. In 1988 the two men met for the first time. Here was Mr Singh the commoner, a veteran of Nepal's jails, who had once been flogged for refusing to call a judge "your highness"; and here was the king, said to be an incarnation of Vishnu, a Hindu god whose duties include preserving the social order.

Mr Singh took a deep breath and asked the king to agree to give up his absolute rule in favour of a multi-party system. If the monarchy was to continue in Nepal in any form, Mr Singh said, it would have to co-operate with the democratic forces now on the march. It was perhaps the first time such presumptuous demands had been made directly to the king. His exact words in reply have not been disclosed. It can be assumed he was polite (he was educated at Eton). But, in essence, the king said no.

Mr Singh's approach was meant to be a helpful one. He, if not the king, was aware of the anti-royal feeling building up outside the palace. Revolution was in the air. The king's head was in danger, not just his throne. Mr Singh sought for Nepal a constitutional monarchy. The king could retain his sacredness, but mortals should be allowed to run the government, however foolishly, as indeed happened in Japan and Thailand.

Mr Singh's moderates and the less-moderate communists combined in a "people's movement". Strikes and demonstrations were answered by curfews and killings. In April 1990, after 50 days of turmoil in Katmandu, the crunch came when 45 people were shot dead in a seemingly peaceful demonstration outside the palace. The king, and the outside world, were appalled. The king conceded. A general election held the following year under a new constitution was won by Mr Singh's Nepali Congress Party. He declined to be prime minister. At 75 he said he was tired. For millions of Nepalis he was, for the rest of his life, simply sarbamaanya neta—supreme leader.

Remote and poor

The Nepal that Ganesh Man Singh was born into was remote. The region where James Hilton's novel "Lost Horizon" located the imaginary "Shangri La", had few visitors as recently as the 1930s. It was also poor—although Mr Singh's family was relatively well-off. For any Nepali hoping to move his country into the modern world, India and its Congress Party politics were the inspiration. The inspiration nearly did for Mr Singh. In 1940 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for a political offence. Four years later he escaped to India and helped to form the Nepali Congress Party. In 1959 King Mahendra, the present king's father, decided to give democracy a try and Mr Singh was made a government minister. But a year later the king had had enough of it, reverted to absolute rule and jailed Mr Singh and other politicians.

After eight years in jail, followed by exile in India, Mr Singh returned to Nepal. Political parties were formally banned, but were active anyway. It has to be said, though, that so far democracy has not done Nepal any favours materially. The king's capitulation in 1990 may have been the high point in Mr Singh's political life, but success came too late. Nepal remains poor: the ninth poorest country when measured by GNP per person, according to the World Bank. The percentage of Nepalis living in absolute poverty is actually increasing, from an estimated 36% in 1977 to 45% in 1996, the Bank says. Its exotic poverty remains an attraction for western tourists: backpackers in search of cheap pot; climbers queueing up to scale (and pollute) Everest. Mr Singh wanted Nepal to end its quaintness. It has, for example, plentiful water resources that an enterprising government would find ways to develop. But politics in Nepal are in a mess. An insurgency led by admirers of Mao Zedong was put down last year with 113 people killed. At least 24 people died as a result of violence during council elections in May. There have been five prime ministers since 1990. Most of the leaders are "a far cry" from what Mr Singh had envisaged, lamented the Katmandu Post. The present government is a coalition led by the United Marxist-Leninist Party.

A five-year plan to 2002 talks of providing more drinking water. By 2005 illiteracy among the young may be ended. But such targets seem ambitious. Mr Singh, who loathed communists, called Nepalis who believed their promises "a flock of sheep". But he was also angry with infighting in his own party, and formally gave up membership in 1994.

He had a state funeral, the first accorded to a commoner. The procession to the cremation site took five hours. An onlooker who had seen two royal funerals reckoned that Mr Singh's was the most impressive. The communists were there, alongside the Congress Party leaders. A debate on a motion of no confidence in the government was postponed until October. For the first time for years Nepal had a sort of quiet unity.

