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The Thinker For Oki Sato, the clean-cut posterboy for top Japanese design firm Nendo, the unexamined life is hardly worth living. by max crosbie-jones / portraits by dan carabas
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Fishbone low tables for Moroso. Space Dipped Shirts for COS.
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hen posing for photographs, Oki Sato – the bespectacled wunderkind of Japanese product design – is given to propping his index finger and thumb under his chin. Is this a foppish affectation? A controlled response to a nervous tic? Or is he just a big fan of Rodin’s The Thinker? During our interview I never get around to asking him, but I do come away with the impression that this posture, hokey as it may be, is apt for someone so deeply contemplative. Oki’s products, more than those of other designers, seem to be a distillation of pure thought, his creations typically stripped of aesthetic fat until all that remains is a sleek, refined, elegant expression of some clever or witty idea. Very often, his highconcept creations – be they big or small – challenge you to think anew about the everyday, garnering what he likes to call a small “!” or “aha” moment. “Whether I’m designing a house or packaging for a piece of gum, I try to incorporate surprises that relate to everyone,” he has said. Before we meet on the sidelines of Milan Design Week, I potter around an exhibition of products by his design firm, Nendo, in search Emeco's Navy Chair. of these surprises. True to his word, they come thick and fast. Bowls made of silicon quiver and shudder before my eyes as a fan blows wind over their smooth surfaces. A thin, sculptural stick of wood unravels to create a pair of chopsticks. A pair of eyeglass frames has magnetic, rather than screw, hinges. And upstairs, in a daylit nave of the building, sits an ethereal installation commissioned by normcore highstreet clothing brand COS: a train of crisp white shirts that gradually take on darkening gradations of colour as they pass through hollow steel cubes of imaginary paint. “Surprise and humour are the things that create connections between people and objects,” he tells me later, as we sit in the showroom of Emeco, one of the many design brands lining up to
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work with him. For him, surprise and humour also distinguish Nendo’s output from that of other Japanese minimalists such as Naoto Fuksawa, who tends to favour an unsmiling rationalism over playfulness. “When you do it too minimal or too simple, Japanese design often gets cold,” he says. “It becomes almost like an art piece – it’s beautiful but it’s almost something you don’t want to touch. It’s something remote. I don’t want that to happen in my designs.” A recent example, he says, is his stout reworking of Emeco’s classic Navy Chair. Available in a range of different materials and finishes, it has a seat that can be detached and reattached using nothing more sophisticated than pocket change. “The Emeco stool is very technical, but I didn’t want to put something technical in someone’s house. So it was important that we used the coin, not another new tool or mechanism; the coin is the thing that connects people with the stool.” Nendo’s world teems with such canny touches – and what a fast-expanding world it is. “We’re working on close to 300 projects right now,” he tells me while taking a big slurp of coffee, as if the success of them somehow depended on it. “I have no idea how we do it.” How Nendo does it – how it flits from creating mysticallyinspired store designs and exhibition spaces to sculptural furniture, cutlery, stationary and even bedding for dogs – surely has something to do with its proven ability to shape-shift to suit a client’s needs. In Japanese, Nendo means “clay.” This name is apt for a design firm – 30 staff and 12 years strong – that is nothing if not pliable, turning its hand to interiors, architecture and installations, as well as furniture, products and graphic design (or cross-pollinations between them). It’s apt also because, as well as the eclectic range of projects Nendo takes on, pliability
Oki’s products, more than those of other designers, seem to be a distillation of pure thought.
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Surprise and humour are the things that create connections between people and objects.
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is common also to their execution. Nendo might just as easily turn out something handmade by a Japanese craftsman as industrial. And while some designers and architects tend to become focused on one or two materials – think, say, of Tadao Ando and concrete – Nendo has no such fixation. “It’s not the object that’s important,” he once said. “I really don’t care about colours or materials or the form itself, but it has to have a nice story behind it. The story is what moves people.” Sketches are integral to how Oki tells his “stories.” Or rather, bad sketches are. Before our interview, I am handed Nendo’s new release sheet and find it covered with drawings thatcould have been the work of a five-year-old (and a cackhanded one at that). Each sketch is tied to a new product, from a ‘Lampshower’ for Axor (a stickman under a raining umbrella) to an island-inspired sofa for Casamania (another stickman, this time dreaming of an archipelago). To those not familiar with Nendo, these might seem like faux-naïf sketches, drawn by some freelance illustrator in an effort to imbue the studio with a certain cuteness, but that’s not the case. These are the best sketches Oki’s hand Axor's Lampshower. can muster. And one of the most effective weapons in his design arsenal. The worse, the better, as far as he’s concerned. “If you’re a good sketcher, it’s too perfect,” he says. “You imagine the final output in a way; but in my case they are so awful that you don’t know how it’s going to be in the end and that leaves a lot of space. It’s open and it’s easier for us to understand, all of us, including the designers that work with me, my clients, and the product development team. They start imagining things themselves. It’s not like I show them the finished thing and just tell them to make it. It’s not like that.” Perhaps herein lies part of the Nendo appeal – this is a design studio that openly courts open-endedness.
s intriquing as Nendo’s designs are, it would be a stretch to call Oki a dream interviewee. There are no indiscreet tirades, no gotcha moments, and, when researching him, I dig up no dirt. “I am,” he says not even half-jokingly, “a super boring person.” But among his champions (and there are many), Oki’s being boring is exactly what makes his work far from boring. “Beyond the obvious elbow grease involved, the real magic in Sato’s ‘!’ moments is the hard-won fruit of a lifestyle devoted to careful, constant observation,” writes Anna Carnick in Nendo 10/10, a 2013 monograph of Nendo’s work. “He is inspired by quiet, everyday moments, and the subtle yet impactful differences that can occur from one day to the next.” A routine that borders on the ascetic heightens his sensitivity to these quiet, everyday moments. When not travelling the world to meet with clients, something he does for roughly two weeks each month (“My office is my suitcase”), he is committed to it. Each day he walks the same way to work, eats lunch at the same restaurant, and visits the same Starbucks the same amount of times (three). Evoking Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, and even, at a push, Groundhog Day, this uncomplicated existence allows his brain to spend less time processing the unexpected, and more time monitoring his environment for patterns and anomalies. “When someone asks me, ‘What inspires you the most?,’ my answer is ‘The things that inspire me the most are the things that don’t inspire other people the most,’” he says. “It’s the boring things.” One can view Oki Sato as many things – including a distant relative of Socrates (“The unexamined life is not worth living” could easily be Nendo’s tagline) – but one of the most illuminating narratives paints him as an alchemist who turns the mundane into design gold. “When he comes across a simple, yet evocative
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instance, he dissects it, so that he may conjure it anew for the rest of us to enjoy in more permanent, solid forms,” explains Anna. And so it is that, in Nendo’s world, the patterned wings of dragonflies end up on hand-knotted wool rugs; ruler increments find their way onto watches; and the simple action of rolling or folding paper inspires elegant lamps or a futuristic computer mouse. One of Nendo’s most commonly cited “!” moments is a series of furniture known as Dancing Squares. Comprised of square, simple planes, each item appears to be about to topple, its structure seemingly freeze-framed mid-tumble. Oki came up with the idea while balancing a glass of water on the edge of a table. Over the years, he has also proven himself a dab hand at turning waste into things wondrous. In 2008, the avant garde Japanese designer Issey Miyake asked him to create an item of furniture out of the pleated paper that is produced in large amounts during the making of pleated fabric and, being an unwanted by-product, usually tossed away. What he came up with – the Cabbage Chair, with its peeled-back layers that envelop the user – is a primitive response to 21st-century sustainability, one that’s found its way into Dancing Squares. the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Of the experience, he told DAMn Magazine: “What Miyake taught me is that you have to stop somewhere and not complete the object. It allows for a sense of ma [the Japanese word for negative space]. This leftover space allows users to imagine for themselves.” He doesn’t stockpile ideas, preferring to serve them up fast and fresh, like a sushi chef. “Some designers prefer making design like a soup,” he says. “They take their time, add many things, and with that create flavour. I like to keep things very fresh. The quicker, the better.” Which is not to say his work is slapdash. He uses 3D printers – several of them – to create prototypes for each design (the expense “almost bankrupted Nendo several times”). And guiding his process are 10 key design principles, or “small recipes” that, he says, help him find “new perspectives on boring things.”
