日本媒体

当全世界纸媒都在苦海里挣扎的时候，日本各大报纸虽然也遭受冲击，发行量出现了一定程度的下滑，但值得关注的是，日本各大报社的日子过得都还不错。原因在于，日本的报纸零售量出现了下降，但订阅数并没有出现太大的跌幅。日本全国120家日报中，这几年只关停了一家。
为什么日本的纸媒日子还能如此好过？这里面有几个重要的原因。

首先，日本国民相信媒体报道的公正性与中立性，他们认为报纸报道的东西都是真的。为什么日本人会如此相信报纸？因为日本六大报业集团都是民营的，政府没有参股，也无法管控这些媒体。也就是说，这些报业集团没有上级管理单位；最大的管理机构，就是报社自己的经营委员会。因此，这些媒体能够保持自己的独立性。

而报社本身又实行经营与编辑体制的分离，一家报社的灵魂人物，不是社长，而是总编。因为社长只负责经营，报纸的采编与立场观点的体现，都属于总编的权限范围。而总编的权限，又受到两个机构的牵制。一个是编辑委员会，负责具体的新闻报道方针和内容的审核；另一个是论说委员会，负责每天社论的撰写。这两个委员会实际上把控了整个报社的报道立场与方针，而不会因为总编的更换而改变一家报纸的色彩。

正因为如此，日本国民中产生了一大批报纸的追随者。比如，思想倾向于保守和民粹主义的读者，喜欢订阅《读卖新闻》；文化与旅游资讯的读者，喜欢订阅《每日新闻》；公司白领和企业经营者，喜欢订阅《日本经济新闻》。这叫“萝卜白菜，各有所爱”。按照现在时髦的说法，就是日本的报业出现了“粉丝经济”。

日本家庭都有订阅报纸的习惯。早在20世纪50年代，日本基本上就普及了报纸，这个“普及”的概念，就是家家户户订阅报纸。因此，半个多世纪以来，报纸已经成为日本人日常生活中必不可少的日用品。早上起来，泡上一壶茶，读刚刚送到家的报纸，成了日本社会的一道风景。这道风景在电影和电视剧里也经常出现。

文章读到这里，大家一定会想到一个问题，报社努力地想保持自己的公正性和中立性，那么，当政府需要其做出配合，或者要求他们不要报道某些敏感的话题，报社会怎么办？

这个问题，在日本并不复杂。首先，政府没有权力对报社和其他新闻媒体指手画脚，更无法发号施令。因此也自然无法要求报社报道什么，不报道什么。其次，政府如果通过其他手段对某一家“不听话”的媒体进行施压，那结果是会遭到所有媒体的报复。

日本人普遍认为媒体的第一功能就是代表读者，也就是国民来监督政府。因此，“批评政府”是报社的第一责任。你批评的越多，读者会认为你的公正性就越强，对于报纸的信任度也就越高。

- 徐静波，《日本的底力》，2019

日本新干线（3）

日本新干线有几项特殊的技术，值得我们关注。

首先是遭遇地震时的瞬间紧急停车系统。日本的新干线大部分线路是在靠近太平洋一侧的沿海地区，这一地区是太平洋板块和菲律宾板块与欧亚大陆板块的交叠处，地震十分的频繁。2011年发生的东日本9级大地震，也是在这一沿海地带。当年地震发生时，在灾区奔跑的新干线列车就有20多列，最终只有一列新干线列车在高架桥上出轨，但是没有人员伤亡。为什么日本的新干线能在如此巨大地震来袭时，依然安然无恙？地震紧急停车系统发挥了很大的作用。当地震发生的瞬间，铁路公司就能在地震波尚未抵达铁路线的十几秒的时间里，通过这一系统实施紧急自动减速，当地震波来袭时，新干线已经处于减速运营状态，最大限度地避免出轨的危险。

新干线不仅设置了对各条线路上行驶的列车进行监视和远距离控制的中央控制系统，每条线路还安装了称为“ATC”的列车速度自动控制系统。这个“ATC”装置可以自动调整新干线列车的行驶速度或停止运行，并不需要驾驶人员操作。如果前方和后方列车接触距离接近1500米时，双方列车都会自动紧急刹车，避免撞车事故的发生。由此可见，日本新干线早已经可以无人驾驶。