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Viktor Frankl

- Sep 18th 1997

WHEN Viktor Frankl was 16 he wrote an essay on Sigmund Freud's teaching and sent it to the great man. Freud, Dr Frankl recalled, wrote back that he had found the essay interesting and had passed it to a journal of psychoanalysis, recommending that it be published (which it was, although, in the manner of learned publications, not until three years later). Freud, ever polite, hoped that the young Viktor did not mind having his work in print.

It is a nice story and not all that improbable. Vienna, then the crucible of psychiatry, with Freud its most famous practitioner, was a quarrelsome place. Having the devoted attention of an obviously clever young man was at least a relief from having to parry the attacks of rivals who questioned, for example, Freud's emphasis on sexuality in explaining mental disorders.

Although in his career as a psychiatrist Viktor Frankl moved away from Freud's teachings, he retained an affection for him and had a bust of him in his study in the University of Vienna. But he was glad that the genius who explored the "basement" of human aspirations, and in doing so excused them, did not live to see them practised in the gas chambers of Auschwitz (Freud died in 1939). Dr Frankl's father, mother, brother and first wife all died in the camps. Dr Frankl was arrested in 1942 while he was working in a Vienna hospital and spent the next three years in four camps, among them Auschwitz. He not only survived in the "basement" of wickedness, but he used his experience to devise a therapy that, one way or another, has enabled many people to refashion their lives when they might have given up.

Life's demands

Even in the camps one freedom remained, to be able to think. Viktor Frankl observed that prisoners who gave "meaning" to their lives—perhaps simply by helping others through the day—were themselves more likely to survive. Those who had lost any faith in the future fell into depression and were doomed. In the camps there were many suicides. The camp guards did not allow prisoners to cut down anyone who was trying to hang himself. So Dr Frankl and others of like mind tried to forestall suicides by giving meaning to the lives of those who had sunk into depression. Life, he would say, still demanded something of them. You had to go on, if only in the hope of living to tell what had happened in the camps.

When Viktor Frankl was freed at the end of the war he wrote "Man's Search for Meaning", which has sold some 9m copies in numerous languages. He wrote 31 other books, but "Meaning", written in nine days as the ideas burst from his mind after years of confinement, has had the most impact. Dr Frankl was surprised, and a little irritated, that he was known mainly by this one popular book: "I simply thought it might be helpful for people prone to despair."

The book has sometimes had an influence in ways that he did not at first envisage. The Frankl therapy is sometimes summarised in the sentence, "Get to work". Anyone doing satisfying work is likely to get a feeling of well-being, according to Dr Frankl. Happiness "ensues".

When "Meaning" was written there was no shortage of work. Europe especially was being rebuilt, and there was a spirit of optimism about. Now in the rich countries there are many millions of people without work. Some followers of Dr Frankl see in his writings helpful advice for those sunk in depression for the lack of a job. In Britain, some politicians used to urge the jobless to "get on your bike" to look for work, an echo of Frankl therapy. Dr Frankl never bent his ideas to political needs, and indeed his notion of "work" was broader than just the task of earning a living: as a psychiatrist he was concerned with healing the soul, "the higher part of man", rather than the body. But like the ideas of other European psychiatrists, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler and of course Freud, Dr Frankl's have seeped into other disciplines.

In the post-war period he practised and taught psychiatry in Vienna for 25 years, and spent 20 years in the United States as a visiting professor at Harvard and other American universities. He liked to hold forth on television, once suggesting that America should erect on its other coast a Statue of Responsibility. He was awarded 29 honorary doctorates from institutions around the world. He climbed mountains and, at 67, learnt to fly, although he said both activities frightened him. He never really retired. When he was 90 he said in an interview in First Things, an American philosophy magazine, that he was still receiving, on average, 23 letters a day, mostly from people saying that he had changed their lives.

In that interview he spoke of his memories of the camps, of how not a day went by without thinking of what had happened in them. Yet, in a way, he pitied those younger people without experience of the camps or the war, to compare with any present hardships. "What I would have given then if I could have had no greater problem than I face today."

