‘America is scary.’
I pray that’s a sentence my son never hears again.
By Michael Judge
Tokyo — In a country known for tradition, my family has one I hope we can hang on to for at least a few more years. Every summer, while visiting my wife’s parents, my son goes for a walk after dinner with his now 83-year-old grandfather. Every year the walks get shorter and shorter, but more meaningful, as if they both understand that this is one tradition, like the walk itself, that isn’t meant to last.
My son is a beautifully awkward 13. Half-Japanese and half-American, he’s nearly six-feet tall, and towers over his stooped grandpa, who slowly makes his way through the neighborhood with two walking poles. The poles, which make him look like a skier in search of skis, make it impossible for him to hold on to his grandson’s arm, which was always the best part of the walk for both of them. Even though neither one of them would admit it, there’s a reason we call something that moves us “touching”—for touching is at the heart of all that is truly human, and all that we recognize as beauty.
No one would call video footage of masked ICE personnel rounding up “illegals” in Los Angeles, some who have lived in the community for decades, “touching.” And most sensible citizens, no matter what they think of President Donald Trump, don’t want to see protests turn violent and footage of young U.S. Marines and National Guard being deployed on U.S. soil to “protect federal property and personnel.” But those were the images my son and his grandfather were watching on television—over and over again—when it was time, mercifully, for their walk. The shock and disbelief on the faces of the Japanese newscasters were mirrored in Gigi’s (an affectionate term for Grandpa) face as we headed for the front door.
The night air, as the saying goes, did us good. Gigi led the way, like a climber leaving base camp, cautiously but courageously. He stopped to stretch, catch his breath, and point out old friends’ homes along the way; my lanky son beside him shadow boxing under streetlights. Incredibly, at least for us, one of Gigi’s friends, a dignified elderly man, appeared from a side street and asked, laughing, “Are these your bodyguards?” Gigi laughed and nearly burst with pride, explaining, “No this is my grandson, Max, and his father, my son-in-law, Michael. They’re both American!”
And then something happened I’d never encountered before, at least not in Japan. The elderly gentleman, his smile replaced with concern, said dramatically, “Ā, Amerika! Amerika wa kowai.” Meaning literally, “Ah, America! America is scary.” Apparently he’d been watching the same news as us, and saw the images of burning cars, trashed storefronts, and heard the sound bites of Trump calling those taking to the streets of L.A. “animals” and the protests “a full-blown assault on peace, on public order, and national sovereignty,” saying they are being “carried out by rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion of our country,” and vowing to “liberate” Los Angeles.
Scary, indeed.
Gigi’s response was one I’ll never forget. His eyes and voice full of compassion and worry for the home of his daughter and grandson, he said simply, “Kowai-so desu ne?” Which means more “It’s a pity, isn’t it?” than “It’s scary”—in this context, an important distinction. And this I think is an important turning point, not just in my family, but one I’ve felt approaching since last summer, after then President Joe Biden’s abysmally unsettling performance in his debate with Trump—a sense that America and the American people are no longer feared or hated or worshipped, as they were for so long in so much of the world, but, sadly, pitied for falling from on-high to join the ranks of the rest of the world’s compromised democracies, kleptocracies, autocracies, and tin-pot dictatorships.
I’m not saying this is actually where America is on the broad and ever-shifting spectrum of geopolitics. I’m saying that in geopolitics perception is often as important as reality. And there is a growing perception around the globe that the “liberal democracy” known as the United States is increasingly less liberal (economically or politically) and democratic (according to both sides of the aisle) than many of the relatively stable “social democracies” in Europe and Asia, Japan being key among them. I’ve lived and worked (off and on) in Japan for more than 30 years, and never have I felt such concern for its greatest ally. As in most of the world, the exception being in Moscow, Beijing, and the radical fringes in nearly all societies, there is no joy in witnessing America’s disarray and decline in international stature and reliability; no broad celebration of the end of Pax Americana, the Latin phrase which Webster’s defines as “the period of relative tranquility from circa 1945 to the present day in regions to which U.S. power has extended.”
