Jumbos from the sun
Nov. 27th, 2007 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
Tyler Brûlé has a column in the International Herald Tribune which he mostly uses to promote Monocle, his stylish, slightly smug business magazine. This week his slot sees perhaps the most shameless piece of advertorial yet. Headlined Haneda Airport leads top 50 travel poll, the article is nothing more than a plug for the next edition of Monocle, which runs "a year-end, top 50 list focusing on the best in travel". You'd think that a quality newspaper like the IHT would know that a "poll" is an inquiry into public opinion conducted by interviewing a random sample of people. Read Tyler's piece, though, and you'll find that "poll" here has lost all its democratic implications and become something imperial. The carefully-weighted sample group for this "poll" is just two people: Tyler and his Tokyo assistant Fiona.
What Tyler and Fiona have chosen as "the ultimate in flying" is equally imperial. "We nominated the Japanese government's pair of 747-400s - one for the prime minister and one for the emperor," Tyler tells us. "While not quite a flying palace, the emperor's 747 comes with a matching fleet of support vehicles that all feature the same signature black and gold stripes that run elegantly down the fuselage of the aircraft. The inside is decorated in subtle caramel and camel tones that reference ancient patterns used by the royal family." This isn't bling stuff, though. "There's also not a gold tap or gold seatbelt in sight. From nose to tail, the identical aircraft are exercises in restraint and good taste."
Now, expensive private aircraft have long been part of Tyler's dreamworld, which is to say his world plan. Wallpaper, Monocle's loungecore ancestor, encouraged its readers to imagine they all owned a Falcon 900B private jet with interior design by Marc Newson and were just about to fly off to Belgrade for a weekend of simply divine decadence in Marshall Tito's refurbished brutalist Interior Ministry, now a luxury hotel.
[Error: unknown template video]
But the stakes have now been upped: if you aren't an emperor, flying into Tallinn or Arlanda in twin 747s (one for you, one for staff, presumably Fiona) bearing the insignia of your chrysanthemum throne and, on the tail, the sun (your great, great, great... great granny), you're nobody, friend. If a fatal crash for your enormous plane wouldn't mean, quite literally, the end of an era (in this case the Heisei era defined by the lifespan of Japan's Emperor Akihito), well, forget it. You're a loser. You probably read Star magazine.
I must say, the sheer cheek of this recommendation intrigued me (as Tyler and Fiona knew it would) and made me want to see pictures of the interior of the imperial planes. They were indeed understated. The Japanese page providing those glimpses tells us that the planes are kitted out with conference tables and up to 350 seats for diplomatic staff if it's the PM who's traveling, but sofas for the Emperor. If practical power does, symbolic power is. The "job" of the Emperor is simply to be.
So what does the Emperor -- this creature whose job is simply to be -- actually do on his foreign visits, once his twin sun jumbos have touched down? Well, on a visit to Sweden this year Akihito made a visit to the Bergius Botanic Garden in Stockholm, had lunch with the Swedish Prime Minister at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, visited the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences then saw the exhibition “From Linnaeus to DNA” at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. The next day he attended the 300th birthday commemoration of Carl Linnaeus at Uppsala University, met with Japanese and Swedish students and researchers, then banqueted at Uppsala Castle.
Akihito, a keen biologist and scientist, is quite an expert on Linnaeus. When a Swedish delegation to Japan showed him a rare 1735 copy of "Systema Naturae" -- the book of Linnaeus' classifications of animals, plants and minerals -- the emperor "studied the copy with great interest and was especially interested in observing the notes and changes Linnaeus had made in the margins".
Reading this, it's hard not to think of Akihito's father, the Emperor Hirohito. Both emperors studied marine biology and published scientific papers (Hirohito published accounts of jellyfish previously unknown to science, his son is an ichthyologist known for his research into the taxonomy of gobies).
[Error: unknown template video]
In Aleksandr Sokurov's haunting 2005 film "The Sun" (the third part in his Men of Power tetralogy) the Shōwa Emperor is portrayed as a stammering, modest, sheltered man. Although it means life or death to his fanatically faithful lieutenants, the Emperor's announcement that he is not, after all, a god seems to matter little to Hirohito. Sokurov portrays him -- with more than a tip of the top hat to Dostoyevsky's "idiot", Prince Myshkin -- as, finally, a sympathetic character.
"A small, frail man with a high-pitched voice," Sokurov said in an interview, "an academic working on botany and hydrobiology, [Hirohito] was entirely unsuited to absolute tyranny, both physically and spiritually. He even turned his palace into a scientific laboratory - this wasn't the bunker of a bloody god of war. But that was the role that Hirohito had to play, that was the mask that he had to put on, and rejecting it was one of the main themes of the work that lay ahead... The Emperor gave the world a lesson for which no students could be found. The scale of the example that he set wasn't noticed in Europe or in the Soviet Union. Our creative group is drawing attention to the fact that good can be both strong and intelligent."
Personally, I find the idea of a shy, unworldly botanist -- Prince Myshkin with a microscope -- flying around in his own personal 747 rather an intriguing one. In our oddly hierarchical, endlessly greedy, nominally "democratic" society it may well be that everyone aspires, ultimately, to be some kind of consumer-emperor (or, at the very least, an airport queen). That's certainly the impression you get reading our magazines and their top-down "polls". Real emperors, though, dream of nothing more than being marine biologists, tweaking with tweezers at a curved, preserved guppy spine or leafing through Linnaeus. Imperial he may be, but I suspect Akihito is, in real life, somewhat less imperious than Tyler Brûlé.
meh.
Date: 2007-11-27 05:53 am (UTC)it would be just as easy to point towards your flimsy wired posts as promotions for this blog, no? i adore your hypocrisy, though, it's kinda cute.
this one gets a "meh" AND a "pfft".
Re: meh.
Date: 2007-11-27 07:34 am (UTC)Come, come! Just the list appears, not the whole content of their Top Travel feature. There are no pictures, for instance. Reading about the imperial 747s, I immediately wanted to see pictures of the interior Tyler describes. Online there isn't really much; you have to buy the mag. Which costs money, unlike Click Opera.
Re: meh.
Date: 2007-11-27 12:03 pm (UTC)no need to buy, just make the effort to go look at it.
Re: meh.
Date: 2007-11-28 04:57 am (UTC)Oh, and surely a minion would gladly fork over a Monocle subscription -- it worked when you advertised on Click Opera your need for a flickr pro account, deshoooo?
Re: meh.
Date: 2007-11-28 12:21 pm (UTC)