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Mother Teresa

- Sep 11th 1997

HAD Mother Teresa not become an international celebrity, she might not have lived so long. Several times in her last years, against her will, she was admitted to exclusive and expensive hospitals for heart surgery. She herself saw no point in taking care to prolong her earthly existence; her only concession to frailty, ever, was to step aside last March to allow the leadership of her order of nuns to be assumed by someone else. Nor did she see any point in interventionist medicine: she would have been happy to die, as most of her patients did, on a thin pallet in a communal dormitory, having spent her last days on a diet of rice, water, weak medicine, and love.

Her fame obliged her to continue. Since the order of nuns she had founded made it a principle never to ask for money, they came to rely on her personality to open the purses of the rich and the not-so-rich. She was tremendously good at it. Charles Keating gave her half a million dollars and the use of a jet. Robert Maxwell became her co-sponsor. A government minister in Ethiopia was persuaded, on television, to give her a building for an orphanage. Once, having bought $800-worth of goods for the poor in a supermarket, she refused to move from the checkout until someone else in the queue paid for them. A fund-raiser of Mother Teresa's virtuosity could not merely decline into the peaceful embrace of God she recommended for her patients; she had a duty to survive.

As the list of her helpers suggests, Mother Teresa was not fastidious about the sources of her money. She got into trouble, too, for accepting Haiti's Légion d'Honneur from Baby Doc Duvalier, and for laying a wreath on the tomb of Enver Hoxha, the former Communist leader of Albania, where she was born. People supposed she was ignorant, or, worse, complicit in the tyranny or corruption of these men. The truth was simpler and more extraordinary: she saw Christ in them, and believed they could be redeemed. Her attitude to Maxwell was exactly the same as her attitude to the first woman she rescued from a Calcutta street, already half-eaten by rats and ants: this was "Christ in his distressing disguise", demanding to be healed by love.

From the few to the many

Her fascination with India began as a child, when missionaries from the subcontinent gave a talk at her school in Skopje. She went to India at the age of 18 after joining the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish order, and became principal of St Mary's High School in Calcutta; but life there seemed too comfortable. In 1948 she left the order and founded her own, dedicated on Franciscan principles to serving the destitute and dying in the slums. She began with a few sisters and a handful of rupees; by her death, she headed a network of 4,000 nuns and 120,000 lay workers in hospitals, orphanages, leper houses and AIDS centres in 450 sites across the world.

The hectic growth of her order was accompanied by a faint anxiety in India (where she was suspected, wrongly, of converting dying Hindus to Christianity), and by scepticism in the West. Mother Teresa admitted, in a famous series of BBC interviews, that she was not really doing all that much to ease the lot of the poor in India. The editor of the Lancet, visiting her Home for the Dying in 1994, reported that stocks of medicine were insufficient, and that not enough was done to cure the sick or ease the pain of the dying. But Mother Teresa believed it was not "things" her patients needed; they needed to feel wanted, and to die at peace with God. The secular view of death, as something to be resisted, met, in Mother Teresa, the religious view that death should be joyfully surrendered to. Neither side could hope to understand the other.

Her views on population were equally controversial. In common with most members of the Roman Catholic church, she opposed abortion; in common with a tiny minority, she opposed contraception. To those who argued that India's problem was too many people, she would reply that, on the contrary, there could never be enough people; they were God's life and, if he had created them, he would provide for them, as he did for the birds and the trees. The fact that this belief was called into question all around her did not shake her. She never queried the teaching of her church in any particular. But she performed one small, bold act of independence: when Pope John Paul II left her the white limousine that he had used on his visit to India, she almost immediately raffled it to raise funds.

People said she was a saint. She had most of the attributes of sainthood: a dauntingly selfless life, devotion to a higher cause, rude single-mindedness, a thick skin, and a capacity to wring the withers of the rich and powerful. Teresa of Avila would have embraced her as a sister. She was the secular West's adopted holy person; Prince Charles and Princess Diana, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan all improved their moral standing by appearing in public beside her. Yet her unadulterated message, like the message of most saints and of Christ himself, was undoubtedly too difficult for most of her adoring public to take.

