Corporate Publishing and the Japanese Classics

You can read my article for Japan Today, 'How Corporate Publishing Often Ruins the Japanese Classics', by clicking the link below:

http://www.japantoday.com/category/opinions/view/how-corporate-publishing-often-ruins-the-japanese-classics

The unfortunate practices of some of the major publishing houses has been noted before on this blog. See also my 2007 blog: The March of the Penguin.

Chopsticks and World History

You can read my review of Q. Edward Wang's new book, 'Chopsticks, a Cultural and Culinary History' in today's Japan Times by clicking the link below:

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2015/06/06/books/book-reviews/chopsticks-sifts-cultural-mysteries-asias-eating-implements/#.VXMbz89Viko

Here's a few more of my musings on the subject...

One thing that leapt to my mind reading Wang's book was a curious insight into Natsume Soseki's 1910 novel The Gate, a novel I feel have exhaustively analyzed in the past (See my blog: Visions of the Gate). The novel is a masterpiece of subtle psychological insight, full of incredibly important details. In one key scene the timorous, neurotic protagonist Sosuke inspects a Mongolian sword (example below) with a holder in its handle for a pair of chopsticks. What is the precise meaning of this detail? Certainly the symbolic combination of savagery (sword) and sophistication (chopsticks) - indeed the accenting of primeval brutality with the accoutrements of civilization - is a key factor in tipping the novelist's protagonist into complete spiritual turmoil.

Reading Wang's book, I finally saw just how perceptive Soseki was: knives it turns out were always the unspoken 'other' of chopsticks. Indeed it was precisely because the aristocracy of ancient China were not required to kill animals or cut up their meat - it being neatly prepared for them in bitesize morsels - that chopsticks found their way out of the kitchen and into a diner's hands. Why after all have forks when there was no need to prong and cut meat?

I was fascinated to discover too that for millennia in ancient China, chopsticks were neither the chief means of eating one's food, nor indeed was rice the chief staple of the people. Right up until the tenth century, millet was the chief grain eaten throughout northern China and the most important dining utensil was a spoon. Chopsticks were a mere accessory if indeed one used anything at all: Confucius and his followers mostly used their fingers.

Several factors powered the unstoppable rise of chopsticks. Around the first century CE, the Chinese started milling wheat flour and gorging on noodles and dumplings, best picked up with chopsticks rather than spoons. Then, the large movements of people between north and south and the government's encouragement of the cultivation of new strains of rice - always the main staple in the warmer, wetter south - pushed millet and spoons out of the way and opened up a new millennium of rice and chopsticks.

Wang persuasively argues in the book that the diversification of chopsticks use is affected not just by the food we are eating, but by the surrounding cultures. Koreans have stuck to the traditional combination of spoon and chopsticks, and prefer their chopsticks to be metal, both because of a fine metalwork tradition and because they are eating the meat-rich foods bequeathed to them by the Mongol invasions. The Vietnamese, for long centuries under Chinese cultural dominance, eat all their foods with chopsticks, but the more culturally removed Thais use them mainly for noodles while often eating rice with their fingers.

Chopsticks soon became important cultural artifacts. As symbols of inseparability, they are bestowed in Japan as husband and wife sets of differing lengths and colours. They are sometimes a symbol of life itself. A shogun who inauspiciously broken his chopsticks while eating, fell off his horse and died ten days later. A Chinese emperor continued to hold his chopsticks to allow his favoured minister to talk and eat at his leisure (though later had him killed).

My favourite, laugh-out-loud anecdote in this fascinating, handsome book concerned Nixon and his advisers practising with chopsticks ahead of their momentous state visit to China in 1972. It's somehow infinitely gratifying to know that Henry Kissinger was completely hopeless with them.

On a Different Plane

The other day I was sitting in a cafe reading a newspaper when a woman whom I vaguely recognized made eye contact from a distant table. Middle aged with fair, curly hair, full-bodied and friendly. The next minute, she was stood over me and asked if she could join me.

'By all means', I said, abandoning my paper.

She settled into her chair and looked sweetly into my eyes. 'I dreamt about you the other night', she began.

'Ookay...'

'We were travelling on a space ship together. I could tell it was your first time. You were very nervous and trying to escape out of the window...'

'That sounds like me.'

