Japan
The empty seat
by David Benjamin “I had given up my seat before, but this day, I was especially tired. Tired from my work as a seamstress, and tired from the ache in my heart.” — Rosa Parks CHIGASAKI, Japan — Last week, sitting (thankfully) on the crowded Tokaido Line commuter train between Yokohama and Odawara, I had…
Read MoreThe atomic mother-in-law
by David Benjamin “… I couldn’t help anyone because I… was seriously injured. My entire face and both of my hands were burnt. I went home to Midori-machi stepping over the bodies of the injured and the dead. They looked like forgotten baggage…” —Woman quoted in The Witness of Those Two Days: Hiroshima &…
Read MoreA walk through Hell
by David Benjamin My mother-in-law is hibakusha, an A-bomb survivor. On the morning of August 6, 1945, she took the last train out of the center of Hiroshima, an area known forever after as Ground Zero. She was a schoolgirl required to work in a munitions plant on the edge of the city. It was…
Read MoreZen and the art of sexual predation
Zen and the art of sexual predation by David Benjamin “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” — You-know-who MADISON, Wis. — Motoko Rich, in the Times, reported last week that a Japanese bureaucrat…
Read MoreBack home, in the Shinjuku death maze
Back home, in the Shinjuku death maze by David Benjamin CHIGASAKI, Japan — On the streets of Tokyo, population 20 million, facing waves of 80-year-old kamikaze bicyclists wearing surgical masks and wielding umbrellas like bayonets, watching with wonder as an office lady in a pencil skirt sprints through traffic on three-inch heels with a stack…
Read More"I came… for the waters"
FRIDAY, APRIL 10, 2015 The Weekly Screed (#715) “I came… for the waters” by David Benjamin KOWAKIDANI, Japan — You don’t have to go far in Japan — maybe 100 yards in any direction — to find something weird. On our way here, we passed by the alleged cradle of the kamaboko, the classic Japanese…
Read MoreTo a lot of athletes dying young
, footballTUESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2014 The Weekly Screed (#693) To a lot of athletes dying young by David Benjamin MADISON, Wis. — Just about every year in Japan, the tabloid press reports the death of a young man, in his late teens or early twenties, in a sumo stable somewhere in Tokyo. The story typically…
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