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IT WAS easy to get caught up in the cult of Diana, which became as strong for the Princess of Wales as it was for her mythological Roman namesake. When she was married in 1981 The Economist itself gushed, "God save the next queen." Now the cult is immeasurably greater than it was 16 years ago. Books await to be written, perhaps are already being written, about how a 19-year-old kindergarten helper became the most famous woman in the world, and was seen at her death to be an icon of her age. But whatever puzzles the writer may encounter, there will be no shortage of material to ponder over.

One of the oddities of many of the articles written about Diana during the past week is that they dwell on her search for privacy. True, she had no privacy, but she appeared content to be constantly on public view. After Lenin died the Soviet government employed researchers to make a record of every day of his life. The reporters and photographers who made Diana their career did the same, and more efficiently. She mostly smiled on their dog-like attention and occasionally threw them a bone which would turn up in a tabloid next day as a "world exclusive".

Her friends were privy to her more intimate thoughts and these too would become public property. The princess went on television to give answers to the most searching questions about her life in a BBC programme that was sold around the world. As a product, Diana never palled. There was always some event to keep her public keen, a new lover, a new cause, some painful disclosure about her physical and mental health. Privacy is a luxury still available to the rich, albeit with difficulty. Princess Diana preferred to display her infinite variety.

Enter the bride

Despite her humble job looking after tinies, Diana Frances Spencer was born a lady. Her father was an earl, her mother the daughter of a baron. For centuries the Spencer family had been close to the monarchy, holding whimsically named posts: a grandmother was a woman of the bedchamber. When Prince Charles was looking for a bride fit to be a queen, Diana was high in his list. Like the Roman goddess, she was apparently a virgin, a rare qualification among the prince's girlfriends. She was pretty and, as shown in many of the pictures subsequently taken of her, she could look beautiful in a sympathetic setting. She had received little formal education, but that did not seem to matter. Her youth suggested that she could be eased without difficulty into the royal mould. The Queen Mother, who had never given the monarchy a moment's anxiety since she married into the royal family in 1923 (and is now a hale 97), was the model, and for a while she chaperoned Diana. The princess did her duty, providing two splendid sons, one of whom is in line to be king if he and the monarchy survive. She went along with the formalities expected of a prince's wife, becoming, for example, colonel-in-chief of the Royal Hampshire Regiment and a patron of numerous charities long cherished by the royals. But her fancy was for more offbeat causes, AIDS sufferers, lepers and, most recently, land-mine victims.

She gave them valuable, if brief, publicity, and her support made all the more impact by being unusual coming from a royal. She was up to date. The National Marriage Guidance Council changed its name to the snazzier Relate, with the princess as its patron. The prince also had his favoured causes, concern for the environment, the preservation of architectural standards, but a picture of Diana cuddling a handicapped child was what caught the eye. According to Diana's accounts, she found the prince's family boring and offhand. Although the prince was a mere 13 years older than she, Diana saw him as an old fogey, approaching middle age. Worse, Charles kept up his friendship for Camilla Parker Bowles, an old flame. "There were three of us in the marriage," she said famously on the BBC.

The British public was slowly eased into the knowledge that what had been seen as a fairytale marriage had been deeply miserable. A separation was announced in 1992. On that television programme in 1995 Diana hinted that the prince might never become king. As for herself, she would like to be "a queen of people's hearts". The put-upon real queen had had enough. She told the couple to get divorced as soon as possible. Diana fought her corner and, after long and sometimes bitter negotiations partly over money, the couple were divorced in 1996. Diana remained a princess but was no longer the future queen, no longer even "her royal highness". One of her first actions was to drop the patronage of some 100 charities.

Still, in the public eye, Diana could do nothing mean. Indeed, her seeming lapses, her adulteries, her conspicuous extravagance, seemed only to support the view that she was a real person. The manner of her death, in a speeding car crashed by a drunken driver, with her latest lover by her side, could merely have been shocking. For millions it confirmed that Diana the goddess was a victim of "fate", whatever that may mean.

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Yuri Nikulin

- Aug 28th 1997

A JOKE that Yuri Nikulin was fond of went like this: Why did Stalin wear thigh boots while Lenin's were much shorter? Because in Lenin's time Russia was in the shit only up to its ankles.