'We weren't travelling over Earth, it was a distant planet. The landscape completely different. I've done so many of these journeys before, but I could see you were worried. I wanted to calm you down. When I saw you just now I wanted to come over and tell you that it's OK.'

'Thanks, that's very kind of you.'

'You'd entered another frequency of existence. Most people just don't realize how many frequencies there are, that what we see around us is just one tiny wavelength. Of course we didn't really come from this planet in the first place, we were brought here from a different world. Once you connect to the different frequencies of your existence, you can begin to understand who you really are and where you came from...'

'Yes, there's so much about life we don't understand...'

'So just to say, it's alright: Don't worry.'

'I won't, and thanks again for looking after me up there...'

Regular readers of this blog will know that although I have little time for mainstream religions, I am constantly fascinated by individualistic belief systems (see my blog: 'Penetrating the Occult'). If you are going to have 'faith' in something, you might as well go the whole hog and believe in something of Ridley Scott-esque, thrilling, technicolour proportions. Setting off in a spaceship every night to revisit distant planets? Why not indeed. In the early 1960s, the great Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima was supposed to have spent some nights on his balcony keeping an eye out for UFOs and in a nearer pop universe Robbie Williams apparently threatens to abandon his showbiz career in favour of full-time UFO-logy.

In my abandoned newspaper I had just read a review of a new biography of Sir Thomas Browne, the great 17th century essayist, by the reliably good David Aaronovitch in The Times. Browne was a man of quite extraordinary breadth of interests and inexhaustible curiosity. The books he produced are some of the most uniquely fascinating in the English language. Aaronovitch slightly criticizes him for not quite being able to deny the existence of witches: Browne apparently didn't actually believe in witches, he was just reluctant to categorically state they didn't exist. But in fact Browne's indefatigable curiosity resides in this very open-mindedness, in this ability to find fascination in the mental borderlands of fact and fantasy.

The spaceship-lady rather drifted out of my mind and then a few weeks later while seated in another cafe (when the stars align, I can wangle a decent amount of time sitting in cafes), she joined me again, this time while I was sitting with someone else. Truth to tell, I had completely forgotten about our dark secret, that we had spent a night together on a spaceship with me trying to escape out the window. The lady began relating how she had attended a meeting that morning in a hotel conference room of a 'mystic master' from India, whose very presence had changed the energy of the room and connected everyone to their hidden 'frequencies of existence'.

My companion unfortunately gave it all short shrift, bursting into snorting laughter and uttering sardonic, mocking remarks. I reprimanded him for his rudeness and then suddenly recalled the 'spaceship dream'. The moment became strangely Freudian, as if tapping into a hidden world of dreams.

So I wonder: will I be heading off tonight again in spaceship travels while I sleep? Will I feel confident enough this time to sit down, opening myself to the experience and not try to scramble out the emergency exit?

And in those dreams, what will I encounter? All my fears and longings? And of the recognizable humans I meet up there, will I be brave enough to go up and tell them when I spot them the next day on the other side of my cafe?

I began to think I really rather admired the self-confidence of the spaceship-lady, though recalled hearing she had also made attempts to pay for local services in 'moon therapy' rather than cash. One local merchant took her up on it and found himself seated in a chair for an hour staring up at the moon, wondering why he had not asked for payment by bank transfer instead.

Japanese Universities: Among the Best in the World?

You can read my most recent article for the Asahi Shinbun, 'Why are Japanese universities not regarded as among the best in the world?' here: 

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/forum/politics_and_economy/east_asia/AJ201505280076

As a footnote, a little anecdote: an editor inserted the subheading, 'The Criteria is Suspect' leading me to email him that 'The Criteria are Suspect' was actually grammatically correct...but looking into this I saw that the use of criteria as a group singular is now one of the great battlefronts - the Ypres salient - of the English language. Apparently the old guard cling to criterion/ criteria as the last redoubt, despairing that it will ever go the way of datum/ data or agendum/ agenda. 

As a little test, I thought I would wait and see if any complaints came in, but none so far...so I decided to high five with the kids and let 'criteria' hang loose as a group singular too...

A Short History of Terror

Throughout the Charlie Hebdo outrage and its aftermath earlier in the year, pundits in their desire to defend Islam often pointed our attention to the depredations of Christianity over the ages: the Crusades; the Inquisition; the 30 Years War; the conquest of the Americas. When it came to savagery, they bewailed, few religions could hold a candle to your fervent Christian, who would slash, burn and massacre everything in his path.

