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My image of Vietnam is very vivid.
Being a
juvenile TV addict myself, the impressions of running refugees and cities
being destroyed were deeply imprinted in my memory through news during the
Vietnam War. I still remember that my social studies teacher at junior
high school, who was into the peace movements, lectured us with tears flowing from his
eyes on the
historical significance of the conclusion of the Vietnam peace treaty at
the Paris Peace Conference. One time I even saw several bleeding American
Army soldiers being carried into an emergency hospital on my way home from school.
Those guys probably got
themselves into brawls in Shibuya. (Back then, I was going to a
junior high school located in a busy section of Shibuya.)
I
have mixed feelings toward Vietnam, for I have associated the country with
TV-screen images of the war in Indochina -- fall of Saigon, mass outflow
of refugees from Indochina, war with China, invasion to Cambodia, etc.
On top of that, my trip to Vietnam this time started on Memorial Day (of
the U.S.) weekend, and that inevitably made me think about what this
country and peace signify. (Memorial Day is one of the most
memorable holidays to me for various reasons; for instance, I lived near
Arlington National Cemetery when I was in Washington, D.C.)
It has already been 25 years since the end of the war
with America, which left such intense impact. At least it is very
hard to find a trace of the war in Hanoi. If anything, as you fly
into Hanoi, you can see rice paddies near the airport studded with
unnatural, round patches, which could be where the U.S. military dropped
bombs, and that is about it.
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This country's dealing with "liberalization"
seems to be proceeding at an astonishingly rapid pace. My impression
of present Hanoi is close to that of downtown Hong Kong (Yaumatei on
Kowloon side, for example) when Hong Kong was still a British territory
and at the peak of vitality in the mid 1980's.
Cars on the streets look buffed up and new and the
automobile serves as more an instrument to show its owner's social status
than a means of transportation (which is very Asia-like). Motorcycles are more common by far as a means of transportation, and they
are all new, too.
Women dress themselves up beautifully though not so
extravagantly, and markets are flooded with merchandise from all over the
world. In the youth culture, too, Americanization is undeniably in
progress. Internet cafes, popular these days, stand in a row at
street corners, where young people enjoy netsurfing. Their computers
are installed with English OSs and pages they are looking at are mostly of
Yahoo and other English websites. As usual, pirate (!) CDs are
displayed in the best spots of storefronts at the market.
Vietnam
is one of the few communist nations remaining on earth and I made my trip
out here so poised. However, I am at a loss, for strangely there is
no sign of Big Brother lurking around, which makes me want to ask
"Where's a communist?" (There are countries even in the
West that love to decorate cities with portraits of national heroes,
aren't there?) Portraits of the late Ho Chi Minh are rarely seen on
the street whereas billboards of Sony, Microsoft and IBM are everywhere.
The U.S. dollar is circulating at the same level as
Vietnamese dong and you can even get your change in dollar at markets in
the city if you do not care about the exchange rate. It feels as if
the country has been swallowed up in the U.S. dollar economic bloc in an
instant by economic liberation.
Provided these are the results of economic
liberalization, America might have triumphed in enclosing communism as a global
strategy despite its failure to win the Vietnam War as a regional
strategy.
I have worked as a development planner so I have been
trained to be observant of statistical numbers. On the other hand, I
also believe that it is an important analytical method to examine cities
and regions, regarding their culture and organization as framework. Seeing streets and billboards as "symbols" reveals the
significance hidden behind them in the same way as looking at statistics
and policies does.
(Trans.:
TS) |
Postscript: About the consensus-building workshop (above photo) A
consensus-building workshop employing the PCM (Project Cycle Management)
method was held on-site during this assignment. Consensus without
misunderstanding between the helping side and the helped is a prerequisite
to promote a project. I had been told that in Vietnam, a consensus
was
reached collectively by a community as a whole, like other East Asian
agrarian societies. That is, there may be different opinions but the
elder-and-powerful have the final say on any matter in the end. Thus,
I worried secretly that if meetings were held, opinions and ideas of
senior members would prevail and chances for younger participants to speak
out would be limited. However, once the workshop started, I felt rather overwhelmed by the
way younger members took the initiative in expressing their opinions, and to my relief, it didn't turn into an
extremely age-sensitive situation as I had worried. My
impression was rather that in such settings, junior members were more
energetic in Vietnam
than Japan.
[ Japanese
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