Letters from the Silk Roads: Thinking at the Crossroads of Civilization [ハードカバー]

1) What is it about?

2) What is the author trying to say?

3) How does he make his point?

4) How could it be made better?

5) Why is this book important?

1) This book is about the history of interaction between peoples and cultures, specifically trade, religion, and culture along silk roads - not a specific route, but one defined by exchange. Also this exchange is characterized by mutual benefit, equity, and mutual respect. Although not confined to it, the author usually paints a picture of these silk roads in Asia of the past.

The book is about these silk roads and invisible threads that connect civilizations, and how they are in sharp contrast to the Elitist, exploitative, one way exchange characterized recently by the WestEthrough colonialism and the current world order.

2) The author is making an appeal for a more egalitarian means of cultural dialogue and worldview that is less West-heavy and more objective.

3) The author makes his point by first painting a picture of a historical Asia. He shows how, for the majority of history, civilization has called Asia home, with diverse cultures linked together by trade, religion, and even common origins. These invisible lines are very ancient and connect Asia from East to West, Japan to Turkey.

He expresses the common link between the great Asian Empires (Chinese, Persian, Islamic, and Mongol) as the democratic participation in trade and contribution to the posterity of culture.

One good example is the evident Altaic link between Eastern and Western Asia. It is fairly accepted that Japanese Sumo, as well as other aspects of ancient Japanese culture, originated North of China, in the Altai region of Mongolia and Central Asia, then traveled South through China and the Korean Peninsula. These Altai Mts. are also thought to be the place of origin of the Turkic peoples, some of who migrated West to Anatolia and live in modern day Turkey. Besides the lingual similarities between Japanese and Turkish, Hattori offers another invisible string in support of this Altaic connection.

In Ancient Japanese tombs can be found a symbol incorporating four creatures situated as if directions on a compass. The black Genbu (a mythical Turtle-Dragon) is to the North, the Red Phoenix to the South, the Blue Dragon to the East, and to the West, the White Tiger. Now think about a map of Western Asia, featuring Anatolia (Turkey), Syria/Palestine, and Egypt. There are 3 seas featured. Hattori's explanation for how they got their names is interesting. The Black Sea to the North, the Red Sea to the South, and to the West, the Mediterranean, or in Arabic and Turkish, Bahar Abbayad (the White Sea). Dollars to Pesos that if there were a sea to the East, (bigger than the Dead Sea), it would be the Blue Sea. Evidently it is this same color-coded directions originating from a common Altaic source.

Intriguing and obscure historical references to a surprisingly socially integrated past challenges the notion of linear and cumulative development of civilization. For all our technology, we are forced to consider how long ago, people far away were more advanced in at least one basic thing: getting along together.

4) The author's over 20 years of experience working for the UN in 80 different countries and his wealth of historical illustrations help to paint a vivid portrait both of the Silk Roads and an Asia of the past.

It is easy to read some of Hattori's letters as being out of context, like when he compares powdered milk donated by Western countries to Cambodian refugees with poison gas. We are not given much information, just that the so-called emergency help turned out to be as lethal an instrument as poison gas without proper sanitation. Having worked for an NGO distributing powdered milk and other food and medical in the Gaza Strip, I was particularly interested in how this story was used to help raise awareness and safeguards in distributing emergency aid, or to polarize and vilify the West.

Hattori has no such aim, however, and his criticism and anecdotes must be seen in their context - that of a Japanese intellectual working for an International organization in a world where American preeminence and the overall dominant and value-laden culture, economy, and structures characterize the current Global system that he wishes to address diametrically.

Basically, it is an attempt at balance, or at least a strike in the name of balance.

As objectivity is inhuman, though, we do get a glimpse of Hattori the man, especially when he is trying to incorporate his own country, Japan, into this image of a free-flowing past Asia of exchange and the current order of division. This leads him to talk of a unique "Japanese brain" and "Japanese soul" that is somehow intrinsically incompatible with Western modes of communication and with logic. He then ascribes Japanese "discrimination, segregation, and ignorance of the people of Arabic, Asian, and African civilizations" to outside Western influence. Hattori says that Japanese translations of Western history led to Japanese textbooks being written, "just as if Japan were outside of world history".

5) This book is important because it helps us, both the Occident and the Orient, to see our world in a different way. Just as the Peters Projection map presents such a different image of the world than we are used to seeing. Hattori found a vision of a world in which nations co-existed and even prospered by sharing ideas, culture, and goods in a system of trade. The model for this was the ancient silk roads going East and West in which "everyone went seeking something". The many historical references to invisible strings that connect civilizations not only shed light on a much-neglected past, but also give us hope for the future by making us realize how connected we really are.