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uite where Oki – who was born in Toronto, Canada – got his love of design is a mystery, even to Oki. Our conversation goes a bit meta when I ask him to recall when he first became interested in making things and he replies, with a dizzying circularity, “I didn’t have any interest in design until I became a designer, actually.” Ok then, but surely design was on your list of dream careers? “No, I wanted to be a petshop owner,” he replies. “But at a certain point I noticed that I would have to sell the pets so I gave up on becoming a pet shop owner.” And so it goes. On further prying, Oki says he doesn’t think growing up in Toronto influenced or informed his career path in any discernable way, but that moving to Tokyo, at the age of 10, most definitely did. “Everything was totally different,” he says. “I was enjoying things that other kids thought normal. For instance, in Japanese schools we have four different types of shoes. But when I was living in Canada, I had only one pair that I could use wherever I liked. The fact that I had to change shoes according to activities or the space was so funny to me. That was the moment I noticed that by just changing the perspective, your way of seeing things, ordinary things could become something that is interesting or funny.” The brevity with which he broaches his upbringing and private life – “Basically, when I’m not designing I do nothing” – suggests that Oki isn’t particularly interested in dissecting himself. But then, you could argue that neither should we be. Certainly, few of his fans in the industry are. In the same way that the work of some film directors connects deeply with other film directors, and the question marks surrounding their personal lives are often brushed aside, Oki is considered a designer’s designer whose work stands for itself. “I love the simple and effortlessly genius way that Oki tells stories that are easy to understand for all through his design, no matter whether its interiors or products or art installations,”
I wanted to be a pet shop owner, but at a certain point I noticed that I would have to sell the pets so I gave up on becoming a pet shop owner.
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says Amata Luphaiboon, co-founder of Thai design studio, What is the secret of Nendo’s success? And how would, say, Department of Architecture. “Oki has a curiosity that never a fledgling Thai design studio looking to break-out go about stops. He is interested in everything, and always has something emulating it? Though its work process and aesthetic has played a to say,” says Jana Scholze, curator of contemporary furniture large part, another factor that sets Nendo apart might well be its and product design at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. approachability. Many design enthusiasts are familiar with the For many, especially young Asian designers looking to way in which Nendo fuses a Japanese take on minimalist form break into the hyper-competitive world market, Oki is an and function with an almost child-like sense of humour, one that inspiration. And understandably recalls European schools such as the Memphis Group or the witty, site-specific designs of Dutch so. Established by him and designers Droog. But fewer are his business partner in 2002, aware of its client-friendliness. the same year he graduated Despite travel not being conducive with an M.A. in architecture to his creative process (“I don't from Tokyo’s Waseda University, see new things when I travel too Nendo’s rise was rapid. Toyko much” he told the Wall Street is its home, but Milan is where Journal recently), Oki goes to it cemented its position as meet each new client in person. a sought-after company that Visiting them allows him to “find straddles continents. He met the ideas within the client.” As he Milanese furniture moguls Giulio puts it, “by exploring the brand, Cappellini and Maddalena the history, the factories, or just De Padova there in 2002, and by discussing things, I notice set up an office there, which interesting things and interesting speaks volumes about the materials and then try to use extent to which Nendo has them as much as possible.” been welcomed into the still No design firm is infallable; Eurocentric design world. some of Nendo’s eye-catchingly From his lofty perch (Newssimple designs get more love week named Oki one of the than others. More often than “100 Most Respected Japanese Walt Disney Japan's Winnie the Pooh Collection. not, though, design blogs and People” back in 2006), he can magazines lap them up with all see the design world’s centre the gusto of cats around a bowl of of gravity shifting away cream. And even if they don’t go down well, a new Nendo design from Europe towards Asia. “I think there will be tons of is still a talking point. No wonder, then, that firms want to be them young Asian designers within less than five years. Maybe and mass-market brands such as Camper, Häagen-Dazs and Walt two or three. I think there’s going to be a big shift in the Disney Japan are queuing up to tap into the Nendo imagination, be design market towards Thailand, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, it by asking them to create a transcendentally elegant store design, and, of course, China, because everyone is studying at the a seasonal ice cream cake, or a line of abstract furniture inspired European schools now,” he says. “Now it’s still – not exactly by Winnie the Pooh. It is an ascent that looks destined to continue. copying – but really influenced by European design. But I Recently, Oki curated his first exhibition, at Singapore’s National think the next generation will be more original. They’re very Design Centre, and opened Nendo’s first dedicated stores. Nendo aggressive and energetic.” Meanwhile, Japanese design he will also play a key role in the Japanese pavilion at the forthcoming finds complacent, to its detriment. “Japanese designers feel Milan Expo, which will run between May 1st and October 31st. they are one of the leaders of Asian design, but I don’t think All of which will only further cement Nendo’s enviable market so anymore. Because design is linked with the economy, position, and leaves one wondering, “Boring? Oki Sato? Really?” there are a lot more powerful countries in Asia.”
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rissada “Noi” Sukosol Clapp – singer, actor, businessman – has always had a passion for antiques. He loves stories. He loves fantasies. His hotel The Siam, for example, is full of fantasies crafted from his collectibles and antiques. “[Building a hotel] is like making a film and I am the director,” Krissada explains. “For a film, you try creating an atmosphere, the mood for the audience to feel like they are stepping into another world. When you build a hotel, it’s similar. And you have to get it right – the mood has to be right for them to believe they’re in another world. So for The Siam, I’m the director, and the antiques – the collectibles – are the actors that create the mood.” Building his own home was no different. Krissada has moved his family into a hundred-year-old building built by his great-grandfather. “I decided to live the way my great-grandfather lived. The way shophouse owners lived. We live above, and our businesses are below.” The renovation took four years, and the once-delapidated building now resembles a whimsical Chinoiserie-style residence owned by French nobility. Workspace: Krissada’s office is on the ground floor of his home. He and his family live on the top two floors while, at first, he’d planned to build a cafe and an antique gallery on the ground floor. A French-style cafe with proper kitchen and an old counter bar shipped directly from France occupy one side of the space. “But then I was pretty much a dreamer at that time and I realized how running a cafe can be quite difficult. And I couldn’t quite part with my antiques; I couldn’t let them go. So now it simply becomes my office in a way, and the antiques I
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collect, I just put on display,” he says, laughing. His working area is nestled in a back corner, behind the most impressive collection of vintage collectibles I’ve ever seen. It’s a Louis XVI-style vintage wood table, with a huge painting of the king as a backdrop, which Krissada uses for signing cheques. “To me, signing cheques is the way to learn about the business. You must know who you sign cheques to, who you’re giving money to.” Routine: Krissada doesn’t have a fixed daily schedule. He spends most of his hours at The Siam, of course, but he always tries to pick up his children from school and spend time with them every day. Apart from jogging in a public park opposite the building, his most important routine is to get to Chatuchak Market at 7am on Saturday morning for vintage finds. “All the good things go really quickly, so you’d better get there early to get them. Then, around 5 o’clock, I look at the other antiques at Klong Thom. With young kids, I don’t go out anyway. I don’t even go to movies anymore. Inspirations: Krissada thanks his home for always giving him inspiration, for work and life. “I‘m really lucky to be able to relocate to the old part of town. I moved my life here where I could inherit and restore this old home. I’m lucky there’s a park opposite my house, and it’s kind of urban in a way. I see real-time lives. I see people live. I jog as part of my routine, then I walk back to see my office downstairs and my home above. It’s all about creativity, and it inspires you. It’s like I don’t have to go anywhere to find inspiration. I’m in my escape already.” Krissada is about to start shooting a new film next month. He also has a new solo album coming along, and he assures us that “Pru fans will love it.” He has been talking about the album for ten years now, and we can finally stop holding our breath.