As I write this, I realize how outdated and, for lack of a better word, conservative these ideas sound. My friends on the left and increasingly across the political spectrum have been calling out the hypocrisy of Pax Americana’s “relative tranquility” and the sham of benevolent U.S. rule in the “postwar” period. Witness, they say, the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (two), Afghanistan, and the post 9/11 “War on Terror,” as well as the many military interventions, targeted bombings, drone attacks, regime changes and assassinations (some clandestine, others not) in Central and South America, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere.
Only a fool would argue that the U.S.’s perceived “national interests” haven’t disregarded the sovereignty of other nation states, sometimes in violation of international law, and oftentimes regrettably and shamefully with great loss of life. Indeed, the entire Pax Americana, which many believe is coming to an end, was predicated on America’s dropping of two atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, instantly annihilating tens of thousands of civilians and exposing many thousands more to the horrors of radiation poisoning, ushering in what we now blithely call the “atomic age” with its inherent political terror and potential for global destruction.
I realize I seem to have wandered far afield from my 13-year-old son and his grandfather on their soothing nightly walks through a peaceful Tokyo neighborhood. But have I? In the world I live in, a world in which my country, 80 years ago this summer, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed hundreds of thousands in the preceding firebombing of Tokyo—the bombing that killed my son’s great grandmother (Gigi’s mother) and his great uncle and great aunt when they were small children—the deadly history of World War II is ever-present. Indeed, as present as the portrait of my wife’s dead grandmother that hangs in her home, and the PTSD suffered by my grandfather (who fought with the U.S. Army at the Battle of Okinawa), and my wife’s grandfather (who was conscripted into Japan’s Imperial Army and returned home after the war to find his wife and two of his three children dead).
[Note from MJ: As I was writing this, I received an AP News Alert saying: Trump urges all of Tehran to evacuate ‘immediately’ in new social media post President Trump posted on his social media site calling for the immediate evacuation of the Iranian capital of Tehran. Trump has said repeatedly that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. He emphasized that again in his social media post, writing, “IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON.”]
None of this is to discount the utter horror of the genocides, atrocities, and forced displacements taking place in Ukraine, Myanmar (also known as Burma), China, Ethiopia, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Gaza, and South Sudan. Now, terrifyingly, we may be adding Iran and Israel to that list as the bombings and targeting of military assets and civilians alike intensifies. But an unstable and erratic U.S.—both in military and economic affairs—only increases the likelihood of more horrors and the further dissolution of the postwar economic and political order that still exists.
In a recent column for the FT titled “America the Unstable,” Rana Foroohar, wrote about just this phenomenon, comparing the U.S. to an “emerging market,” similar to the outdated term third-world country. “When I first raised this idea last October, I pointed out that emerging markets are often characterised by uncertain economics, corrupt politics, institutions that are too weak to enforce democratic norms, violence and social polarisation. The US has been heading fast in that direction since 2016, for reasons we know all too well,” she explained.
In a similar vein, Euronext Chief Executive Stéphane Boujnah told French media in that same FT article that “Fear exists all over. The country [United States] is unrecognisable and we are living in a transition period. There is a certain form of mourning, because the United States that we had known for the most part as a dominant nation resembled the values and institutions of Europe and now resembles more an emerging market.”
In other words, Trump's insistence on bullying traditional U.S. economic and military allies with tariffs, petty insults, and threats, while gladhanding authoritarians and dictators, undermining the rule of law, and deploying the U.S. military to “liberate” U.S. cities (with Democratic mayors and governors), will only heighten global alarm, further rattle markets, and increase the number of kind old gentlemen saying to each other, “America is scary” and replying, yes, “It’s a pity, isn’t it?”
For my son’s future, I pray that’s an exchange he never hears again.
TFP IS A PROUD MEMBER OF THE IOWA WRITERS COLLABORATIVE
“Undermining the rule of law”? How? And, news flash: the Marines and National Guard are not in LA to “liberate” it. They are there because “mostly peaceful” protests regularly turn into riots which destroy other people’s property and physically harm innocent citizens.