In Stalin's time such a joke could be a passport to the gulag, but even latterly, as Russians felt able to speak freely, Mr Nikulin kept the joke for private parties. He feared Russia's neo-communists. Repression, he believed, could return. Russia's history of suffering was not going to end so suddenly. He never lost the habit of keeping a record of his political jokes in a private code, a practice he had started in Soviet times.

Even so, Mr Nikulin's career was a marvel of survival. All humour is based on hostility. While he was making seemingly safe jokes about, say, Americans, or Chinese, or Jews, might he be getting at authority in general, and even at the state? Was there something subversive in Yuri Nikulin's facial expressions and the movement of his hands, for he was a mime as well as a masterly teller of stories? Such thoughts nagged at the Soviet bosses. No one cares to be laughed at, but for a tyrant it is treason.

Straightforward critics of communism could be jailed and then banished, as Solzhenitsyn was. At least they took the regime seriously. But what did you do with a seemingly guileless clown with an immense following among a public that called him Uncle Yuri? By kicking a clown you ran the risk of yourself looking foolish. The state loaded him with awards and hoped for the best. Pravda said on Tuesday, when he was buried, "He was one of us."

Like Chaplin

Yuri Nikulin said he got his sense of the absurd from his father, who was a writer of humorous articles in pre-communist times. He started out as a party loyalist, but may have begun to have doubts in the 1930s, at the time of the great purges. He was a sergeant in the artillery in the second world war, and his talent for comedy emerged in army shows. After the war he became famous in the Soviet Union in some 50 films where he usually played a put-upon Chaplin-like character caught up in situations largely out of his control. In a typical film, "The Twelve Chairs", he finds himself involved with some jewellery smugglers. As well as Chaplin, Mr Nikulin has been compared with the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, suggesting that he had a touch of the universal. One day a television company looking for someone new to cheer up its jaded viewers may decide to introduce him to western audiences.

As television spread, Mr Nikulin became a regular, telling stories with faultless timing. "Where were Adam and Eve born? In Russia, of course. They had no home, were naked and had one apple between them, and thought they were in Paradise." It was a political joke, but President Yeltsin was in the studio and applauded vigorously. Mr Nikulin campaigned for Mr Yeltsin in last year's presidential election, and may have helped to turn the tide for him.

Television was fun, but real laughter, Yuri Nikulin believed, was generated with a live audience, and the best audiences were those at the circus. Although the circus is dying out in the West, it remains as much a part of Russian life as the ballet. Even in the strained days of the cold war, Russian circuses toured Europe, America and Australia with great success (marred for the Soviet Union only by the number of defections). Mr Nikulin was among the performers, along with such legendary clowns as Popov and Karandash. "We forced the audiences to collapse laughing," Mr Nikulin recalled.

The Moscow Circus so admired Yuri Nikulin that it made him director. It was a disastrous appointment, one that has the air of Russian doom. Uncle Yuri was no businessman. In 1992, when the Soviet Union had collapsed, and the circus was close to collapsing with it, an American firm was accepted as a partner. The Americans set about pepping up the enterprise on Tsvetnoy Boulevard. The bread and sausages on offer in the circus snack bars were replaced by candy floss and other American delights. Business picked up, but it soon became clear that the Russians were unhappy with the terms of the deal.

Among other things, Mr Nikulin said he was not being paid enough to have his name on Russia's first "submarine sandwich". His son, Maxim, said that just having his famous father's name on a sandwich was "against our traditions and psychology". The mayor of Moscow declared the partnership illegal. Candy floss and popcorn machines were seized. The American ambassador became involved. A Russian who had been a go-between for the deal was shot dead. The Americans went home, apparently in fear.

Maxim Nikulin, the present director of the circus, blamed his father's "naïveté". Yuru Nikulin saw the episode more bleakly. "When the history of the third world war is written," he said, "it will be remembered that America's capture of Russia began with the Moscow Circus. What a joke."