Krissada Sukosol’s home-office is an antiques wonderland. by top koaysomboon / photography by chiniji kano
I decided to live the way my greatgrandfather lived.
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Chadatip Chutrakul For the frontwoman of ICONSIAM, the forthcoming lifestyle project on the Chao Phraya River, raising a child is so much more challenging than managing a shopping mall. by top koaysomboon / photography by chiniji kano
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he retail business: “Retailing is not about shopping; it’s about providing an ever-changing experience. To me, a shopping mall is a place to offer happiness. We create spaces with different experiences for everyone, of every age, to be happy, excited and inspired. We create a building with a soul. I am no longer building a shopping mall; I build a place to inspire people.” ICONSIAM: “The Chao Phraya is an epic landmark. It has seen everything through our history. Ancient historic landmarks are on the river banks. So when we were fortunate enough to get these riverfront grounds, I said to myself, ‘I need to create a Thai icon for our era.’ ICONSIAM is a US $1.54 billion project we have been working on for two years. We are no longer building a mall; we are creating a new landmark that will narrate ten thousand stories of Thailand’s legacy of pride and prosperity through different features, from the National Treasure Museum and iconic architectures inspired by Thai arts to Southeast Asia’s longest water feature and a 10,000-square-metres waterfront that can fit any world-class event. It will be the greatest project of my life.” Teamwork: “I cannot do everything by myself. I am the one who initiates ideas and then my staff makes them happen. I have confidence in my people. I’m kind of like a conductor. I cannot play each musical instrument as great as they do. My role is to pull out the best of them and integrate their expertise to compose the best music. I’m lucky that I have a good team. Without them, I couldn’t have achieved anything this far.” Challenge lover: “Personally, I love to be challenged. If life is too smooth, I wouldn’t be able to come up with creative ideas. I like working under pressure.” Her icon: “My father, General Chalermchai Charuvastr, was my role model. He taught me everything. So smart and visionary, a great man. He was the founder of the Tourism Authority of Thailand. What’s best was he never taught me to do but to think. My mother showed me how to be mindful, to know when’s enough.” Happy family. “I believe that a good family is the foundation of everything. I’m lucky to have good parents. I have a husband who understands my work, understands that I might often need to come home
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late. I have an wonderful daughter. It is essential to me to have quality time with my family. No matter how late it is, my husband and I would try to have dinner together. I connect with my daughter every single day even though she’s been studying abroad for 12 years. My family is the most precious thing in my life.” Positive thinking: “Of course there have been struggles in my life. There were harsh times but I choose to remember only the good things. I believe that positive thinking brings in positive power. If I did something wrong, I learned from the mistake. I’m optimistic. I’m very positive because I live to motivate, to inspire people. I don’t think people with negative thinking can build spaces that inspire people like we do. Before going to bed, you must let go of everything. Every problem can be solved, sooner or later. It’s part of life. Life is like surfing. If we aim at a high wave, we need to try harder to ride upon it. But if you see it’s impossible, you need to accept that and let it go.” Cautious investments: “When it comes to investment, I’m really conservative. I have a responsibility to the shareholders, so I can’t make mistakes. That explains why we do a lot of research before starting a project. We analyse the very worstcase scenarios until we think we can handle the potential loss, and we have strategies to deal with different unexpected circumstances. I’m cautious. I don’t want to live with fear. I need to know how to deal with scenarios.” Crisis management: “I’ve learned from crises that we never have no way out. I’ll never give up even though there were, and will be, unexpected impossibilities. I need to solve any uncontrollable factors. I was taught to do the best. If I cannot do it myself, I must be patient and seek for the right help. I don’t want to look back and feel regret. That’s why I’ve never felt sorry for what I did in the past as long as I know I had done my best.” Motherhood: “I have only one daughter. Raising her is a greater responsibility for me than managing a multi-million-baht project. I’ve never expected her to be the best at everything but I do want her to be a responsible and reliable person with a good heart. She needs to be humble and grateful for all the helps and support she’s received. I’ve never raised her that protectively, because I think she must learn to be strong and to live her own life with dignity. My greatest wish for her is simply that she is happy and has the utmost pride in her future endeavours.”
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The cadets report for duty.
The Canine Cadets Don’t be fooled by those furry ears and wet noses. Thailand’s go-to bomb-detection experts are consummate professionals, born and bred to protect the Kingdom, one sniff at a time. by appy norapoompipat / photographs by jeeraw bunpook t’s a sunny, dewy August morning at the Pak Chong military base, and the new recruits are doing their daily training. Instead of sweaty men with buzz-cuts rhythmically jogging to the tempo of cadence calls, it’s a litter of four-month old German shepherd puppies, yelping and barking excitedly while stumbling over their short, fluffy legs to reach the target in the trainer’s hand – a loud squeaky-toy. With looks of pure joy and adorable ears flopping with every clumsy step, it’s hard to imagine that one day these little fur-balls will be some of the Kingdom’s most skilled and valuable tools, risking their lives while working in its most uninviting territories. Military working dogs have been protecting and serving the country since being introduced to Thailand by American troops during the Vietnam War. With many lives lost due to land-mines and guerrilla attacks by the Viet Cong, His Majesty the King set up the War Dog Program in 1968 to lessen the casualties. The program started out with 17 military dogs and three handlers presented to the army by the U.S Armed Forces. The project ended by 1972, in which the Military
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Working Dog Project was established. By 1983, the project expanded to become the Military Working Dog Company, and by 1995, the Company transformed into what we see today - The Military Working Dog Battallion. Now, the Thai Military Dog Centre has expanded to become the biggest in Southeast Asia. With their intelligence, bravery, loyalty, fierceness and heightened senses, war dogs have been helping out with tasks that humans could never do. Originally trained for warfare in jungles and mountains, today these four-legged soldiers – all 254 of them – are dispatched all over the country to help with newer, modern-day threats. Every day, they sniff out leftover landmines in the Thai borders, patrol the streets, and search for improvised explosive devices 194
On the search for explosive materials.
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In the past decade, mine-detection dogs have helped find more than 13,500 landmines along Thailand’s borders areas. The Military Working Dog School.
(IEDs) in the three southerninsurgency provinces. They also detect narcotics throughout the country, rescue victims during times of disaster, and even patrol Bangkok’s MRT and BTS stations. In the past decade, mine-detection dogs have helped find more than 13,500 landmines along Thailand’s border areas. But before going out to work in the field, they all start their career at the Military Dog Centre, tumbling and stumbling to sink their teeth into that earpiercing toy. Becoming a Military Dog The Military Dog Centre is split into numerous units, including a Breeding Section (where the studs are selectively bought from abroad), a Puppy Training Program, a Military Dog Hospital, and, most importantly of all, the Military Working Dog School. Once they start walking, the puppies do the one-year Puppy Training Program, which focuses on sociability and basic obedience. Trainers slowly introduce them to new sights, sounds, terrains and obstacles in order to desensitise them, build up their bravery, and analyse their personalities and physicality. After that, when one year old, the dogs are split up
into their respective duties and matched with a handler in the Military Working Dog School. “The dogs we’re training are split into seven duties,” says Lt. Col. Kosol Karinrat, deputy commander of the school. “Three types, seven duties. The first type are security dogs, which consist of sentry dogs and patrol dogs. The second type are tactical dogs, consisting of mine-detection dogs and scout dogs. The last type are specialduty dogs, which include rescsue dogs, explosive-detection dogs and narcotics-detection dogs.” Labrador retrievers are mainly trained as rescue-dogs and bombsniffers; Doberman pinschers and Rottweilers as sentry and patrol dogs; and German shepherds, with their high skills set, are fit for all duties. But with so many strays in Thailand, why not just train those? “We have trained [soi] dogs taken from dog shelters before,” says Lt. Col Kosol. “It was a project set up by His Majesty the King. It was during the time he raised Khun Thongdaeng, and he had the idea that the army should train Thai dogs and work with them....They can work. We’ve used Thai dogs in Suvhanabhumi airport before. They work just as
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Four-month-old German shepherds begin the Puppy Training Programme.