日本新干线采用的是动力分散方式，以每节车厢的车轴作为驱动，不需要沉重的机车，由此车厢的轴重便可大大减轻，不仅易于加减速和在大坡度线路上平稳行驶，也降低了噪音和振动，大大提高了旅客的舒适性，同时，由于降低了对轨面的压力，既降低了建设成本又提高了经济效益。随着半导体技术的迅速发展和应用，新干线列车的制动系统由原来的空气制动改为电空联合制动与再生制动，使用再生制动的列车在制动时会将电机的接线反接，这时电动机就变成了发电机，将列车制动时的巨大动能转化为电能，从而节省了能源。日本新干线是目前世界上运营品质最佳的高速铁路。

- 徐静波，《日本的底力》，2019

日本新干线（2）

日本新干线在半个多世纪中，时速从最初的200公里到目前的320公里，只提升了120公里。而我们中国的高速铁路从日本和德国等国家引进才10多年，“复兴号”已经跑出了350公里，为什么日本的新干线跑不出350公里的时速呢？

其实，在中国还没有引进高铁的1997年，日本新干线955系列就已经跑出了443公里的时速。日本为什么硬是把速度降下来，始终控制在300公里左右呢？我采访了JR东海铁道公司的技术部长，他告诉我几个原因。

第一是出于运营安全的考虑。因为日本是一个岛国，大部分地区是丘陵地带，许多新干线线路是不断地穿越隧道的，当列车高速穿越隧道时，车头会产生压缩波，车尾会产生膨胀波，乘客坐在新干线列车上，耳膜会有一种压迫感，影响坐车的舒适度。因此，日本的新干线不宜开到时速350公里以上。

第二是为了防止地震导致的交通事故。日本各地经常发生地震，如果列车速度过快，在地震波来袭之前不能有效减速停驶，那么很可能会飞出铁轨，酿成重大灾难。

第三是出于经济利益的考虑。日本铁路公司经过测算，新干线时速控制在300公里以下，其轮轨的磨损率处于最经济、最合理的区域。如果时速超过300公里，磨损率会出现大幅提高，运营成本也会因此大大增加。

“我们不能因为早到十几、二十分钟而去冒这个险。”这是这位技术部长最后跟我说的话。

- 徐静波，《日本的底力》，2019

日本新干线（1）

日本的新干线诞生于1964年，许多读者朋友可能还没有出生。这一年，日本承办了第一次东京奥运会。为了显示日本战后复兴的成果，日本用了4年的时间，建造了这条从东京到大阪的高速铁路的新干线。当时新干线的时速是200公里，对于还在乘坐时速30公里的绿皮火车的国家来说，日本的新干线已经属于“子弹列车”了。

为什么日本当时能够造出世界上最高速的列车？原因其实很简单，虽然日本在第二次世界大战中战败投降，而且日本列岛还被美军炸得一塌糊涂，但是人还在，技术没有灭亡。因此，在20世纪50年代开始进入经济复兴时期的时候，日本人首先想到的是，如何将东京首都圈和关西经济圈这两大日本的经济核心地区建立起最为紧密的联系？于是想到了建造高速列车。东京到大阪的距离有515公里，当时坐夜行列车需要一个晚上。新干线建成后，东京到大阪只需要4个小时，提速之后，现在只需要2小时25分钟。

从1964年开通东海道新干线以来，到目前为止，以东京车站为枢纽，日本已经建造了8条新干线，从东京始发，可以穿越海底隧道，直接登陆北海道。也可以从东京出发，直接抵达最西南端的福冈市。现在除了冲绳县还没有新干线外，其他大部分地区都已经覆盖了这一高速铁路网络。

日本是一个多灾多难的国家，地震和台风频繁袭击日本列岛。但是半个多世纪以来，日本的新干线创下了两大奇迹：一是没有因为列车自身原因死过一个人；二是准点率以秒计算，东海道新干线的全年平均晚点时间在八秒以内。

为什么日本的新干线能够创下这两大奇迹呢？

日本的新干线从车辆技术到运营管理系统，都是日本自己研发并逐年提高的。长年的技术积累和坚定的安全经营意识，使得日本新干线始终以“安全”为第一考量，“速度”排在第三位，第二位是“经济利益的平衡”。

- 徐静波，《日本的底力》，2019

What Do We Teach Our Children

Are we moving toward something, or away from it? Are we teaching our children to march forward, the banner of their civilization in hand, or to back slowly away from it, watching the shining city on the hill receding into the distance? So, what do we teach our children? What must they know to become defenders of the only civilization worth fighting for?
 