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Walter Farmer

- Aug 21st 1997

IN THE months immediately after the second world war, Walter Farmer, then a captain in the United States army, was the head of a team sorting out the many paintings and other works of art salvaged from the wreckage of Germany. The National Gallery of Art in Washington coveted 202 of these treasures, among them paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Titian, Dürer and Botticelli. Mr Farmer and his team were ordered to pack them up and dispatch them speedily to America.

Mr Farmer was deeply opposed to the transfer. It was, he argued, not "morally tenable". His view, at the time, was a minority one among the victorious countries. In the custom of war, the victors were simply collecting their loot. Germany itself had pillaged the countries it had occupied of their finest pieces, and, it was argued, deserved no sympathy. Was it not a Prussian general, Gebhard Blücher, who had said (of London), "What a place to plunder"?

In November 1946 the 202 paintings were duly sent to Washington and put on show. Mr Farmer and his supporters in the army team drafted what came to be called the Wiesbaden Manifesto, named after the German town where the team was stationed. Denouncing the plunder, the manifesto spoke of "obligations to common justice, decency and the establishment of the power of right, not might, among civilised nations." A copy of the manifesto was sent to the United States Senate. Harry Truman, the American president, mulled it over and ordered the paintings to be returned to Germany.

Sorry we kept you waiting

Last year, Mr Farmer, then 84, was awarded Germany's highest civilian honour, the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit, for his work in getting the paintings returned. At a ceremony in Bonn the Germans apologised to Mr Farmer for waiting for 50 years before thanking him. It seems that, until recently, no one in the German government had heard of Walter Farmer's good deed. What brought it to the Germans' attention was the publicity given to growing indignation about German paintings still in Russian hands. Had the Russians not heard of the Wiesbaden Manifesto?

If they had, they took no notice of it. Like the National Gallery in Washington, the Hermitage in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and other Russian galleries also took a fancy to German art treasures located by Soviet troops in 1945. But they never gave them back. For decades they were hidden away. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union the Russians have acknowledged that thousands of works of art taken from Germany are in their possession. Shows of some of the paintings have been put on in the Hermitage and in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

In these peaceful days the Russians do not have the gall to say that the art works were the spoils of war. They say they were removed from Germany for their "protection" and hint that they may be handed back at some unspecified time. The German ambassador to Moscow spoke of the need to return the pictures "to overcome this unhappy consequence of war", but did not sound too hopeful. The Germans have been more comforted by the remarks of Mr Farmer who, when he visited Bonn last year, said that all the time part of Germany's cultural heritage was in Russian hands it would be a cause of "justified bitterness". Art, he said, was the soul of a nation.

America, and Germany, were lucky to have in Wiesbaden someone as concerned and knowledgeable about art as Mr Farmer. He had been collecting paintings since he was a student. During the war he was at first in an engineering corps, helping to rebuild bridges. As the Allied forces fought their way through the broken cities of Europe Mr Farmer became increasingly determined to do what he could to save what was left.

Walter Farmer, though, was never a propagandist. He was an architect from Cincinnati who, caught up in a moral issue, did "what any decent Mid-Westerner" would do. In civilian life after the war the decent Mid-Westerner became interested in protecting the culture of the American Indian. Many "souvenirs" were seized by the United States cavalry in the Indian wars. To take one example, at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, the site of the last big battle with the Indians in 1890, where almost 200 Sioux were killed, there was a rich haul of artifacts.

At a conference in New York in 1995 Mr Farmer suggested that the "spoils of war" taken at Wounded Knee were as indefensible as those denounced in the Wiesbaden Manifesto. But was this not an academic point, of no relevance more than 100 years later? Not at all, said Mr Farmer. Indian relics often came up for auction, as did many other articles taken from "native" peoples. The buyers should establish that the articles were not stolen. The transfer of stolen property, albeit in "good faith", did not establish title. Mr Farmer's observations sent a shiver though the salerooms, not all of which are concerned about such niceties. The verities of Wiesbaden live on.