Ah, came the counter-response, these are all matters of the remote historical past. Christianity has now moved on, matured, lost its bloody zeal, acquired sense, tranquillity and good order. Most British Christians hardly believe half of it all anyway, they are only in it for the carols, and tea and cake at the vicarage on a Sunday. Show me today the militant Christians ready to inflict terror on the world like the extremists of Islam?

There is something to these arguments. Yet in the end for me it's not really a question of whether historically Christianity has been more or less bloody-thirsty than Islam. What people in the West tend to forget is that a reinterpretation of the Christian narrative is central to the very genesis of Islam.

Terror is I think intrinsic to the historical legacy of Judaism and Christianity, impinging on the psyche of people in the West from a very early age. Yet I am also intrigued at how a re-interpretation of that 'terror' has manifested itself in the Islamic world.

Let me start off with my own small universe. As a little Catholic boy in England, the figure of Jesus writhing in agony on a crucifix was the dominating image of my childhood, an image I was subjected to constantly in my primary school classrooms and in weekly masses at church. Before I could hardly form sentences, this intense horror was my constant companion. I was soon informed that it was all my fault: I was guilty and Our Lord had died to redeem my sins...

This terror was forever planted in my psyche, such that no amount of rationalizing could ever quite wash it away. I'm keen however that my own children will not be exposed to the same abuse. Even in today's secular age however, it's surprisingly difficult to keep an impressionable young mind away from a sudden avalanche of religious terror.

Let me give you an example. The other day my 6-year-old son happened upon a mounted reproduction of Leonardo's 'Last Supper' given to me as a gift by my grandmother for my first Holy Communion when I was 7.

'I know this picture, Daddy' he said. 'We learnt about it at school. It was made by someone whose name begins with a L...'

'That's right', I marvelled. 'Leonardo! Like one of the turtles.' (6-year-olds see the world refracted through a lens held up by Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles.)

'My friend T says that he cut off his ear and shot himself.'

'No, no, darling. That was Van Gogh.'

(Looking at the picture) 'And one of them did something quite naughty to Jesus...'

'Oh, that was Judas...'

'And what happened to him?'

'He hung him...er, he got quite sad and died.'

'And what happened to Jesus?'

'Er, he was cru....he died too.'

I was thankful he didn't ask me what happened to all the other apostles: crucified, beheaded, crucified upside down (image by Michelangelo below) ...Is there any religion in the history of the world that is as brutal in its iconography as Christianity? In Britain, I rarely take my children into churches but while on holiday in Spain recently, I frequently entered churches only to be confronted with ghastly images of nails being hammered into Christ's feet, blood dripping from his crown of thorns, a soldier plunging a lance into his side. My children wanted to know why poor Jesus was constantly being savagely tortured in this way (Flagellation scene by Cranach the Elder below). At the time the best secular response I could muster was, 'He was a man of ideas, darling, and people didn't like that', but a more accurate response would be, 'Because the Church wishes to terrorize your imagination and fill it with horrors'.

I had always thought that the one advantage I had over those people such as my partner who had a completely religious-less education ('Who was this King James who wrote the Bible?', she once asked) was that at least I could make sense of the history of Western art. How could you navigate your way round the Italian quattrocento and quintocento without a solid Catholic education?

But now, I've moved on. Who after all would want to look at any of these pictures anyway? Endless gallery rooms filled with excruciating Grunewald-esque crucifixions, occasionally enlivened with a St. Sebastian studded with arrows, or a scene of flagellation or flaying. And don't forget the Massacre of the Innocents (early version by Giotto below) and the beheading of John the Baptist (below, 19th century version by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes). Sudden exposure to the brutal iconography of Christianity can be almost as shocking as watching the obscene images of torture produced by Islamic State - and for good reason because they are both inspired by similar sources.

There is however a key difference. In the post-Jesus, Christian version of terror, it is the victim - the Imitation of Christ - who is the stoical, indomitable hero, looking forward after unspeakable suffering to the rewards of virtue in the after life. This is what Nietzsche referred to as 'ressentiment', the canny ability of turning seeming defeat into transcendent moral victory.

