Trains and Pirates

This is the most respectable looking Starbucks I've ever seen. I think most of the building is actually a tourist centre--this is in Nara City, where I ended up yesterday towards the end of a very long day out.

I got up early to take the train to Osaka, a journey of a little more than an hour, where I sat on panels to give oral exams to Japanese college students hoping to become English teachers. Then I decided to save some train fare and walked from Sakai to Tennoji station, a walk that turned out to be about two hours. But I'm pleased to say I never got lost and I only used my phone once. I didn't see anything really interesting except a couple weird buildings.

I think this one's an apartment building:

Would you call that a skyscraping barn?

Closer to Tennoji I saw this barber shop:

For a mere 1000 yen (around ten dollars) this dedicated barber will cut your hair right to the roots! I like to imagine nothing can stand in the way of his commitment.

Instead of taking the Kintetsu line as usual, I had the bright idea I could get to northern Kashihara faster by taking the JR line. When I realised this was wrong, I figured it was no big deal because my phone said I could transfer at Oji station to a train that went directly to Kashihara and I wouldn't lose any time. But it turns out Google maps is not infallible because the train it said would be at Oji station never arrived. After that, the only way I could see was going all the way to the end of the line at Nara, about fifteen kilometers north, away from my destination, and transfer to a southbound train. Altogether I think I travelled around 75 kilometers yesterday by train. Who knows how far by walking. Once in Nara, I had to hoof it again to go from the JR station to the Kintetsu station. It was a pleasant walk, though.

I got a lot of reading done on the trains. I finished reading Pirates of Barbary, a 2010 book by historian Adrian Tinniswood. Some of it was really interesting but not what I was hoping for. It's really not a book about the Barbary pirates, it's a book about European dealings with the Barbary pirates. The first several chapters of the book deal with European pirates who became prominent figures among the Barbary pirates, even commanding ships, such as John Ward and Zymen Danseker. Profiles of corsairs actually born and raised on the Barbary coast are pretty scanty as are descriptions of the institutions that supported them. Worse than that, the self-hating European bias is surprisingly prevalent for an author whose Wikipedia entry says he's a nearly 70 year old Officer of the Order of the British Empire. He frequently mentions the Janissaries, a Muslim fighting corps who were the main muscle of the Barbary pirates, but has very little to say about their society and produces no illustrative examples from among their numbers in the way he talks about European pirates. He mentions an incident where 30 Janissaries gang raped the son of a Dutch renegade in a Tripoli tavern but he only mentions it to say that the inclusion of the incident in the journal of the British consul to Tripoli reflected a peculiar preoccupation with sex on the part of the Brit. Perhaps a remark could just possibly be spared for the Janissaries and what the incident says about them?

Tinniswood's instinctive hatred for European culture carries over to the U.S. In describing the peace treaty temporarily signed between the U.S. and Tripoli 1805, Tinniswood quotes from the U.S. consul, Tobias Lear;

On finally meeting his former adversary, Lear commented with some surprise that [pasha of Tripoli] Yusuf [Karamanli] was "a man of very good presence, manly and dignified, and has not, in his appearance, so much of the tyrant as he had been represented to be." Abstract notions of the Other as barbarian are hard to sustain when you come face-to-face with the reality.

Abstract notions? This comes after several pages in which Tinniswood described how Yusuf had extorted tens of thousands of dollars from the young country, essentially protection money, because the U.S. navy wasn't strong enough yet to fend off the corsairs, who had already taken a few American ships and their crews.

He concludes his book by reminding us, "Fear of European conquest had turned the Barbary states into pirate kingdoms in the first place, motivating the Barbarossa brothers and their sixteenth-century corsairs to set out on their sea-jihad. Without that fear of conquest, Barbary's socialised piracy would never have grown into the scourge of Christendom." Yeah, of course, somehow it's all, always, European colonialism at fault. It's clear even from Tinniswood's own book that history simply isn't that simple.