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Jeanne Calment

- Aug 14th 1997

FOR 100 years nothing much happened to Jeanne Calment. Centenarians are commonplace these days. But as she lived on, and on, she became famous, first in her home town, Arles, in southern France, then nationally, and eventually as the person with the longest proven life of anyone in history. France, always happy for new evidence that it is, in every way, the most desirable of countries to be born in, was gratified when (in October 1995) Mrs Calment passed the lifespan of a Japanese who had previously held this most competitive of records. Mrs Calment, it was noted, attributed her staying power to olive oil and good French wine.

Each birthday, reporters would be dispatched to write about Mrs Calment's career in longevity. But extracting the gems of her experience was not easy. In her final years Mrs Calment's sight and hearing had almost gone. There is a certain amount of repetition in these birthday accounts. One much-told story is that in 1965, when Mrs Calment was 90, a local lawyer made a deal with her to take over her flat when she died, meanwhile paying her the equivalent of $500 a month. But the lawyer died first, 30 years after making the deal, having paid Mrs Calment several times the value of her flat and ensuring that she lived out the rest of her time without money worries. "It happens in life that we make bad deals," Mrs Calment was reported to have said.

The lawyer story is probably true. But as Mrs Calment grew ever older and frailer, the tales about her became suspiciously improbable. Did she really remember Van Gogh when he had both his ears, or was this a piece of embroidery by a journalist who worked out that the painter lived in Arles when Jeanne Calment was a girl? Did she really say, off pat, "I've been forgotten by God"?

The claims and the proof

Perhaps it does not matter. For most people, the interest in Mrs Calment was her durability. We all live under sentence of death. How did she put it off so long? And was it worth it? Research into ageing is one of the newer disciplines. The University of California's department for "the economics and demography of ageing" has located more than 20,000 centenarians in the United States and quite a few "super centenarians" aged at least 110. It studied the life of Jeanne Calment for clues to her endurance. "Here was someone of the greatest age and one we could authenticate," said a worker in the department. Since Methuselah, said to be 969, and his less-famous son Lamech, a mere 777, many claims have been made for long life. But Mrs Calment had the papers to prove that she was born on February 21st 1875, the year that Tolstoy published "Anna Karenina". Her father was a shopkeeper and Jeanne was married within her class to another shopkeeper. The couple had one child, a girl. Mrs Calment seems to have had no endangering illnesses. Putting aside her faith in the life-sustaining qualities of olive oil, the Californian researchers assumed that Mrs Calment's otherwise unexceptional life had been prolonged because of her genes. It seems the best chance of attaining a great age comes from having long-lived parents. Mrs Calment's father lived to the age of 94 and her mother to 86. But it doesn't always work. Her daughter died at 36.

People generally are living longer in the rich countries. In some, average life expectancy has doubled over the past century. There will be 1.3m American centenarians by 2040, according to present projections. The Californian researchers are unwilling to point to a maximum age beyond which no one could live, although they take the view that no one could live for ever. Would anyone want to? As it happens, in the week that Jeanne Calment died, 44% of Germans who took part in a survey said they did not want to live beyond 80, and only 18% hoped to be centenarians. They may change their mind nearer the time.

The nasty ailments, cancer, Alzheimer's and heart disease, tend to strike those aged between 50 and 80. Survive beyond that period and you could still live a life without being a nuisance to your nearest and dearest. Another American group, the National Institute on Ageing, reckons that many octogenarians can climb stairs, go for a walk and do their shopping. At the age of 85, Bernard Baruch, an adviser to American presidents, wrote, "I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am." He was to live another ten years.

Mrs Calment may have simply grown weary. "Journalists visit her," said her doctor, "but she no longer enjoys them." The journalists are now keeping a watch on Christian Mortensen, a Danish-born American, who will be 115 on August 16th. Others are contesting his claim to be the oldest living person, among them a Brazilian woman who says she is 126 and a Lebanese who smokes 60 cigarettes a day and is sure he is 135. But Mr Mortensen has the all-important birth certificate, and has already held his first press conference, reminiscing about his early days as a cowboy. A promising start.

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Gene Shoemaker

- Jul 31st 1997

IN 1961 Gene Shoemaker, his mother and his wife, Carolyn, were on holiday in Germany. In a church in the town of Nördlingen, Mr Shoemaker, ever curious, scratched the walls to see what they were made of. To his delight, the stones contained coesite, a mineral he had found a year earlier in the 1,200-metre-wide Barringer crater in Arizona, near his home.