But for the Moslems, the Christians were just kidding themselves: Jesus, despite being a great prophet, was not 'resurrected' at all, he was simply murdered by his Roman oppressors. To bring justice to the world, they argued, force had to be met with force. To watch the obscene torture images of the IS fanatics is like strangely reliving the medieval images of Christianity but with the torturers now cast in their own minds as heroes.

But Christianity too was only glorying in self-sacrifice in its post-Jesus aspect; it, like Islam, also drew on the cultural legacy of Judaism. Concurrent with the New Testament version of 'transcendence through torture and sacrifice', in utter contradiction Christian art also turned for inspiration to the Old Testament. Here, it was always the purveyors of divine terror who were the heroes: Abraham sacrificing his son Issac (below); Judith cutting off Holofernes' head (below); David slaying Goliath (at top, all three versions by Caravaggio).

Catholic churches have always teemed with this type of ultra-violent imagery. Confusingly some images are a straight-forward glorification of violence, while others are supposed to offer a critique - though in truth the artists were mostly just interested in a juicy subject matter. It's hardly surprising if the Christian observer missed any supposed subtleties: the brutal images were transposed to a corner of the psyche, waiting to be awakened and re-enacted, often, ironically, in the defence of the faith and particularly when encountering so-called 'heretics'.

My flippant self has to laugh when I hear priests opine that Christian values don't approve of all the sex and violence in the movies and on the internet. Huh, I groan, it's all utterly amateurish in comparison to the extraordinary pornography of violence and sadism available at many churches and art galleries.

It's too late for my brutalized soul, but I do wish my young children to avoid looking at and contemplating these grotesqueries.

If we search for the cause of the appalling atrocities currently being committed by Islamic State, then the brutality of the US-UK Coalition's bungling and unnecessary invasion of Iraq is certainly a contributory cause. But the way in which those atrocities manifest themselves with Old Testament-style beheadings shows that far from this being a 'clash of civilizations', IS is actually an abhorrent aberration of a religious culture with which we are in our own not-too-distant historical past all too familiar.

If you want to get inside the mindset of an IS fanatic, you don't need to travel to Syria, just try wandering through the Medieval and Renaissance Europe section of your local art gallery...

So Farewell Then, Murphy's, Japan

I'm in Baden-Baden, Germany, but my thoughts are over in Shinsaibashi, Osaka, Japan where my 'local', Murphy's, is apparently closing down (or 'moving') this weekend. As the death-knells for the old place ring out, I thought a few words were appropriate...

I've been a regular at Murphy's for 19 years, having discovered it along with the rest of Shinsaibashi after being marooned the wrong side of my home turf of Sannomiya in the general chaos following the Great Hanshin Earthquake. It was never remotely 'local', being about 10 miles from where I lived, but at the time I'm pretty sure it was the only Irish pub in Kansai (it branded itself indeed as the first Irish pub in Japan). 

These days it seems like you can't walk 200 metres anywhere in the world without tripping over an 'authentic Irish pub', which makes it impossible to believe that when I first lived in Tokyo as an undergrad in 1988, residing under the pylons by a railway track, it seemed surreal that a country like Ireland actually existed at all. If you mentioned it to the Japanese, many would think you were talking about Iceland; if you pointed to it on a map, most would adamantly declare that it was 'Igirisu' (Britain). 

And then suddenly, there in Shinsaibashi was a little hole in the wall, where you could drink draught Guiness (and good Guiness too, better than the flat dregs they sell in the UK) and where the people of the world came for the craic. From the first time I went, I loved it and spent hundreds of nights there and millions of yen. (Photo below, courtesy Murphy's)

I have adored Shinsaibashi with a passion - I have it expressly written in my will that a share of my ashes are to be scattered, at night, along its streets. Many of the happiest nights of my life have been spent there. From glitzy restuarants to roadside noodle stands, I love the smell of the streets, the loitering characters, the infinity of possibilties and encounters waiting for you as you turn into each alleyway or entertainment building replete with its tapestry of bars and clubs.

On far, far too many occasions, I have celebrated in Shinsaibashi until the first train at some bleary-eyed hour after dawn and fallen asleep next to bright-eyed salarymen on their way to work. I've danced in bars in Shinsaibashi that indeed only open at dawn and don't get into their stride until 7am (once happening to be in Shinsai at bright-and-early 11am, wondering if it could possibly still be open, I popped my head inside that bar and was greeted as if still on a roll from the night before). 