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well as Western dogs, sometimes even better, because they don’t get sick as much, they’re not picky about food, and they’re used to our weather.” However, there were a couple of glaring problems. Thai dogs, although workable, were more difficult to command offleash and had a shorter attention span, a risk to both dog and handler. Additionally, if a group of dogs does not pass the Puppy Training Program, people are less likely to adopt or buy them, resulting in more dogs that will be left uncared for. Consequently, the project was closed down, and the training of Western breeds continued. Open for training twice a year, the Military Working Dog School trains selected personnel from the army, airforce, navy, border police, and other government and private organizations that request working dogs. Ocassionaly, trainers from the United States come to collaborate, advise and improve the technical aspects according to whatever gaps they see. Before the
match-up, the handlers have four weeks to study up on topics such as dog-training theories, leash handling and veterinary practice. “It was tough!,” says student dog handler Paksawit Buakri. “There weren’t just written exams, there were also theories we had to learn. We have to know how many teeth they have, how many bones they have, what type of diseases each breed has, noticing the dog’s behaviour, taking care of them...everything!” After theory courses, the handler is matched up with a K9. “There were ten dogs that we had to choose from,” Paksawit explains. “We had to see which ones we got along with by playing with them. Some dogs tried to bite me, but when I called Jarden and she came, I knew this was the dog for me.” Paksawit and Jarden, his two-year-old female German shepherd, are now in their last weeks of training, one of the toughest periods in the curriculum. After twelve weeks
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on school grounds, they, along with 68 other pairs, are camping out in the forests of Pakchong. Paksawit, Jarden and the rest of their unit, have based themselves at a temple. “The dogs we see here in the temple are the specialduty dogs,” explains Lt. Col Kosol. “Their duties are bomb and narcotics detection. We need the dogs and handlers to get used to what they have to face after they graduate. We simulate reality and situations they’ll have to face while on duty.” Once they graduate, Paksawit, Jarden and their unit will head straight to the three southerninsurgency provinces. Every day,
the unit follows a rigid training schedule in order to prepare for the real job. Master Sergeant First Class Wittaya Senjanta, explosive-detection-dog instructor and handler, gives us a small demonstration of their training. Leading us to a broken-down pickup truck, he plants an IED ingredient somewhere inside as Jarden waits patiently for Paksawit to give her the command. “In the south, they’d hide [IEDs] in cars or bikes, so we train that way,” he explains. “We don’t know what’s going to happen in reality, so we simulate as many situations as possible.” Giving her the signal, Jarden shoots off and does an
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Six-month-old Labrador retrievers in the Puppy Training Programme.
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intricate dance around the truck. Tail wagging, ears up and sniffing every corner she can get her nose into, she quickly sits down and stares at the passenger seat. Calling her away, Paksawit then takes out a red ball from his pocket. “Dee mak, dee!” he screams, throwing the ball to her. While the pair run and jump around in circles with excitement, MSgt-1st Wittaya explains how it works: Bomb equals reward. Reward equals playtime with their favourite ball. Find the bomb, get the toy – it’s a simple but dangerous game. Man’s Best Tool? On November 6, 2013, the Military Working Dog Battalion lost U-Bern, a five-year-old German shepherd, Lance Corporal Prapan Chomkokruad and Sergeant Prinya Prabchiwit in a motorcycle bomb attack in Narathiwat’s Ra-Ngae district. U-Bern’s grave is placed in the battalion’s training grounds in memory to his and his handlers’ self-sacrifice. LCpl Prapan and Sgt Prinya recieved posthumous
promotion to become Majors, and though military dogs do not have military ranks, the battalion has been negotiating for U-Bern to receive an honourary one. After graduation, military dogs work until the age of eight, if they do not first pass away from sickness or while on duty. After they retire, the K9s are either brought back to the battalion to be taken care of, or adopted by their handler (who has to go back to the school to train a new puppy).“I’ll probably let Jarden stay with the battalion because I won’t have time to take care of her,” says Paksawit. “But I’ll visit and watch over her until she passes away. I’ve taken care of her for almost four months now, so there’s a bond that’s been formed. If something happens to her, then it’s tough – they’re like our children. When I go home, I always call my friends and ask how Jarden is: if she’s eating, if she’s sick. I’m not even like this with my own family.” However, it isn’t all sweet and rosy. Like other countries, including the US, military dogs are considered
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a piece of equipment on paper. “Simply speaking, they’re like a gun,” explains Lt. Col Kosol. “You didn’t buy the gun, so when you’re done using it, you have to return it. It’s the government’s property.... They’re a piece of equipment... a piece of equipment that can also be used as a weapon.” But talking to other handlers and trainers, it’s clear that the dogs are more than just mere tools. “When people talk about the dogs, there are a lot of different mindsets that come into play,” says MSgt-1st Wittaya. “But to the people who don’t actually work with K9s, they don’t know how it is. They might just see them as equipment for work, but for us, it’s something else. If we work, we technically use one piece of equipment, which is the dog. But when we’re done, they’re our buddies. If I’m eating a box of rice,
They’re our friends. If you don’t trust them, and if they don’t tell you something’s wrong, then there’s going to be a problem. We’re looking for bombs. If we make a mistake, we or the people behind us will be in trouble.
Special duty dogs in training.
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Jarden searches for explosive materials.
I’ll eat half and give my dog the other half [laughs]…. They’re our friends. If you don’t trust them, and if they don’t tell you something’s wrong, then there’s going to be a problem. We’re looking for bombs. If we make a mistake, we or the people behind us will be in trouble. We’re buddies. We have to know each other [to work together].” The Future Overseeing the usage of military dogs is the Military Dog Battalion. Its commander, Lt. Colonel Prapas Sripratoom, is responsible for assessing and analysing the threats of the present and the future so that both dog and handler are fully prepared once they encounter them. With these threats, new and interesting projects have manifested. On July 10, 2014, the battalion’s Facebook page uploaded a photo of an airborne German Shepherd, dangling amid clouds from an open parachute and alone. The caption reads, “Military dogs go parachuting…. Another step forward in the Military Dog Battalion and a historic picture
for Thailand’s military dogs.” The photo was met with both praise and criticism, but the important question is why? “It’s part of expanding the limits of the army’s duties,” explains Lt. Col. Prapas. “To have more variety – this is normal for every team. And it’s also to have more choice in how to bring military dogs into our operational areas. We normally go by car, foot, or a helicopter that lands. But in some circumstances, the operations area isn’t easily accessible, so it’s necessary to bring the dogs down by air.” In the Thai army’s practice, there are two ways to send the dogs by air: 1) Sending the dog down alone with personnel already in the area to receive him, and 2) Sending both the person and the dog, with the dog jumping out first and the person after. “When jumping like this, you might ask if they’re going to go in different directions, but it rarely happens. They’re usually in the same vicinity, and the soldier will control his parachute so he lands as close to the dog as possible.” Another dog in the making is
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July 9, 2014: Four-year-old female German shepherd Apply was the first K9 to go airborne solo.
a multi-skilled K9, similar to the dogs in the US SEAL’s. They’re attack dogs who are also able to patrol, warn of incoming enemies and detect bombs. “We don’t have them in our country so far, so we’re still training them. It’s necessary to select the best K9s because they have to be smart, skilled and strong. These dogs will be parachuting, as well. It’s adding to the skillsets that we have in our battalion.” With the GT-200 controversy
still fresh and even the most cutting-edge bomb detection technology flawed, dogs still have a huge part to play in the Thai military. According to Lt. Colonel Prapas, there isn’t a piece of existing technology that is better or that can replace the skills which K9s possess. And with today’s threats, be it terrorism or drug smuggling, not likely to disappear soon, it seems that K9s will continue to be called for duty.
