Cookout Congolese Style

[Mike Oxlong]

Japanese diplomat arrested for arson at country's embassy in Congo

Police in Tokyo arrested a Foreign Ministry official on Monday on suspicion of setting fire to the Japanese Embassy in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Shinya Yamada, 30, who was working as the third secretary at the embassy in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa, was arrested in Tokyo. The diplomat returned to the ministry after the fire occurred on June 20.

Although no injuries were reported following the blaze which partially destroyed two floors of a private building in Kinshasa that served as the embassy's head office, arson was suspected as traces of an accelerant -- most likely gasoline -- were found following the police investigation, the ministry said.

Sources with knowledge of the matter also said the arson attack may have been financially motivated as money was found to be missing from the official building.

The foreign ministry, in a rare move due to diplomatic sensitivity, asked the Tokyo police to investigate the matter personally and found evidence showing that Yamada was the last person seen leaving the building soon after it was set ablaze. The building houses offices used by Japan's ambassador and counselor in Kinshasa.

Further investigations later turned up a gasoline canister at a private residence, presumably used by Yamada, police officials said...

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news ... assy-congo

[matsuki]

So we got the Tokyo police handling/investigating a diplomat for a crime that happened in Congo?? What is SOP?

Dude is denying all the charges...by J-logic, he must be innocent.

What is it with Japan sending these kinds of assholes to their embassies abroad? Remember the one in the US that got arrested for going all out on his wife? One might get the impression that Japanese beat their wives and not all crimes in Japan are committed by foreigners.

[Samurai_Jerk]

So we got the Tokyo police handling/investigating a diplomat for a crime that happened in Congo?? What is SOP?

Yes, because it was at a Japanese embassy and therefor technically took place in Japanese territory.

[Mike Oxlong]

The connection between Japan and the Congo is interesting...

In the heart of darkness, the atom bomb
The connections that Patrick Marnham makes in Snake Dance - from the Congo to Fukushima, from Conrad to the Bomb - are sometimes tenuous but always compelling

At the dark heart of this dark book is a startling fact: Joseph Conrad was employed to steam up the Congo river by the same company, Union Minière du Haut Katanga, that later shipped uranium from the Congo to the US, where it was used to make the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Patrick Marnham develops that historical oddity into a brilliant travelogue, blended with an angry history of America’s atomic bomb and a meditation on what the creation of nuclear weapons means for the human psyche. It is his own journey into a Heart of Darkness.

He follows not a river, however, but the flow of uranium. He visits the original Congolese mine at Shinkolobwe (‘the fruit that scalds’), tours the badlands of New Mexico where the bomb was developed and ends in the ironically named ‘Control Zone’ surrounding Fukushima, Japan, which is the nearest landscape he can find to one devastated by a nuclear explosion.

The travel writing is first-class. In Belgium’s monstrously huge Palais de Justice, Marnham describes the colony of blind cats that exists in the subterranean darkness of the legal archives. In the decaying sheds of Kinshasa’s National Museum, he sees ‘wooden figures so beautiful that you wanted to reach out and honour them, beside fetishes, twisted, clotted and black, which you would rather not see at all.’

In the control room of Kinshasa’s decrepit nuclear reactor, he notices that ‘a transparent, plastic ice-cream container has been placed over the button’ that would fire up the reactor. ‘Kinshasa is not so much the capital of a sovereign state’, he comments, with lugubrious savagery, ‘as the abandoned control panel of a long-dead empire.’

Marnham’s thrillingly ominous account of New Mexico introduces a key topic, the destruction of Native American society, and a surprising key character, the classical art historian Aby Warburg. Warburg came to New Mexico in 1895, just after the end of the American Indian Wars, to study the Snake Dance of the Hopi people. They worshipped the rain-giving lightning in the form of a rattlesnake and this worship was, for Warburg, ‘man’s primeval reaction to the universal terror of his existence’. And Hopi territory later became the site of Los Alamos, the site of the Manhattan Project…

If such links feel forced, the observation remains exquisite. In the National Atomic Museum at Albuquerque, the earrings made by Navajo silversmiths in the shape of Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, ‘were still on sale but kept behind the counter, following complaints from Japanese’...

http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/908092 ... am-review/

[Yokohammer]

The connection between Japan and the Congo is interesting...

In the heart of darkness, the atom bomb
The connections that Patrick Marnham makes in Snake Dance - from the Congo to Fukushima, from Conrad to the Bomb - are sometimes tenuous but always compelling

That looks very interesting. Thanks Mike.
The Kindle version is now in my Amazon wish list.

[matsuki]

So we got the Tokyo police handling/investigating a diplomat for a crime that happened in Congo?? What is SOP?

Yes, because it was at a Japanese embassy and therefor technically took place in Japanese territory.

Yeah, but the explicitly say "The foreign ministry, in a rare move due to diplomatic sensitivity, asked the Tokyo police to investigate the matter" as if it's not SOP?? (unless that's just more nuts than I thought and they're saying the foreign ministry would almost never consider investigating one of their own??)

‘wooden figures so beautiful that you wanted to reach out and honour them

401468[1].jpg

‘man’s primeval reaction to the universal terror of his existence'

...and Santa Clause is man's "primeval reaction" to capitalism?

[Samurai_Jerk]

So we got the Tokyo police handling/investigating a diplomat for a crime that happened in Congo?? What is SOP?

Yes, because it was at a Japanese embassy and therefor technically took place in Japanese territory.

Yeah, but the explicitly say "The foreign ministry, in a rare move due to diplomatic sensitivity, asked the Tokyo police to investigate the matter" as if it's not SOP?? (unless that's just more nuts than I thought and they're saying the foreign ministry would almost never consider investigating one of their own?

Take a deep breath and relax. It's probably rare simply because there are seldom cases of crimes committed by people working abroad for the Foreign Ministry that would fall under the jurisdiction of the Metro Police. Maybe there's more to it than that but there's no need to try to read something into the story that isn't even implied.

[yanpa]

What is it with Japan sending these kinds of assholes to their embassies abroad? Remember the one in the US that got arrested for going all out on his wife? One might get the impression that Japanese beat their wives and not all crimes in Japan are committed by foreigners.

They should adopt the examplary behaviour of the fine upstanding representatives of the US diplomatic corps

[matsuki]

Take a deep breath and relax. It's probably rare simply because there are seldom cases of crimes committed by people working abroad for the Foreign Ministry that would fall under the jurisdiction of the Metro Police. Maybe there's more to it than that but there's no need to try to read something into the story that isn't even implied.

I can think of a few off the top of my head. Far from rare but I guess if the d00d doesn't admit guilt, it's not a crime

What is it with Japan sending these kinds of assholes to their embassies abroad? Remember the one in the US that got arrested for going all out on his wife? One might get the impression that Japanese beat their wives and not all crimes in Japan are committed by foreigners.

They should adopt the examplary behaviour of the fine upstanding representatives of the US diplomatic corps

I'll rephrase my question. What is it with Japancountries sending these kinds of assholes to their embassies abroad?