There’s a beautiful documentary called Jiro Dreams of Sushi on the rounds. It played in Dublin’s IFI for five days in January. It’s about 85-year-old Tokyo sushi chef Jiro Ono, proprietor of the triple-Michelin-starred Sukiyabashi restaurant. Along the way, he tells of how he left home as a seven-year-old and never saw his father again. In one scene he pours water on his parents’ gravestone and then turns to his son and comments that he doesn’t know why he comes to see his parents’ grave when they never came to see him.

But he’s not bitter. Not at all. He says it with a wry detachment, much as he describes his extraordinary work.
His lack of rancour rang a bell. For the Hog, it recalled Vietnam at the turn of the millennium and the general absence of bitterness evident towards the busloads of Americans lugging their guilt across the south of the country.
Maybe it’s the Buddhist undertow to Vietnamese culture, a capacity to be in, and to focus on, the present – and to look to the future rather than the past. I don’t know. But the contrast was striking.
The US vets seemed locked in the past. They needed to revisit and recall, to talk and worry and weep. Not so the Vietnamese. Yes, they acknowledged the monstrous destruction visited on them by the Americans in the late 1960s and early 1970s and they quietly celebrated their own victory. But they were neither triumphalist nor sour. Nor were they locked to their history.
Remember, the Americans dropped more explosives on Vietnam and Cambodia than were dropped by all combatants on all sides, and in all theatres, in World War 2. A generation later, children are still being maimed by mines. Many thousands have been deformed by defoliants such as Agent Orange which is still in the ground even now, only washed down two metres. Yet, they situate themselves in the present and turn their attention towards the future.
The contrast is as stark with Ireland as it is with the US. Backward-fixated, that’s what we are. We can’t shake ourselves loose from the past. It’s not just the oul fixation with the eight hundred years. It’s everything and everywhere. Who did what and when and to whom always seems more important than who’s going to do what and when and with whom…
Well, if you think we haven’t been able to escape the past before now, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. This year marks the start of a decade of commemorations. We’re going to wallow in the past, swim in it till we sink to our oxters. There will be no escape.
This year for starters, there’s the centenaries of the Ulster Volunteers and the Irish Volunteers and the 1913 lockout. The Civil War ended in 1923. Fifty years ago, JFK visited in June 1963 and was assassinated in the following November. On a lighter note, the Beatles also came calling…
But it’s the centenaries that will suck the intellectual oxygen out of everyone. If we’re lucky, their contemplation will be worthy and earnest. If we’re not, it will be vicious and rancorous, as people and parties position themselves for even bigger anniversaries to come.
There will be much talk. As with Americans, we have great faith in the talking cure. If we get anywhere close to thinking about the present and the future, someone will mention closure – even though nobody really understands what this means.
And yet…and yet…and yet…
Because everything has remained the same for so long, there’s an irresistible temptation to say that we will repeat ourselves yet again. But the past weeks have given some small startling hints that maybe we’re growing up. The most important and impressive indication came from the Dáil sub-committee on health and children’s hearings on the abortion issue.
The Hog is firmly of the belief that the politicians will not go far enough on abortion, but at the same time, respect is due for the way the committee calmly and firmly shepherded the medics and clerics and pressure groups through, politely listening and demanding (and getting) politeness in turn. Particular praise has been lavished on the chair Jerry Buttimer and well-deserved it is too.
For the first time in a very long time, one had the sense that we can politely discuss important matters on which people hold deeply held convictions… Who’d have thought? This wasn’t The Frontline, that’s for sure, nor was it A Scare at Midnight With Vincent. It was elected representatives doing what they should do much more often.
The past is the past. We have to understand it in order to know why things are as they are. Sure. But if we continue to expend our already stretched intellectual reserves and cultural capital on living in the past, then we’re doomed to repeat it over and over again. And that won’t do anyone any good.
Look around you. Listen too. Even as the Irish take themselves to far flung foreign fields, they are being replaced by people from equally distant shores, people who know nothing of our historic woes and care less. For them 2013 is the year they arrive or the year their first Irish child is born or starts school, or whatever. It’s not about the past: it’s about here and now. It’s about what is and what will be.
And that’s where we have to turn now. Yes, let’s recollect and reflect and explore the meaning of things past. But let’s do it as a platform for understanding and then moving on, towards change, towards hope, and not as an excuse for yet more mining yet more misery and discord. We’ve had enough of that…
If the Viets can do it, so can we.
Happy New Year…