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Even ten years later, the traumas of the 2004 tsunami are painfully felt. by jim algie / illustrations by thanawat chaweekallayakul
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ike many other people around the world, I first saw the breaking news from CNN flash across the screen above stock market reports and sports scores scrolling past on December 26th, 2004. It was Boxing Day, which surely must be named after the bruising and debilitating hangovers that one experiences on the morning following Christmas: the least auspicious time for a natural disaster to strike, catching many travelers unawares as they dozed in bed or walked woozily around buffet tables. As good luck or sheer accident had it, I was supposed to have been holidaying at Lake Toba in Sumatra. I couldn’t make it but a friend and his wife had gone ahead anyway. The maps on CNN showed the epicentre of this underwater earthquake was just off the coast of northern Sumatra. The tremors of fear worked their way out through my fingers, causing many typos while I wrote a brief email to make sure they were okay, then returned to watching the news with the kind of mounting dread that tunnels into your stomach and squats there like a tumor. For the first few hours after the 10-metre-huge waves spread across the Andaman Sea and the Indian Ocean, bulldozing everything in their path, the news networks repeated the same jerky, video-cam footage shot by tourists, of water inundating shorelines and hotel lobbies; upending automobiles; turning streets into swimming pools and swimming pools into aquariums, as people shrieked and ran. At first it seemed small in scale, only a few dozen reported dead and maybe a few hundred injured. But every hour, as reports flooded in from half a dozen different countries (Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Malaysia and the Maldives) the body count surged. Nobody, not even the TV news networks or government agencies, knew what was really going on, nor that this would turn out to be the third-largest earthquake ever recorded. The situation was still shambolic a few days later when I accepted an assignment from a tourism body to visit southern Thailand to assess the damage and write a report that would hopefully reassure overseas visitors, little realising that the grim ramifications of the task would come back to haunt me for the next decade. The first familiar face I saw while walking along Patong’s
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Beach Road, where the smaller hotels were as empty and gutted as haunted houses, after the waves trapped and drowned dozens of visitors dining at basement buffets, was a stringer for one of the better British newspapers. Her first piece about the aftermath on Phuket had just been published. In paragraph 15 she had written a sentence or two about how a few sex workers had returned to Patong and that the jet-skis were buzzing again. Her editor had entitled the article, “Prostitutes and Jet-Skis Return to Patong.” She shook her head and laughed. “Tabloid journalism at its tackiest. Thousands of people are dead and they’re playing up the titillation factor.” This was the first act in a theatre of absurdities that the media directed and enacted. Their shoddy coverage, factual errors and lack of ethics still rankle some of the expat residents on Phuket. Sue Ultmann, the director of communications for the Baan Rim Paa Restaurant Group, says, “One of the senior reporters for a major news network was staying in a big hotel with her entourage and she wanted to shoot one of her segments with a pile of rubble in front of the hotel for a backdrop. She was furious that they’d removed the rubble. It’s a shame we didn’t ask her to pay 1,000 baht per person to bring back the rubble as they could have used the money and I’m sure she would have paid.” The press quickly muddied every welcome mat up and down the Andaman Coast by running the same photos and same video clips over and over again, by their constant scaremongering about the imminent outbreaks of epidemics (which never happened and they never accounted for), while spreading a number of tall tales like the one about the fish being served at upscale seafood restaurants around the Andaman area which had allegedly fed on corpses. (That apocryphal tale was later traced back to a Thai tabloid.) Soon enough, Sue says, the word went around the tourism community: “Do not talk to the media.” When journalists cover natural disasters, they apply the same boilerplate and the same five or six angles: scientific, environmental, fiscal, political, celebrities arriving and a few standard-issue, human-interest features, such as following a survivor or relative searching for family members caught in the maelstrom.
The press quickly muddied every welcome mat up and down the Andaman Coast by running the same photos and same video clips over and over again.
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Two weeks later most of the media had flown off like vultures to circle the next series of cadavers, leaving the biggest question unasked and unanswered: How do the survivors and the bereaved cope with what has been the biggest natural disaster of our lifetimes, claiming some 250,000 lives and triggering other earthquakes as far away as Alaska? Cropped from the Bigger Picture The majority of the big news networks, wire services and international magazines limited their coverage to white Westerners; other ethnicities barely merited a mention. But these sins of omission also catalyzed some serious humanitarian endeavors, like the Insight Out Project: a sounding board for the voiceless and a creative outlet for the children who lost homes and/or family members. Many of these orphans were suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a treacherous and difficult-to-diagnose malady. (As Sue Ultmann said of the aftermath, “We were in shock but we didn’t know we were in shock.”) Started by the Japanese photojournalist, Masaru Goto, along with his wife, Yumi, a graphic designer by trade and an altruist at heart, they began giving free workshops in digital photography and journaling for young people in Banda Aceh, the most obliterated part of the region, and in Phangnga province, Thailand’s most heavily inundated area, where some 6,000 had died. Some of these images are more effective than those taken by the hard-news photographers, since they focus on starker and more personalized subjects that also show the groundlevel realities faced by the majority of the survivors and PTSD sufferers, who were cropped out of the big mass media picture in favor of rich tourists from wealthier countries. May May Lae’s chiaroscuro of a building’s black skeleton juxtaposed against sunbeams fanning out from dark clouds is almost biblical in its depiction of faith and apocalyptic destruction. That balancing act also illuminates PrinyaVarak’s image of a boy silhouetted against a lake and setting sun, whereas Myo Min Naing stares down hope in the midst of desolation by picturing a small tree that has survived the onslaught and is framed by the pillars of a gutted building. Filmmaker and long-term Bangkok expat
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Jeanne Hallacy, who is also the executive director of the project, says, “The tsunami did not only wipe out people, homes and livelihoods – it also washed away childhoods.” That is the focal point of Myo Min Naing’s shot of a doll abandoned on a beach. Many professional photographers also lent their talents and visions to the project, taking their pupils to shoot at atypical settings, like a construction site where migrant laborers from Myanmar live in metal shacks with no running water or electricity and, similar to the two young men from Myanmar charged with the murder of a pair of British backpackers on Koh Tao, are dangerously vulnerable to exploitation. As photographer Suthep Kritsanavarin says, “You can’t understand how important it is to be able to speak out unless you have spent your whole life being ignored at the bottom of society.” What emerged from these photography and journaling sessions was a series of portraits of Southeast Asian youth not glimpsed through the usual lenses of teachers, politicians and aid-organization staffers, but through their own eyes, raw and unfiltered. That is a rare and important distinction. At the launch for the 2006 exhibition of the children’s work at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand, Jeanne said, “It wasn’t really about the tsunami. It was a window in which these kids showed us what they wanted to say about themselves, their families, their dreams.” Emboldened by successes like that exhibition, the project has continued on, though they are chronically underfunded and still need donors, staging other workshops for children affected by the violence in southern Thailand, and more recently for youth turned into internal refugees thanks to the ongoing fighting in Myanmar’s Kachin state. Another project that has endured far beyond its inception after the tsunami is the Phuket Has Been Good to Us Foundation. Originally started by Tom McNamara of the Baan Rim Pa Restaurant Group, who passed away from prostate cancer a few years later, the NGO sprang up to take care of what was a common problem in post-tsunami Thailand: big aid projects that never quite got off the ground. In this case, it was two completely destroyed schools in Kalim and Kamala rebuilt but without
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any English classes. The foundation stepped in to offer English teachers and classes that give the young, mostly disadvantaged learners a better chance at finding careers in a tourism-based economy and a dormitory for those orphaned by the tsunami or who came from broken homes, so that there are now 130 students, ranging in ages from six to 18, staying there, and a thousand students partaking of the classes. Sue Ultmann, chairwoman of the board of managers, prefers to emphasize the positive repercussions of the catastrophe. “We never had ambulances until then on Phuket, and there wasn’t really a blood bank either. Enormous changes have come out of the tsunami. That’s what we like to highlight with the foundation.” But positive stories hold little appeal for the mainstream media, unless the good Samaritans are celebrities. Yet, when you talk to those who helped to rebuild the region, like Bodhi Garrett, the stories they spin are often of a more constructive and hopeful nature. He put together a not-for-profit organisation called the North Andaman Tsunami Relief that morphed into Andaman Discoveries, specialising in responsible and community-based tourism in Phangnga province. “Disaster relief lays down the foundation for community development for both a physical and social infrastructure. There were actually three tsunamis: the wave, then the influx of cash and assistance, and then the withdrawing of that assistance in the first to fourth years,” says Bodhi. “Our approach was that you need indigenous solutions to indigenous problems. You can’t enforce this outside model of development because it will fail. Tourism was just a tool to empower the villagers because their traditional ways of life, like fishing, were already dying before the tsunami.” His company has gone on to notch up some big local and international awards for their devotion to responsible tourism and conserving cultural heritage. To what does Bodhi attribute his success? “I didn’t know how to do this when I started, but I had awesome Thai folks to teach me. My moxie was Western, but the method was Thai.”