Those nights in Shinsaibashi might lead you anywhere - a bottle of shochu and a deep debate about your favourite Japanese author somewhere; or into the dancing arms of a beautiful Canadian, Korean, American or Australian girl. On one magical evening in Shinsai, I was tottering along a quiet street with delicate snow flakes fluttering down when a lift door opened and a topless hostess in heels stepped out and formally bowed farewell to her businessman client as he clambered into a taxi. 

For me, all those nights started in the same place - Murphy's - with a pint of the black stuff in my hand. It wasn't of course just the Irish thing. Subsequently a slew of Irish pubs opened, though none exerted quite the same appeal. It was something to do with the dynamics of the space. Fanning out around you in high rise after high rise are bars, nightclubs, restaurants, street stalls, massage parlours, within touching distance from this little room on the sixth floor. Shinsaibashi is one of the world's great pleasure grounds. But at Murphy's it was all about intimacy: it was completely normal to go up and talk to everyone in the bar. The seats along the bar positively demanded interaction to left and right. 

And then the people who came into that small space were people from every part of the world: Kiwis, Aussies, South Africans, South Americans, Indians, Serbians, Turks, Finns...and quite a few Irish too. Oh, and a few Japanese. Though for me, as a Japanese Uni boy who was saturated in Japanese all week long, 'meeting the locals' was never the priority. 

You had to pan your way of course through a fair share of dull just-off-the-plane English teachers and the I'm-here-to-practice-my-English Japanese brigade, but the golden nuggets were worth the effort. Some of the greatest characters I ever encountered, I met at Murphy's. After nearly seven years spent as a graduate student in Japan, I tragically failed to produce a single friend at the uni. But Murphy's gave me some of my dearest, lifelong friends. (As a small aside, I should also note that it gave me my life partner - an erstwhile barmaid at Murphy's - and it has from there played a hand in producing three children. )

There were too the endless nights of torpor, of non-happening, of waiting-to-happen, of reading newspapers, novels and critical theory along the bar. But that was all OK too. Murphy's was one of the few bars where you could get away with that without anyone thinking it odd. 

For me there will probably never be another Murphy's, a bar whose prime happily coincided with (and abetted) my own nocturnal glory years. Never again will the lift doors open and will I strut out feeling that tonight the world is my oyster, that anything, in the magical floating world, is possible...if only I can first have a pint of Guiness. 

Hail, Murphy's, dear friend. You are gone (in present incarnation at least) but not forgotten. To a Murphy from a Flanagan I raise a glass and salute you!

While hesitating to invoke the spirit of Tony Wilson who at the closing of The Hacienda encouraged the clientele to 'loot the place', I would at least like to lay claim to some of the memorabilia: the long-lost framed article donated by Mr. Sven Serrano about how Samuel Beckett had said it impossible to get a decent pint of the black stuff in Japan. Either that, or the picture of the other half circa 1997, when she looked about twelve...

Proposing The Arthur Waley Prize

I'm a great believer in the power of literature, albeit that most of the time those benefits are fairly intangible. Just occasionally though the world of books has an opportunity to intervene in human affairs with a clear and important message.

Many of us have watched with dismay the ever-increasing rancor of the political relationships between the nations of East Asia - the triangle of suspicion and mutual disdain that encompasses China, Japan and South Korea - not to mention the waves of tension that fan out further to the shores of Vietnam and the Philippines, or the eternal stand-off with North Korea.

Here's a suggestion about how the creation of a new literary prize could make a powerful symbolic statement and make a difference not just to the mutual relations of the East Asian family of nations, but to the cultural understanding of East Asia throughout the world.

Let me row back a little and explain.

In the world of Japanese Studies, there is something called the Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, which is a literary award for scholars of Japanese Literature in the West.

As a past (2005) winner of the prize, I received an email the other day enquiring if there were any new works I would nominate for the award, but noted a significant change in the conditions: all candidates now have to be American citizens. Whereas previously scholars from all over the English-speaking world - including Brits like myself, Canadians and Australians - had been able to win, now it was strictly for Americans.

