Pubdate: Sun, 22 Sep 2002
Source: Japan Times (Japan)
Copyright: 2002 The Japan Times
Contact:  http://www.japantimes.co.jp/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/755
Author: Sarah Rooney

MISERY IN A GOLDEN LAND

Author Takes A Trip Into Darkness

THE SHORE BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL: A Report from Inside Burma's Opium Kingdom, 
by Hideyuki Takano. Kotan Publishing, 2002, 264 pp., $23.95 (cloth)

"The Shore Beyond Good and Evil" is a book about a little-known region 
called Wa. "The name 'Wa' is not indicated on maps," writes author Hideyuki 
Takano. "Yet, despite its anonymity, perhaps no other place on earth wields 
such an effect over the world." Just what is so influential about this 
10,360 sq. km, semiautonomous territory in eastern Myanmar (Burma), 
bordering China? The answer is simple: The cool, dry climate of Wa State is 
ideal for the cultivation of a particularly valuable plant called papaver 
somniferum, better known as opium poppy, which is refined and smuggled 
around the globe as the lethally addictive drug heroin.

Located in the heart of the Golden Triangle, Wa State is responsible for an 
astounding 40 percent of the world's opium.

Fed up with reading journalistic "bird's-eye views" of Wa State, Takano 
wants to go and see for himself what life is like in the opium-producing 
capital of the world. He decides to live in a traditional Wa village and 
chronicle one cycle of an opium crop, from the sowing of the seed to the 
poppy harvest.

But getting into Wa State is no easy feat. The nearly impenetrable mountain 
region is controlled by the United Wa State Army (UWSA), and the Wa people 
have long had a reputation for savagery.

The Wa were formerly headhunters living in villages approached by "skull 
avenues" lined with the severed heads of their victims. The British 
colonial administration put an end to headhunting in the last century, but 
the region is still a frighteningly lawless land. Luckily, Takano is no 
stranger to hard travel; he has searched for the yeti in remotest China and 
trekked through the most inaccessible parts of the African Congo. After 
negotiations with the UWSA, he rides into Wa State in a truck sitting on "a 
mountain of metal cans filled with [live] ammunition." Takano's journey 
into the unknown is told with arresting images.

Describing a night spent in a Wa army base that was lit by the feeble glow 
of a single naked light bulb, he writes, "I felt this tiny light . . . was 
under threat from the vast darkness of the inner Wa State."

Takano goes by the Wa name Ai Lao (literally, Eldest Brother Storyteller) 
and, with admirable zeal, throws himself into the hardscrabble routine of 
Wa village life. He joins in the back-breaking work in the poppy fields 
each day and downs the local hooch each night. Surprisingly, smoking opium 
is prohibited in Wa State; though, as Takao learns, this is not always 
rigorously enforced. Village healers use opium as a curative, and when 
Takano starts smoking to heal his aches and pains he soon finds himself hooked.

The sometimes humorous tales of his attempts to secretly smoke opium in the 
heart of the world's biggest opium farm make entertaining reading.

Less fun for Takano is the incredible lethargy he suffers when he has to 
quit: "I felt as if each cell in my body was being rammed down by an 
intense gravity." When Takano first saw opium, however, he was unimpressed: 
"So this smelly, muddy dumpling had invaded the hearts and minds of people, 
put the world's police on alert and even triggered murders and wars. It 
didn't seem to make sense."

The Wa believe opium poppies sprang from the loins of a beautiful young Wa 
woman who, overwhelmed by suitors and unable to choose between them, killed 
herself.

As her corpse lay on a mountainside, tobacco sprouted from her breasts and 
opium grew from her groin.

Takano charts a less romantic but more plausible route for opium from the 
medicinal halls of ancient Greece, to India with Alexander the Great and 
finally to China on Dutch trading ships via Taiwan. Opium was used during 
the Ming Dynasty as a medicine alleviating anything from diarrhea to malaria.

The Chinese soon developed a taste for opium as a recreational drug and 
began to trade Indian-grown British opium for Chinese tea. In 1840, the 
Opium War put an end to this trade and the Chinese had to grow their own 
opium in the high and dry regions of southern China, around Wa State. The 
drug has since been used by the Wa to fund an armed struggle against their 
Myanmar overlords. (Today, the UWSA and the Myanmar Army have reached a 
ceasefire and both benefit from the highly profitable opium business.)

"The Shore Beyond Good and Evil" is part-travelogue, part-anthropological 
study and there are lots of interesting tidbits to be gleaned within its pages.

We learn, for instance, that opium is appropriately measured in units of 
weight called joi. We also get etiquette lessons on how to drink plai ko, 
Wa alcohol made from the fermented seeds of the ko plant.

Just in case you ever meet any Wa drinkers, here's what you do: Say ah 
(literally, "you and me"), touch a bamboo cup of plai ko to your lips and 
then hand it to your drinking partner to down in one.

But Takano's book has a much greater purpose. "The Shore Beyond Good and 
Evil" highlights the plight of the Wa villager.

Farmers spend half of each year growing opium to sell and the other half 
growing rice to eat. Over 50 percent of every farmer's opium crop is 
confiscated by the Wa army as an "opium tax." This feudal practice keeps 
the villagers trapped in an unbreakable cycle of poverty.

Meanwhile, Wa army officers sell the opium abroad and get rich on the 
proceeds. "In a sense," writes Takano, "farmers and consumers stand at 
opposite ends of a long tunnel with no idea about the darkness that lurks 
between them."

In "The Shore Beyond Good and Evil," Takano does a great service in 
demonstrating how villagers in Wa State are just as trapped as the heroin 
addicts who are shooting up in inner cities around the world.

Sarah Rooney is an independent journalist based in Bangkok.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager