Musings About Diversity

 I once lived for several months on the Japanese island of Kyushu.

It was near the city of Fukuoka, a million people.

Nice city.

Walking the river that was in its center and looking at the green, green, mist shrouded hills above and outside it made me think I was in Tillamook Oregon.

Just amazingly beautiful.

I didn’t live in Fukuoka, though.

I lived at Itazuke Air Base, a semi-abandoned Japanese Defense Force Base a few miles from town that had been re-opened to allow an American Tactical Air Reconnaissance Squadron of F-100s to pursue their mission of keeping track of what North Korea was doing in relation to the Pueblo Incident/Crisis - one of the fantastic fuck ups of that era.

I was the officer in charge - first lieutenant - of the intelligence function of the squadron.

There are a lot of Itazuke stories in Screen Saver - so check that out if you are interested.

But this is one that never made it to that book.

One day I got on the train and went downtown.

It was a beautiful day in May or late April.

And Spring Becomes Fukuoka,

The sky was pale mid blue, with wisps of clouds.

The hills were greener than I had ever seen them.

The mist cloaking them was magic.

The eel pens were foaming-full-with fat frothing eels; the pens were concrete square walled things that spanned a great deal of the quais along the river.

It was a perfect day.

I was in a perfect mood; I had had a couple Asahi beers.

So, I decided to walk around.

Years later, after spending a couple-years-of-twenty living in Paris, with most of that walking, I was to discover that what I did that day in Fukuoka was to be a flaneur.

I have never learned the Japanese word for flaneur.

On the walk I encountered a large flock of fairly homogenous Japanese - they were about the same height, they were all dressed similarly, they all had black hair, even their gender seemed to be negotiable.

For some reason that jangled me.

I stopped and looked and I listened.

After a time, some words came to me: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …”

I realized at that moment that I had lived in a society with that motto, that I had grown up among and with and for the mass of fellows that those words necessarily have induced; I realized that a nearly homogenous population might be many things: unavoidable due to history and geography; convenient for national record keeping; just plain convenient for national messaging.

But I had to say, as messy as an American crowd of the descendants of the world’s detritus was, it was more my style.

Before I lived on Kyushu, I already felt kindred to the Japanese.

After several months there, I loved them.

In fact, they are part of and significant contributors to - don’t get me started on my father-in-law - the mélange that is America.

But they are only part.

When I look out on a crowd/flock in America I see hair: black, blond, white, red, brown and various; I see an “us” that, before France, England, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Italy and Spain began to catch up with us was unique in history.

That’s something, I think, worth dying for; and, with MAGA, that may be necessary.