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Reconstructing Japan’s security policy: the role of military crises

in two different museums – and even the online class in a teacher education college. The account of the second trip has a slower rhythm and offers less adventure. Even though the Party has agreed to the author’s request to attend a marriage ceremony and a funeral service, they only allow him to ask his questions about such events from an anthropologist whose remarks are closely checked – and at times modified – by the Party agent. The most fruitful part of this second trip, according to the author, is his visit to a hospital where he can observe firsthand the newborn babies and the effect of sanctions, which are reflected in haunting encounters with malnourished mothers and their low-birth-weight babies. The comparatively slow-paced account of the second journey reaches a climax with the most unexpected turn of events in the Pyongyang Airport, when the author is leaving Pyongyang for his home country. What distinguishes Amirkhani’s narrative from most accounts by Westerners and North Korean defectors is his focus on the question of sanctions, which is often overlooked in similar narratives. Amirkhani aptly demonstrates that tyranny and sanctions are two sides of the same proverbial coin and together they form the vicious circle that he observes and narrates. Sanctions create monophony, which, in turn, perpetuates tyranny, and this ominous circle constantly repeats itself. Amirkhani also argues that sanctions cannot do to Iran what they have done to North Korea, as the two countries’ political structures and populations are radically different from one another. Iranians, he remarks, have a certain freedom of choice, while North Koreans’ only option is to allege loyalty to the Party. Moreover, despite unprecedented sanctions imposed on the country, Iranians are still very much connected to the rest of the world, while the North Korean public is totally cut off from the global village – what Amirkhani dubs a form of “self-sanctioning” by the State. Does Amirkhani manage to see much beyond what is already known about the country? Perhaps not. But his narrative definitely offers an important and much-needed account of the country from an Iranian perspective. Although he is not allowed to see or communicate much, this very absence, in fact, enables him to see what there is for him to see: not only the Party’s domination over almost everything, or the façade of bliss and welfare, or the effects of the most inhumane sanctions imposed on ordinary people by the so-called proponents of human rights, or the people turning their worried faces away from him, but also the unimaginable defiance of the North Korean human against his military superior in the Pyongyang Airport, which is perhaps the only ray of hope shining in the dark world of the narrative.