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Closure? After 9/11 and the tsunami, or almost any traumatic event, the word you hear the most often is closure. There is no such thing, in the view of Tew Bunnag, author of the short-fiction collection After the Wave. He worked down south on a Human Development Foundation project for AIDS patients, last in line for assistance after the calamity. On and off over two years he worked down there, striking up friendships and amassing material. The first tale, “Lek and Mrs. Miller,” was commissioned by the BBC’s Radio 4, which wanted to broadcast different works of short fiction from authors in each of the affected countries. It’s a subtle story that builds to a gentle climax when a grieving Englishwoman and a Thai hotel worker come together to comfort each other. The story testifies to Tew’s belief that the “tragedy was a leveller. There were no more barriers,” he writes in an e-mail, “just people joined by their pain and hence by their humanity.” Perhaps the standout tale in his collection, soon to be reprinted by River Books and featuring black-and-white photos from the Insight Out Project, is called “Closure.” It stars a gay couple supposed to holiday together in Phangnga province, except Charoon’s jealousy and insecurities prevent him from leaving at the same time as Sueb. Only a year later does Charoon, still grappling with his guilt, visit the resort where his partner stayed before he was killed. “He realised that this need for closure was fictional, a device to round off a story or a film. In reality there was no ending to anything and his grief could not be healed by any formal gesture and that true forgiveness would require much more than scattering ashes in the sea and mouthing a few prayers. He had to make the choice of going on or of drowning.” The will to live resurfaces when Charoon finally takes a new lover a respectful 18 months after Seub’s death. Another barrier that stands in the way of closure, for those of us who were there, was the sheer horror of the scenes unfolding in living and
“There were actually three tsunamis: the wave, then the influx of cash and assistance, and then the withdrawing of that assistance in the first to fourth years.”
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dying colours at places like Wat Yanyao in Phangnga province, where Dr. Pornthip Rojanasunand and her team worked for 40 days straight to identify some 5,000 cadavers laid out in a makeshift graveyard on the temple grounds and covered with dry ice to keep them from decomposing too quickly, so an eerie mist floated over the dead and sometimes you’d see chickens pecking at the eyes of corpses before the monks and forensic workers chased them away. Those scenes are imprinted upon our memories in the indelible ink of tattoos. Over time they have darkened and blurred, but they will never fade away entirely. When the TV news networks do their 10th-anniversary stories – read: two-minute clips – this year none of those scenes will be included. Nor will the fact that after cadavers have been in the water for five or six days, it’s hard to tell whether they are Asian or Caucasian, or even male or female. Due to a phenomenon that forensic scientists call “skin slippage,” facial features are almost completely unrecognisable. So you have to look for tattoos, wedding rings, scars and piercings, or use DNA samples and dental records. By far the most disturbing incident that I experienced personally came when I was helping a Scandinavian woman looking for her teenage son in the middle of these rows of bodies. We were bending over another blob of blackened, misshapen flesh when the corpse started moaning. Imagining some zombie coming back to life, we ran over to talk to Dr. Pornthip, who explained to us that when gases escape from a decomposing body they make the vocal cords vibrate and the dead appear to speak. I used that incident more or less word for word in the concluding novella, “Tsunami,” to my short-fiction collection released earlier this year, The Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand. You see, I also needed to close a chapter of my life that has gone on for the past decade. As it turned out, the friends I was supposed to visit Sumatra with were fine. The report I had to write for the tourism body was not; the boss lady forbade me to mention the tsunami even once. That’s a
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mighty big whitewash. It does tend to weigh on one’s conscience. So I kept returning to the south, interviewing more survivors, hearing about their ongoing phobias and traumas, writing stories about the anniversaries and the more memorable rituals to honour the dead. On Phuket, for instance, the authorities released more than 5,000 lanterns to give all those lost souls a Thai-Buddhist sendoff as monks chanted on a beach turned phosphorescent by moonlight. In the final novella, spanning some 42,000 words in my book, the French-Canadian writer, Yves, concludes that there is no possible way he can do justice to such an enormous tragedy that impacted so many lives in so many different countries, but instead of all the different journalism angles he has seen or used – political or environmental, spiritual or scientific, fiscal or touristic – he decides to jettison them all in favor of a more humane touch while standing around in the deserted Phuket International Airport at midnight where the walls are filled with photocopied posters – “paper ghosts of the missing presumed dead.” Yves writes: “In the end, it wasn’t all that important what any of the deceased did for a living, what kind of cars they drove or what grades they got in school. Whether they were accountants or policewomen, travel agents or investment bankers, most were easily replaced in their workaday lives, as we all are when our time comes, which could not be said for the pivotal parts they played in any number of domestic scenarios as wives and sons, sisters, lovers, fathers. Their absences would be most sharply felt during family reunions on national holidays, at birthday parties in living rooms and at anniversary dinners in fancy restaurants lit by candles and smiles floating in the darkness, and during the photo sessions following graduation ceremonies when the missing person popped up in everyone’s mind but not inside the frames of any photographs. “All the dead had been loved and that was their greatest legacy. It was why their lives mattered and why their deaths would be mourned by their loved ones for many years to come.”
After 9/11 and the tsunami, or almost any traumatic event, the word you hear the most often is closure.
