 |
Daily Speculations The Web Site of Victor Niederhoffer & Laurel Kenner
Dedicated to the scientific method, free markets, ballyhoo deflation,
value creation, and laughter. |
Write
to us at:
(address
is not clickable)
Laurel Kenner
August 2003
Chronicles of Tokyo, Singapore, Cambodia
* To celebrate my first trip to Asia, I propose a
verb, "to cassowary.” Eg., “I was cassowaried in the market today.”
(According to a sign in the Jurong Bird Park, Singapore, "A kick from this
bird has been known to disembowel many an adventurer.")
* The Maserati & Lamborghini showrooms
have managed to stay open in Tokyo after a decade of recession, and 1,000
companies seek listing on the stock exchange.
* I had heard of the politeness of the
Japanese but was unprepared for the cheering sections at Tokyo Dome, where
baseball fans of opposing teams take turns to sing their well-rehearsed paens
to the players. Nor did I have any notion of Japan’s cleanliness; not a paper
cup marred the floor of that stadium. At the hotel pool, the staff continually
analyzed water samples and swimmers were expected to pass through a waist-high
antiseptic bath, after showering and putting on a swimming cap and special
sandals.
* Who but the Japanese would adopt as a slogan for
the Yomiuri Giants "The Most Traditional and Exciting Baseball Team"?
* In some countries, a prospective employer
or business associate might take you golfing to size you up. The late Ed Marks
took people fishing. Singaporeans judge you by your aptitude in eating chili
crabs. I had the pleasure of meeting trader Kevin Ho and Paul, the founder of a
very glossy Singaporean trading magazine, and they took me to a waterfront
restaurant to partake of this famous dish. As I sank into chili sauce up to my
second finger joints and the staff rushed to put plastic over my coat, Paul and
Kevin consumed their crabs without so much as a speck of sauce in evidence.
They didn’t even seem to use napkins. During the meal, Paul, who like me spent
some time as a defense reporter, explained that Singapore is the Israel of
Southeast Asia. Not only does it possess modern fighter jets, reconnaissance
planes and spy satellites -- it is the world's largest maker of small machine
guns. This is because Singapore is a Chinese island-city pressed by Indonesian
Islamic fanatics on one side and anti-Chinese Malaysia on the other.
Unfortunately, Singapore's water comes from Malaysia. A book, “Defending the
Lion State,” discusses these things in detail, while providing a good guide to
the regional balance.
* Singapore resembled Newport Beach -- everything
new, everything planned, everything zoned -- and would have horrified Jane
Jacobs, the arch-critic of regional planning. Yet I found much to enjoy in the
harbor lights, the waterfront restaurants and walks, and the mauve
bougainvillea on the freeway overpasses. The optimistic and talented Saurabh
and Naina Singal kindly showed me the paradaisical aspect of their adopted
home: exquisite parks filled with exotic birds, orchids, aquariums, animals.
From a business standpoint, Singapore is cheap; you can set up a corporation on
the Internet. (But watch out for Indonesian pirates if you're shipping
products.)
* The antithesis of regional planning is
found in Cambodia, where I found much to admire in the fishermen of giant Tonle
Lake. The lake contains 102 species of commercially valuable fish, enough to
feed all of Southeast Asia. The fisher folk live on houseboats, like
Huckleberry Finn, moving the boats in accord with the rise and the fall of the water.
They rise at 4 a.m. to go out and check the traps, return for lunch at 9:30
a.m. and then do chores, visit, sleep, and enjoy themselves for the rest of the
day. Out in the countryside, where farmers still plow with oxen, every
family has a little business in the front yard. No shopping malls here.
* Every so often in Cambodia a king or dictator
will get an idea for a big project. Then he rounds people up and works them to
death for a while. It happened in the 1100s and 1200s with the kings who built
those massive temples in the jungle (doubling as mausoleums on the builder’s
demise), and in the 1970s again with the Khmer Rouge. As is well known, the KR
collectivized agriculture, closed all schools and libraries, and put the people
to work 12 hours a day building dikes, channels and such. They starved or
murdered about 1.7 million people, out of a population of 7-8 million. The
Cambodians themselves are as polite and winsome as the Japanese, and one is
tempted to say, as the neighbors always do when someone on the block goes
postal, "He was such a nice, quiet, guy."
Nowadays the UN and the NGOs run the place, and the
big project is massive overbuilding in the hotel industry. Dozens of hotels are
going up, all owned by various government ministers, all funded under the table
with taxes and what have you. It is easy to do business in Cambodia, although
somewhat risky because the person to whom you paid your massive bribe may no
longer be in charge if the regime changes, forcing you to make a new payment to
another minister. This I had from a businessman. And thus Nock's geese are
plucked again.
* A bit of excitement while I was there came
on election day (Cambodia's third), when the prime minister, Hun Sen, won every
province except the most important one: Phnom Penh, the capital district. He
also failed to muster the necessary two-thirds majority to rule solo, and the
minority parties insisted on a new PM, a proposal that Mr. Hun Sen rejected.
Votes were still coming in on elephant back when I left. There was almost no
violence, and people expected King Sihanouk to step in soon and settle the
dispute. The king is much revered along with the rest of the royal family. The
No. 2 candidate was the king's son, but the king dislikes him because he is not
the child of his favorite consort. When this particular son won the 1993
election, the king was so displeased that he appointed himself PM. Before 24
hours had passed, he changed his mind. An interesting biography, “Hun Sen:
Strongman of Cambodia,” by the husband-wife team of Harish C. Mehta and Julie
B. Mehta, describes these doings in beautiful straight-faced detail.
* A thousand years ago, the Cambodian empire
was the largest in Southeast Asia. Its kings forced some 400,000 people to
spend much of their time and wealth building and defacing, by turns, what today
stand as the largest religious monuments in the world. A Buddhist king would
build a big temple and then a Hindu king would come along and chip all the
Buddha heads away. Then the Thais would come and raid the place. These
decapitations were revived by the Khmer Rouge, who financed their doings by
selling many of the temple’s big stone heads in Thailand. The Thais have not
given the heads back. As a result, the heads of the 54 stone demons and 54
stone guards that line the way to one of the biggest Angkor temples are
concrete copies. The originals remain in Thailand, on concrete bodies.
*The passage that kept running through my
mind during my investigations of Angkor temples was from another husband-and-wife
team, that of Will and Ariel Durant: “Have you learned anything,” they asked,
“beyond sad stories about the downfall of kings?” Well, the hubris rule
certainly seems to have worked back then, just as it does with skyscrapers
today, as we pointed out in Practical Speculation. The most marvelous
sight in Cambodia is the roots of silk cotton trees slowly tearing the temples
apart.
* The king is a fan of North Korea, and
Koreans are the main visitors to the temples of Angkor. The Chinese, too, are
regular visitors, and not for the first time. Stone bas-reliefs of daily life
in the 1100s at one of the temples portray Chinese soldiers who helped the
Khmer fight the Vietnamese. My guide said that one of the illustrations showed
a Chinese restaurant.
-- Laurel (8/2/2003)