1. Your Life Has Purpose. Life is not a bewildering, chaotic mess. It’s a struggle, but it’s a struggle guided by a higher meaning. You were designed to use your reason and your natural gifts—and to cultivate those assets toward fulfillment of a higher end. That end can be discovered by investigating the nature of the world, and by exploring the history of our civilization. That end includes defending the rights of the individual and the preciousness of individual lives; it includes acting with virtues including justice and mercy. It means restoring the foundations of your civilization, and building new and more beautiful structures atop those foundations.
 
2. You Can Do It. Forge forth and conquer. Build. Cultivate. You were given the ability to choose your path in life—and you were born into the freest civilization in the history of mankind. Make the most of it. You are not a victim. In a free society, you are responsible for your actions. Your successes are your accomplishments, but they are also the legacy of those who came before you and those who stand with you; your failures are purely your own. Look to your own house before blaming the society that bore you. And if society is acting to violate individual rights, it is your job to work to change it. You are a human being, made in the image of God, bound to the earth but with a soul that dreams of the eternal. There is no greater risk than that and no greater opportunity than that.
 
3. Your Civilization Is Unique. Recognize that what you have been given is unique in human history.  Most human beings have lived under the control of others, suffered tyranny and oppression. You have not. The freedom you enjoy, and morals in which you believe, are products of a unique civilization—the civilization of Dante and Shakespeare, the civilization of Bach and Beethoven, the civilization of the Bible and Aristotle. You did not create your freedoms or your definition of virtue, nor did they arise in a vacuum. Learn your history. Explore where the roots of your values lie: in Jerusalem and Athens. Be grateful for those roots. Then defend those roots, even as you grow to new heights.
 
4. We Are All Brothers and Sisters. We are not enemies if we share a common cause. And our common cause is a civilization replete with purpose, both communal and individual, a civilization that celebrates both individual and communal capacity. If we fight alongside one another rather than against one another, we are stronger. But we can only be stronger when we pull in the same direction, and when we share the same vision. We must share the same definition of liberty when it comes to politics, and, broadly speaking, the same definition of virtue when it comes to creating and maintaining social capital.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History, 2019.

Moltmann’s Perichoretic Trinity

Perichoresis is a concept originally appropriated by Moltmann in order to frame his understanding of an intensely relational, communal Trinity. Derived from the teaching of John Damascene and Richard of St. Victor, perichoresis has come to refer to a circulatory, interpenetrating, relational sharing between two realities or forms of existence, to the point where they co-define each other and share attributes.
 
In reference to Christology, perichoresis was traditionally seen as a one-way interpenetration and exchange between the two natures, flowing solely from the divine to the human—the classic image was the piece of iron (the humanity) heated red by fire (the divinity). But much like his trinitarian radicalization of the Lutheran communicatio idiomata, Moltmann posits a reciprocal exchange in his articulations of perichoresis. For him, perichoresis becomes the great binary blurring device; it is, in essence, the supreme form of “both/and” (rather than “either/or”) reasoning. Dualisms dissolve and conceptual dichotomies disintegrate as perichoretic logic argues for unity and diversity to co-participate as mutually-shaping realities.
 
In Moltmann’s trinitarianism, perichoresis involves a clear kenotic element. His use of kenosis here bespeaks the necessary limitations inherent in relationship, rather than a divestiture of some attribute or another. Moltmann will speak of the trinitarian persons “making room” for each other; they are three distinct persons, and yet are united in all things, through the hospitable perfection of kenotic love.
 