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The Christmas Market, or Christkindlmarkt, in full swing.
another nuremberg Echoing with a history that is both brilliant and chilling, Nuremberg puts on a cracking Christmas. by keith mundy
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here are places in the world whose names mean only one thing. Take these examples from four continents: Guernica, Hiroshima, Sharpeville, Jonestown, Chernobyl. They are all towns or cities whose reputation has been hijacked by one historical event of great power or horror. Nuremberg is another. Despite one thousand years of history, for a good part of which this South German city was preeminent in cultural and economic significance – including as a beacon of humanism and a fountain of great art in the Renaissance period – its name means one grim thing outside Germany: Nazism, its megalomaniacal rallies and its judicial termination. You can’t ignore Nazi Nuremberg, but let’s dump Adolf Hitler to the bottom of the story where he belongs and bring on somebody infinitely more worthy as the leitmotif of the city: Albrecht Dürer. A supremely gifted and versatile artist, Albrecht Dürer was born in Nuremberg in 1471 and spent most of his life there. Establishing his reputation and influence across Europe when still in his twenties, Dürer has ever since been regarded as the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance. A brilliant painter, engraver, draughtsman and mathematician, he made his greatest impact in printmaking, with woodcuts and engravings whose technical virtuosity, intellectual scope and psychological depth far surpassed earlier printed work. In fact, astonishingly, his engravings were so complex that his prints have never been technically bettered in all the five centuries since. But Dürer was more than a supreme artist: he was also a great entrepreneur and commercial innovator, mass producing his prints and widely distributing high-quality art for the first time in history. Selling his prints throughout Europe and beyond, he trademarked them
Situated in the heart of Europe, it was a major trading centre that played a leading role in the working of metal and textiles, building instruments, making paper and printing books.
with stylised AD initials, creating the first German brand of excellence centuries before the likes of the Mercedes-Benz logo. With this, following Gutenberg and his invention of the printing press in Mainz 200 kilometres to the west, Nuremberg’s greatest son was one of the initiators of the modern age. Like Gutenberg too, Dürer became wealthy, acquiring a fine house in the centre of Nuremberg in which he ran his business and created his works, and used his own printing press. That house, Dürer’s home from 1509 until his death in 1528, still exists in Tiergärtnertorplatz, one of the city’s most beautiful old squares, in the lee of the Kaiserburg, the Imperial Castle, which towers over the city. Rebuilt several times, it was turned into a memorial house in 1828, the oldest one in Europe after Michelangelo’s in Florence, which tells you something about Dürer’s prestige in Germany. A stout half-timbered building of four storeys built in 1420, here you can get rich insights into Dürer’s life, work and techniques via working models, multimedia displays and copies of his creations. And meet his
Albrecht Dürer’s house.
wife, Agnes, his able assistant – or rather an actress playing her who conducts tours in person and on the audioguide. n impressive example of a late Gothic town house, the Albrecht Dürer House evokes Nuremberg’s greatest period of prosperity and influence. For Dürer didn’t come out of any ordinary city, but out of one of Europe’s great craftmaking, commercial and cultural centres during the 15th and 16th centuries. It was also politically pre-eminent, the pivot of the Holy Roman Empire which oversaw the many German states, and a sight to behold, its thousand roofs clustered behind high walls and protected by the Kaiserburg castle towering above. “What a marvellous view this city presents! What splendour, what magnificent sights, what beauties, what culture, what an admirable government... what clean streets and elegant houses!” That was the perspective of Aeneus Silvius Piccolomini, an Italian visitor in the
mid-15th century, a time when Italy was the leading nation in Europe, full of sophisticated city-states, and no Italian was easily impressed by foreign cities. Nuremberg was a free imperial city which enjoyed the privilege of trading duty-free with all other cities. Every new German emperor had to hold his first Imperial Diet – gathering of regional rulers – in Nuremberg. That status was amplified when in 1424 the imperial insignia, crown jewels and holy relics were moved to the city to keep in perpetuity, ritually displayed once a year in the main marketplace and mesmerising the public. Nuremberg experienced an economic and cultural flowering which reached its zenith during Dürer’s time. Situated in the heart of Europe, it was a major trading centre that played a leading role in the working of metal and textiles, building instruments, making paper and printing books. Wealthy and powerful, in the 15th and 16th centuries it attracted numerous scholars and became Germany’s
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Central market.
“What a marvellous view this city presents!” wrote a mid-15th century visitor. “What splendour, what magnificent sights, what beauties, what culture, what an admirable government... what clean streets and elegant houses!”
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View from a castle over the snow-covered roofs.
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dominant city of the Renaissance, a centre of humanism and the fine arts. Nuremberg sat upon a major crossroads of long-distance European trade: amber, salted fish and furs came in from the Baltic, the raw materials of the metalworking crafts such as gold, silver and copper came in from Hungary and Bohemia, valuable silks and luxury items from Venice, and fine cloth from the Low Countries. Commercially dominant, Nuremberg’s measures, weights and coinage were regional points of reference, and its market prices were benchmarks for price-setting in other cities. Long a centre of bookmaking, Nuremberg set up the first German paper mill in 1390, and in 1470 the new printing presses came in and flourished. Using its pre-eminence as a centre of humanism, along with its superlative metalworking, the city cornered the making of precisionengineered instruments for use in scientific disciplines, exporting them far afield. Nuremberg maps were used on pilgrimages to the holy sites and the great trade fairs, and the first
map globes were made in the city. Using locally made instruments, the astronomer Regiomontanus mapped the night sky and calculated the movement of the stars. The modern lead pencil was invented in Nuremberg, and continues to be produced in the area by the famous Faber-Castell and Staedtler companies. The master locksmith Peter Henlein invented a portable clock, sometimes called the first watch, which ran for 40 hours. Nothing lasts forever, though, and after the discovery of the Americas and the opening of sea routes to the New World and to Asia in the 16th century, plus the terrible depredations of the Thirty Years War which halved its population, Nuremberg slumped, losing much trade to the Western European seaports. But the city remained a great beauty, Germany’s most complete medieval and Renaissance city, an historic gem that was “the most German of German cities” according to one of its mayors, until the night of January 2, 1945, when Britain’s Royal Air Force bombed the
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Altstadt – the old walled city – to smithereens in one catastrophic raid performed by an incredible armada of 514 four-engined Lancaster bombers. One of the few buildings left recognisable was the Kaiserburg, half-destroyed on its rocky crag. Most buildings had been flattened or reduced to shattered shells. When the war was over, the city decided to rebuild the whole of the Old City in replica, as far as it possibly could, and so it is that you walk today through the same old pattern of winding cobbled streets opening out into squares, lined with Gothic- and Renaissance-style houses, that was there pre-1945 – with, it has to be said, plenty of obviously modern façades, and none of the quirky angles that genuinely old buildings lean into, their timbers bending with the The Egidienkirche church, built in 1711.
needs of time. That said, it’s not a theme park, either, since much of the city’s everyday commerce and administration is done in the Altstadt. All in all, it’s a pleasant pedestrianised ramble, with several interesting buildings to visit, and plenty of sausage and pizza pitstops, cafés, and taverns for refuelling or idling. The lengthy Hauptmarkt, or Market Square, lies at its heart, still operating as a marketplace for fresh food, sold at red-and-white-striped stalls, and the soaring twin spires of the 15th-century Lorenzkirche are a major landmark. For half-timbered atmosphere, Weissgerbergasse Street and Tiergärtnertor Square stand out, having escaped severe war damage. St. Sebalduskirche, the oldest parish church, has in its brass Shrine of St. Sebald a highpoint of German Renaissance metalwork. A sumptuous glimpse of the city’s golden age is
nuremberg FACT FILE Thai Airways flies daily non-stop from Bangkok to Munich. Trains from the airport to Nuremberg via Munich take about two hours. Hotels Hotel Am Josephsplatz Josephsplatz 30-32; www.hotel-am-josephsplatz.de Beautiful traditional hotel in the Altstadt. Sorat Hotel Saxx Nurnberg Hauptmarkt 17; www.sorat-hotels.com A centrally located modern hotel. Restaurants Zum Guldenen Stern Zirkelschmiedsgasse 26 www.bratwurstkueche.de Dishing up fine Nurnberger pork sausages since 1419, so it claims. Goldenes Posthorn Glockleinsgasse 2 http://die-nuernberger-bratwurst.de Local Franconian cuisine with a pedigree dating from 1498. Sights Albrecht Dürer House http://museums.nuremberg.de Open daily 10am-5pm. Entrance €5. Kaiserburg www.schloesser.bayern.de. Open 10am-4pm in winter. Entrance €7. Documentation Centre Reich Party Rally Grounds, Bayernstrasse 110 http://museums.nuremberg.de Open Mon-Fri 9am-6pm, Sat-Sun 10am-6pm. Entrance €5. Memorium Nuremberg Trials Bärenschanzstrasse 72 www.memorium-nuremberg.de Open 10am-6pm except Tuesdays. Entrance €5. An al fresco bratwurst restaurant.