As the prize is about 'Japan-US Friendship', it might seem odd that non-Americans were ever able to enter in the first place, yet restricting the prize to Americans seems to me an entirely retrograde step. Opening the prize to everyone in the English-speaking world seemed a bold, confident assertion of the US's position as the leading Anglophone nation as well as an acknowledgement that books are not confined to national boundaries.

I might lament that the directors of the prize have taken such an insular step, but it also set me thinking that this was perhaps an opportunity to create a new kind of prize. After all, I had long thought that there should be some type of literary award not just for the best literary translation but for books which offer the general reader important new insights and understandings on Japan, including historical or critical works.

I was very clear about what that prize should be called: The Arthur Waley Prize.

Arthur Waley (1889-1966; portrait by Roger Fry, top), an Englishman, was arguably the greatest scholar of Japanese and Chinese literature to have ever lived. He was the first person to translate the world's first novel The Tale of Genji into English (original text followed by front page of Waley's translation below) and his poetic translations of key Japanese and Chinese classics were widely read by figures as diverse as Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound. The great Japanologist Donald Keene, after a long life meeting the world's leading intellectuals and writers on five continents, declared that he had only ever met two geniuses: Arthur Waley was one and Yukio Mishima was the other. By devoting himself to Japanese literature, Keene declared that he hoped to at least become 'half a Waley'.

Despite the fact that Waley is one of the greatest scholars Britain has ever produced, he is hardly known in the UK and it seems fitting that a new prize should celebrate his monumental achievements.

But this made me consider: there seems something odd about an 'Arthur Waley Prize' devoted only to books on Japan. After all, Waley was equally noted for his achievements in the Chinese classics (see one of many titles below). Shouldn't such a prize also incorporate books on China?

My first reaction though was to hesitate and think that this ran the danger of old-fashioned 'orientalism' of bundling together unique cultures. But looked at another way, what Waley represented was something that today's world is in desperate need: a recognition of the connectivity and mutually influential cultural achievements of China and Japan.

Famously, Arthur Waley, despite being a great scholar of Chinese and Japanese classics, never visited China or Japan. Waley was uninterested in the modern political vicissitudes of either country: it was their enduring cultural legacy and what that offered to the world that fascinated his interest.

I believe that it's important to have in place a prize that celebrates the enduring cultural kinship of East Asia - including Korea and South East Asia - a prize which makes a powerful statement about the fact that great art vastly transcends transient and often petty political squabbles. Not only would such a prize speak of the communality and continuity of East Asian culture, but it would also recognize that East Asia remains the most important and yet least understood part of the world to the general public in the West.

I therefore propose that the Arthur Waley Prize should be an annual award to the best book in English - as judged by a panel of leading writers, scholars and journalists - on a subject offering new insights and understanding of East Asian culture. The award should include outstanding literary translations, but it should also be open to historical and critical works, and not narrowly scholastic works, but to books that have the vision to communicate scholarly research into highly readable books broadly accessible by the general public (this was a crucial part of Arthur Waley's vision).

The prize would be open to anyone in the world and at an annual awards ceremony the representatives of the Chinese, Japanese and Korean governments (among others) would come together every year to celebrate it.

As for the prize itself, a sum of £10,000 - from a fund jointly endowed by the various cultural foundations of East Asian governments - would comfortably establish it as the leading prize in its category. Though for me, just the honour of being associated with the name 'Arthur Waley' would mean more than any cash reward.

Arthur Waley is the ultimate in poet-scholars not just because of his extraordinary breadth of interests and knowledge, or his desire to communicate his findings to a broader community, but because of the very means by which he conducted his life. Until his late 50s Waley was not attached to any university, working instead in his youth as a keeper of antiquities at the British Museum before becoming an independent writer at age 40. His Chinese and Japanese (and a variety of other languages including Ainu and Mongolian) were self-taught. He was not the beneficiary of countless university grants and scholarships. He was a man working in isolation, but with a quite magnificent vision.

There are other poet-scholars out there whose achievements should be recognized. They might be outside of the university system; they might not have been fortuitous enough to have been born in the US. The Arthur Waley Prize would reward and publicize their labours in helping us understand a little bit more about the shared cultural glories of East Asia. In my view, it could also play a small but significant role in helping those nations come together to understand that they share much more in common than what seems to drive them apart.