Motoring down a deserted road deep in Japan's farm country, the taxi driver suddenly turns to me, bows his head and says: "I'm very sorry to hear about the attacks on New York and Washington." The driver did this as soon as he learned I'm an American and a native New Yorker.
The gesture came out of nowhere, but hardly surprised me. Making my way around rural Japan in recent days, the scenario repeated itself time and time again.
From the noodle-shop owner who asked if my family was safe after the Sept. 11 attacks to the innkeeper who said she'd pray for my countrymen and women back home.
That so many rural Japanese felt the need to express remorse to a stranger just because he's American may seem odd. After all, I'm in the middle of Hokkaido -- two hours by plane from Tokyo.
But not when you consider that the hijacked jets that destroyed New York's twin towers and hit the Pentagon in Washington said more about risks facing Asia than most other parts of the world.
The economic implications alone are startling. East Asia, including Japan, relies heavily on foreigners to buy its goods.
For many economies in Asia, that means relying on the American consumer, who all of a sudden isn't visiting shopping malls or flying out on vacation. And investors watching their fortunes dwindle aren't clamoring to put money in Asia, a region plagued by myriad challenges even before the terrorist attacks across the Pacific. If the US hits a wall, so do Asia's economies.
The geopolitical risks are huge, too. The US is working under the assumption that Saudi-born Osama bin Laden and his supporters carried out the worst-ever attacks on American soil. In targeting bin Laden and threatening to retaliate against the Taliban in Afghanistan for harboring him, Washington risks provoking a powerful backlash among Muslims around the world. A not inconsequential number reside here in Asia.
Asia has hardly been untouched by terrorism at the hands of religious extremists. In the Philippines, for example, radical Islamic rebel groups want their own state with independence from Manila. They've set off a series of bombs and kidnapped tourists to make their point. Beijing claims to have experienced bombings in Xinjiang Uighur, an autonomous region north of Tibet. Events in Indonesia, the world's most-populous Muslim nation, are perhaps most worrisome of all.
Jakarta was the site of two powerful explosions last Sunday, and police think terrorists were to blame. The acts came just days after Indonesia's president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, visited Washington and gave her blessing to President George W. Bush's war on terrorism.
Japan also has experienced its share of terrorism. Perhaps the most infamous incident was the sarin nerve gas attacks on Tokyo subway system in 1995. Committed by the Aum Supreme Truth cult, the assault killed 12 and punctured Japan's national sense of security.
For the Japanese, the US attacks seem strangely personal.
Virtually every news outlet in the world compared them to Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Another Japanese wrinkle was that the terrorists who stuck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon employed kamikaze tactics, something also associated with Japan's wartime exploits. The media pointed this out, too.
In reality, the assaults on the US' two most famous cities were much more Hiroshima than Pearl Harbor. Indeed, the still unknown New York and Washington death tolls -- perhaps as many as 7,000 -- pale by comparison to the A-bomb that leveled Hiroshima and immediately killed roughly 100,000 in 1945. But the events of Sept. 11 may prove to be more epoch-making than those of Dec. 7, 1941.
Then, we knew who the enemy was and it had an address -- Japan. There also was little doubt in the early 1940s that the US would be drawn into World War II. The terrorist attacks on the US two weeks ago seemed to catch the world flatfooted. And the perpetrators aren't clearly identifiable, nor do they have a vital city for American military forces to retaliate against.
The fanatics who flew commercial jets into buildings also made no demands, issued no political communique and spoke out for no particular cause. The destruction of innocent Americans and their way of life was the message. Period.
In this way, Hiroshima may provide a better point of reference than Pearl Harbor. What Hiroshima did was forever change the world's view of itself. It injected a frightening new threat into the equation, one that seemed unthinkable at the time. The resulting arms race also meant future generations would grow up wondering not if nuclear Armageddon would end all life on Earth, but when. Now we fear terrorists will nuke us.
In this way, Japanese strangers offering me condolences and prayers may have less sympathy for what Americans are feeling than with how their own way of life is changing. The hijacked planes may have struck the US, but the target seemed to be an international community the terrorists felt had lost sight of whatever it is such extremists think is important. That, no doubt, includes many Asian countries.
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