Bonus Perspectives: The Forgotten Impact of 9/11 on Japan
Bonus Perspectives: The Forgotten Impact of 9/11 on Japan
Now out in The Japan Times with extra commentary posted here and an update on my freelance writing.
Bonus Perspectives is a weekly column series containing my thoughts on the latest Western news and Japanese news, as well as film, television, music, book, and video game recommendations. It’s free for all subscribers to this Substack, but if you enjoy my writing, consider opting for a paid subscription. Doing so will give you access to exclusive in-depth pieces and my entire backlog of work. Your support is greatly appreciated!
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As I wrote in last week’s column, the usual edition of Bonus Perspectives is going on hiatus this week. I simply didn’t have enough time to assemble a proper collection of news stories and media recommendations, while I have multiple articles I’m currently writing for paid subscribers. Expect the first of those to be out later this week.
Instead, I’m using this space to repost an article I recently wrote for The Japan Times earlier this month and to provide an update on some exciting freelance writing opportunities that I’ve been able to secure. I don’t want to leave subscribers of Foreign Perspectives hanging when I’m occasionally unable to deliver my full weekly column, so there will occasionally be shorter pieces like these instead which still offer extra commentary and thoughts.
Consider this part of the Bonus Perspectives canon, but more of side story or gaiden as one would say in Japanese. The burning off episode to your regularly scheduled programming. The bonus to Bonus Perspectives, if you will. Ok, I’m done with the dumb analogies especially since the subject I’m covering is not one I can make light of without it being in poor taste. Let’s just cut to the chase.
9/11 and Japan
9/11 is a subject I’ve dedicated a considerable amount of time researching. I covered it a couple of times on Foreign Perspectives — once about 9/11 lost media and once about the complicated legal case around the surviving terrorist masterminds — so these pieces should give you an idea of just how dedicated I am to this topic. They only scratch the surface of material I’ve read up on, so expect many more 9/11-related articles from me in the future.
I had the opportunity earlier this month to write for The Japan Times, Japan’s largest and oldest English-language newspaper, via my debut piece which analyzes the often forgotten impact 9/11 had on the country. I’ll get into this more in the next section about the state of my freelance writing, but this is an incredible opportunity I’m very proud of to have gotten. 9/11 is often framed as an American tragedy, but it affected dozens of countries since the World Trade Center was truly a symbol of global trade and commerce. The WTC itself already had an inherent Japanese connection with its architect Minoru Yamasaki being a nissei Japanese-American.
Yamasaki passed away in 1986, so he didn’t live to see the destruction of his most famous achievement. In writing my piece, I often wondered how he would have reacted if he had lived long enough to see such a horrible event unfold, especially since some even blamed the design of the building complex itself for leading to more deaths. I tried getting in touch with his son, Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Taro Yamasaki, but was politely told that the family no longer speaks to the media about him or 9/11. Here’s a section from my original draft that did not make the final cut for The Japan Times which further discussed the controversy around the WTC’s design.
After many years of health problems, Yamasaki passed away of stomach cancer on Feb. 6, 1986 at the age of 73. He did not live to see the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center which killed six people and injured over 1,000 nor the eventual destruction of his life’s crowning achievement and deaths of nearly 3,000 people on September 11, 2001. One can only speculate how he would have felt, but in retrospect some have criticized the design of the WTC itself for possibly leading to a higher death toll.
As the World Trade Center was being built, the New York Port Authority adopted a new building code in 1968 which reduced the number of required stairwells for evacuation in high rise buildings. Each tower only had three stairwells, while buildings under the older code had six or more, such as the Empire State Building.
It would be unfair to blame Yamasaki for what happened on 9/11. No one believed that a terrorist attack of that scale would be possible, while the choice to use a less safe building code was not his decision.
Building codes and safety regulations are incredibly dry topics which hardly make for interesting reading material, but 9/11 demonstrated what could happen in the absolute worst case scenario. I highly recommend reading Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn’s excellent book 102 Minutes That Changed America: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers which goes into painstaking detail about the WTC’s design and how it made escape difficult. In future articles, I hope to give more 9/11 books proper reviews, but this is was easily among the best I read.
I should once again make it clear that I do not blame Minoru Yamasaki for any deaths on 9/11. Those are squarely the fault of the radical Islamic terrorists who chose to commit such a barbaric attack. Yamasaki was simply an architect and the final safety code decisions were out of his hands. Furthermore, we’re discussing all of this with the luxury of hindsight. It’s easy to forget now that prior to 2001, hardly anyone thought that something as large as the World Trade Center could be destroyed so quickly or that a terrorist plot as well-coordinated as 9/11 was even possible on U.S. soil.
The rest of my piece focuses on the Japanese victims of 9/11 and how the event continues to hold tangible effects on Japan’s shifting security priorities. 24 Japanese nationals died on that day, most of whom were working for Japanese companies with offices in the Twin Towers. 16 were killed in the South Tower, six were killed in the North Tower, and two had the horrible luck to be on the hijacked planes. These were all ordinary people simply reporting to work, visiting the United States, or traveling to get somewhere. They were ambitious individuals who strove for adventure and success abroad, only to have all of their bright futures robbed in an instant.