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provided by the Tucher Mansion, a lavishly restored Renaissance aristocrat’s home, and the city’s history is dramatically presented at the Fembohaus, a late Renaissance merchant’s house of great beauty. The Hausbrauerei is a working antique brewery whose premises and warren of cellars can be visited, and whose dark brew – typical of Nuremberg – can be quaffed in its next-door pub. The most eye-catching piece of fakery is surely the replica of the 14th-entury Schöner Brunnen – a gaudily painted Gothic spire crowded with a bizarre mix of figures including Biblical prophets and German princes. Make-believe in the Altstadt reaches its zenith in December, when the Hauptmarkt hosts Germany’s largest and most famous Christmas market, called the Christkindlesmarkt – the 210
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Christ-child’s market. The city’s biggest festival, this is where the Christmas-fair custom that enlivens every German city each year’s end began back in the 17th century, after the old custom of giving children presents at New Year switched to Christmas. A seasonal market grew up to meet the soaring demand for traditional gifts such as carved toys and tasty sweetmeats, eventually imitated throughout the country. From the Friday before Advent until Christmas Eve, the Market Square is transformed into an enchanted land of wooden stalls and bright bunting, lit by lanterns at night, when it is at its most entrancing. Despite Christkindlesmarkt’s enormous popularity – it gets pretty crowded as Christmas nears with visitors from all over the world – tatty commercialism is trumped by A toy stall at Nuremberg’s Christmas Market.
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charming traditionalism. Vendors pile their stalls with hand-carved wooden toys, traditional decorations and all kinds of craftwork. Highlights are the Rauschgoldengel (gold foil angels) and Zwetschgenma’nnle (odd figures made from crepe paper and prunes) that have decorated local homes at yuletide for centuries. Aromas of sizzling sausages and freshly baked Lebkuchen gingerbread hang in the sharp winter air, with shoppers merrily imbibing mulled wine to keep warm and feel even more festive. At nightfall on the first day a gilded angel – a pretty teenager chosen for the event – ringingly recites a prologue from a balcony of the Frauenkirche, the imperial church which overlooks the square, and little terrestrial angels trill carols down below. A few days later, together with strings of school chums all bearing home-made lanterns, they wind in procession up the hill from the Market Square to the castle. The next big event is the Toy Fair, the world’s largest, held every February and reflecting Nuremberg’s long renown as a toy-manufacturing centre, a business which helped revive the city after World War II’s devastation, along with big corporate hitters like Siemens, MAN and Grundig. Ending two centuries of decline, the city had regained its mojo in the industrial revolution, becoming Bavaria’s top manufacturing centre. By the time of World War II, Nuremberg was a powerhouse of armaments-making, most notably accounting for some 40 percent of Panzer-tank production. But what led the Allied bombers to smash the city on that apocalyptic night in 1945 was more its cultural significance for the Nazis than its industrial importance. Like that past mayor, Hitler also thought Nuremberg was the most German of German cities, making it an ideal location for the Nazi party headquarters and its mass celebrations. Any visitor with a feeling for history is drawn to the site
of the gigantic Nazi rallies of the 1930s held on the city’s outskirts. If you’ve watched the old newsreels and especially Leni Riefenstal’s film Triumph of the Will (1935), you know what to expect – only without the fanatical Nazi masses and stormtroopers. But you won’t in fact see a vast concrete parade ground surrounded by stone terraces and arcades. The great expanse where the Nazis gathered in serried ranks has been returned to grass as a municipal park, and the masonry is crumbling and weed-infested. The power of the place has been defused, leaving you to rerun the newsreels in your mind to get the historical picture. And then it comes back, the mad barking of Hitler, the swooning faces of the crowd, the forest of right arms raised and extended, the fanatical bellowing of “Sieg Heil!” in a ghostly echo. One of the surviving structures of this failed Naziland has been turned into a documentation centre showing how the Nazis rose to power, stage-managed the rallies and mesmerised the masses. Among the things today’s Germans do superbly well is ensuring nobody forgets how the nation went badly wrong in the Nazi era. At the Palace of Justice in the city centre is another element in this remembrance, an exhibition on the war-crimes tribunal at the very location where the surviving Nazi leadership was brought to book after the war. The actual courtroom used in the trials can also be visited when not in use, an eerie experience. Here, a regime which was supposed to last a thousand years got its judicial termination after just twelve. But to make your own judgment on Nuremberg, which by contrast has lasted roughly a millennium, a far better arena is the Albrecht Dürer House, where the most worthy spirit of this resilient and deeply significant city resides.
photo: ©corbis / profile
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seasonal gems Here are three far-separated places with distinctive Christmas festivities.
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Manila New York
No American city does a show like New York does, so Christmas in the Big Apple is a dazzling affair. In the city where Tin Pan Alley propagated Yuletide anthems like “Jingle Bells,” “Sleigh Ride” and “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer,” Christmas is big. Nowhere are there so many Santa Clauses ho-ho-ho-ing for the benefit of so many squealing children, and so many elves helping out as in the malls, department stores and entertainment centres of New York. The sparkling hub of Christmas is Rockefeller Centre, whose plaza boasts a huge tree with 30,000 lights and the famous outdoor skating rink. Inside Radio City Music Hall, there’s the Christmas Spectacular with dozens of dancing Santas high-kicking with the Rockettes. Macy’s huge store in Herald Square offers Santaland – an extravaganza of Christmas trees, elves, toy trains and snow-filled wonder, while no kid should miss the fun at the great toy stores like FAO Schwartz and the Times Square Toys “R” Us.
Bethlehem
As you’d expect, Christmas in the town where Jesus was born is a major event, even though most of the population is Muslim. First mentioned in chronicles around 1350 BCE, the town first appeared in the Bible as the coronation place of King David. Today a Palestinian town of the West Bank, situated just 10 kilometres south of Jerusalem, Bethlehem boasts about 25,000 townspeople living primarily from tourism provided by the intense interest of Christians from all over the world, which climaxes each year-end. Some of the town’s celebrations are familiar – streets strung with Christmas lights, a Christmas market, Christmas plays – but special to Bethlehem is the multiplicity of rituals and processions enacted by different Christian denominations: Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox, Ethiopian, Armenian and more. Most processions pass through Manger Square, site of the Basilica of the Nativity, which stands where Jesus was supposedly born. The celebrations last a long time, as the denominations have different calendars.
The Philippines is the only majorityChristian country in Asia, so naturally the capital city, Manila, makes the most of Christmas. In the Cubao district, a 30-metre-tall Christmas tree stands in front of the Araneta Coliseum (Big Dome) mall, twinkling with more than 10,000 lights, switched on by movie stars and other celebrities. Watching an automated mechanical Christmas show is a well-loved Filipino tradition, best seen at Greenhills Shopping Centre, San Juan district. About 30 figures present Christmas stories with intricate movements, pretty lights and music. A standout show is put on by the wealthy residents of Policarpio Street in the Mandaluyong district. Thousands of shimmering lights wrap the houses from the towers to the gates, while the gardens are adorned with Beléns (nativity scenes), Santa Clauses and other Christmas motifs. Outside Manila at San Isidro is the Casa Santa Museum with over 2,000 Santa Claus items – from a chessboard with Santa figurines to Swarovski-crystal Santas.