Coesite is a variant of quartz that forms only under intense heat and pressure. Its presence proved that the Ries basin, a huge depression in which Nördlingen sits, was formed in the same way as Barringer. Each was created by a giant rock from outer space slamming into the earth. These rocks enriched the ground beneath them with exotic minerals.

Thirty-three years after their Nördlingen adventure, the Shoemakers watched as one of this scientific couple's latest co-discoveries, the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, smashed into Jupiter in 20 consecutive fragments, scarring the vast planet with blotches thousands of miles across. Though Mr Shoemaker's career was diverse, it had a central theme: that some of the main events in the solar system's history were not gradual changes, as scientists once supposed, but sudden, violent catastrophes.

Nowadays, everybody knows that the craters on the moon are the dents left by meteorites, that such boulders have also hit the earth many times and that one giant impact wiped out the dinosaurs. But when Mr Shoemaker, then aged 20, began his career with the United States Geological Survey, few believed such things. Falling mountains? Who had ever seen one? More likely, craters on both the earth and the moon were the acne scars left by volcanic eruptions.

It was Mr Shoemaker's good fortune to be dispatched by the Survey to look for uranium, which was often to be found in old volcano vents. Though he wore a big cowboy hat like any good prospector, Mr Shoemaker cared less for the uranium than for the shape of the vents. He compared them with Barringer, and later with the collapsed holes above underground nuclear-bomb tests (where he had been sent prospecting again, this time for plutonium). He showed to his own and then to the scientific world's satisfaction that holes punched out from below the earth would look different to those stamped in from above. His discovery of coesite, which became a standard sign of an impact crater, sealed the debate. In proving that the earth takes a regular beating from space rocks he opened the way for others, in 1980, to find traces of the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs.

But his thoughts did not stay bound to the earth for long. In 1965 he persuaded the Survey to create an astro-geology branch, and began a methodical study of the moon which showed that its craters were forged almost entirely by impacts. His greatest disappointment was that a medical condition prevented him from "getting to the moon and banging on it with my own hammer". Instead, Mr Shoemaker helped persuade the American space agency, NASA, that the real point of space exploration was to do science—a considerable achievement in an age when political prestige rested on manned space flights.

Unable to be a scientist on the moon, he chaired the panel that selected them (though only one actually got there). He also worked on the unmanned flights that preceded them, which confirmed a prediction that he had made from his study of lunar craters: contrary to popular belief, an astronaut landing on the moon would not sink into the dust.

Mr Shoemaker continued working with space probes, exploring through robot eyes the remotest bodies in the solar system—and, naturally, their craters. He fretted about the chance of another disaster on earth, noting that something a kilometre across could kill a quarter of the human race. He was also aware of a more immediate risk in those cold-war days: a smaller visitor (such as the one that had exploded over Siberia in 1908, flattening 2,000 square miles of forest) might be mistaken by either superpower for a nuclear detonation and trigger Armageddon.

So, though working full-time as a planetary scientist, Mr Shoemaker taught himself astronomy, and in 1973 began a regular scan of the skies. Together, he and Carolyn discovered 32 comets and several hundred asteroids. He and others also tried to convince the American government that the risk from big meteorites justified a more comprehensive search for potential earth-hitters. In the 1990s they met with modest success—helped by the dramatic impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9.

The Shoemakers also travelled each year to the well-preserved impact craters in Australia. There, Gene said modestly, they would "have a whee of a time just poking around those old holes in the ground"—but, in fact, he was constantly researching, and refining, his estimates of the risk to the planet. It was on the 17th of these pilgrimages that he died in a head-on car crash (his wife survived). "The tragic irony", wrote a colleague, "that his own death should occur there as the instantaneous result of another violent impact would not have been lost on him."

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Emperor Hirohito You Don't Judge Me Cause if You Did Baby I Would Judge You Too

Source: https://www.economist.com/taxonomy/term/82/0?page=47&page%5Cu003d47=

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