Each one of [the three Persons] is active and passive, giving and receiving at the same time. By giving themselves to each other, the perichoretic community is also a kenotic community. The Persons are emptying themselves into each other. . . . It is divine love which draws a Person so much out of himself, that it exists “in” the other. It is the self-emptying of the three persons in this perichoretic exchange that Moltmann relies on to deflect the charge of tri-theism, which often assails his social trinitarian outlook.
 
Though many of Moltmann’s more impassioned descriptions of his perichoretic Trinity are striking, some scholars have objected to his sometimes inconsistent employment and qualification of such language. But more directly pertinent to our project is how Moltmann eventually applies the concept of perichoresis to his understanding of the two natures in Christ (which is how John Damascene initially employed it). Explicit affirmation of this perichoretic unity of the natures has emerged in Moltmann’s more recent work:
 

Perichoresis describes the unity of Godhead and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. This is not a matter of two who are by nature similar being bound together in inward community. Here are two different natures—that is, the one and the other. . . . In Christology, perichoresis describes the mutual interpenetration of two different natures, the divine and the human, in the God-human being Christ.

Perichoresis, as we noted for his trinitarianism, is a kenotic reality for Moltmann. Thus, when we talk about Moltmann’s kenotic Christology, we must recognize that we are dealing with a dual-leveled kenosis. One level is intra-trinitarian and refers to the continued kenotic relating between the divine persons; this is derived by Moltmann from the way in which Christ relates to the Father and the Spirit in the course of earthly life. The other level of the kenosis is the relationship between Christ’s divinity and humanity, and refers to the humiliation and lowliness undertaken by God in becoming human. Both dimensions of this perichoretic kenosis are operative in his understanding of the incarnation, though they are not always explicitly highlighted and much of the specifics of their mutually exchanging interpenetration (especially any kind of specific ontological commentary) are left without speculation. Moltmann is comfortable to simply say: “This is undoubtedly God’s greatest mystery: his closeness . . . Emmanuel, ‘God with us’—with us, the godless and God-forsaken.”
 
Once these themes are balanced, we can see the truth in Gary Badcock’s assessment that “Moltmann’s position is best understood as a trinitarian intensification of the doctrine of the hypostatic union. . . . Moltmann’s point is not to deny the divinity but to affirm its unity with the humanity, on the basis of his understanding of the unity of the economic and the immanent Trinity.” 

- Samuel J. Youngs, The Way of the Kenotic Christ: 

The Christology of Jürgen Moltmann, 2019 

Radical and Revelatory: Moltmann’s Reading of Kenosis

The beginning of Moltmann’s kenotic Christology is thus neither in the concealment nor abandonment camp; his overarching kenotic theology means that his Christology reads Phil 2 as revelatory for divinity itself. Likewise, Colin Gunton (in the midst of a salvo against radical forms of kenotic Christology) writes that “it seems not inappropriate to speak of a self-emptying of God, but only if it is understood in such a way as to be an expression rather than a ‘retraction’ of his deity.” This well sums the trajectory that initializes Moltmann’s kenotic Christology.
 
Thus, we can call the baseline outlook on kenotic Christology that we find in Moltmann a “radical revelatory” model, for it uniquely combines emphases from both the radical interpretation and the revelatory. It entails real limitations applied to the divinity of Christ in his becoming human, but these limitations are extensions and radicalizations of the already existing kenotic patterns of the God-world relationship. The thematic thrust of this is conveyed by Moltmann in the following key passage:
 

[If] the significance of the Son’s incarnation is his true humanity, then the incarnation reveals the true humanity of God. That is not an anthropomorphic way of speaking, which is therefore not in accordance with God’s divinity; it is the quintessence of his divinity itself. . . . His strength is made perfect in weakness. The traditional doctrine about God’s kenosis has always looked at just the one aspect of God’s self-limitation, self-emptying and self-humiliation. It has overlooked the other side: God’s inward limitations are outward liberations. God is nowhere greater than in his humiliation. God is nowhere more glorious than in his impotence. God is nowhere more divine than when he becomes man.

- Samuel J. Youngs, The Way of the Kenotic Christ: 

The Christology of Jürgen Moltmann, 2019.