While Japan may not be the first thing most think of when it comes to 9/11, it was a pivotal moment in the country’s history that largely continues to be without closure. The relatives of some victims were able to receive partial identified remains and have proper burials. But most, like thousands of people with loved ones taken away on 9/11, have nothing to bury. Some of these Japanese relatives push for greater awareness of 9/11 with annual visits to the United States, while others have never spoken to the media and can only bring themselves to grieve in private.
Beyond these individuals, 9/11 made Japan realize that it could not remain a pacifist country into the 21st century with so many global security threats. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi began testing constitutional limits on military power by sending JSDF troops to the Middle East to aid the United States, which sparked immense domestic controversy. His protégé Shinzo Abe unsuccessfully tried to push for the revision of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution which would allow Japan to hold offensive military forces. The country’s new de facto Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba disagrees with Abe’s ideology in many ways, but he too supports constitutional revision amid other aspects of his foreign policy.
All of this can be directly tied back to 9/11 and other rising security issues Japan faced at the turn of the new millennium. In writing my piece for The Japan Times, I aimed to pay tribute to the Japanese victims of the terrorist attacks while also illustrating how 9/11 still has tangible effects on the country’s geopolitical strategy. The 2021 withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan marked an unceremonious end to a tragic 20-year saga, but the lasting implications of 9/11 are still more relevant than ever globally.
Read my article for The Japan Times here.
My new freelance writing gigs
When I first began learning Japanese over a decade ago in high school on my own as a hobby, I was a regular reader of The Japan Times in order to keep up to date with news developments in the country. Beyond its coverage of current events and geopolitics, I adored the insightful columns written by experts like Donald Keene who had lived in Japan for decades. It’s no exaggeration to say that The Japan Times was a major inspiration in me wanting to pursue journalism as a side gig, and by extension this very column you are currently reading.
The Japan Times has followed me through my teenage and young adult years from the United States to my current life in Japan. I’ve seen the paper go through high and low periods of varying quality. While it’s certainly a vital English-language resource on information about Japan, for every Donald Keene the publication runs, it also has featured the rubbish ramblings of serial complainers and agenda-pushers like Jake Adelstein and Baye McNeil. It’s no stranger to being embroiled in controversy on the other side of politics either, as evidenced by its right-leaning editorial shift a few years ago.
Still, I think all of that is largely in the past. Under the current editorial board led by Takashi Yokota, The Japan Times is now a much more centrist paper and I believe it has reached a more nuanced balance than what it was before. It does genuinely good journalism and features commentators who know their stuff. I’m pleased to announce that I’m now part of this team of freelance contributors. Unlike previous gigs that fizzled out, I have been asked to become a regular contributor right from the outset.
I owe my current stint at The Japan Times to my friend Alex Martin, a fellow contributor to the paper who put in a good word about me to the editors. He’s the son of Bradley Martin, one of the foremost experts on North Korea and someone else who is also a friend. I’m currently working on a few pitch ideas for them, but I hope my thoughts on everything from regional geopolitics to cinema and video games will lead to some interesting articles. Stay tuned for future updates.
While I have yet to write for them, I’ve also established connections with the editors at Quillette, an Australian magazine that pays well and offers astute analysis on a variety of subjects. I anticipate that I’ll primarily be producing articles for them around cultural topics. Quillette has a good readership, so I think it’ll be the perfect platform for my writing to reach a wider audience. It’s another publication I’ve read for a long time, so actually becoming a contributor for them is a wonderful opportunity.
Unfortunately, it seems that my time at The Spectator, at least for a while, is coming to an end. The magazine has been embroiled in a heated controversy over who should be allowed to buy it, but that debate was finally put to rest earlier this month when hedge fund boss Sir Paul Marshall sealed the deal. Andrew Neil resigned as chairman and current editor Fraser Nelson will be leaving too. This leaves its internal management up in the air, but my friend and current editor Ross Anderson tells me that he doesn’t expect to stay very long. While I may still be able to contribute to The Spectator, it really was Ross who championed my work and got it published. Without him, I think it’s going to be difficult moving forward.
My latest and currently final piece for The Spectator was published earlier this month after a lot of radio silence for the better part of 2024. It’s about the return of CRT televisions and the few people who still have the expertise to repair them. Regular readers of Bonus Perspectives would know that I’m a big enthusiast of these TVs for retro games. It was an honor to interview specialists who still dedicate their time to repairing such archaic pieces of electronic equipment, and I hope that my article will help to shed some light on why they still matter going into the 21st century.
And so that’s where things currently stand. There are a couple of other freelance writing opportunities that may be available for me down the line, but I’ll talk about them here if and when they actually happen. For the time being, Foreign Perspectives remains a priority and I will continue to deliver weekly content to my audience of subscribers here. I’ve said it before, but thanks again to all those who have encouraged my work. I’m hoping to end 2024 with 1,000 subscribers, so please share this newsletter with your friends and families who may be interested. I couldn’t do this without you and I’m indebted to your support. Let’s continue these adventures to foreign places together.
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