當(dāng)心美國的傲慢讓橫須賀港毀于一旦

On the dot of 9:30am, when the doors of the famous Sukanagoso farmers’ market open to an impatient army of vegetable enthusiasts, the battle to find the greenest Savoy cabbage is fought with elbows and without mercy. Beyond that, it is hard to think of Yokosuka as being on a war footing.

上午9點30分整，當(dāng)著名的Sukanagoso農(nóng)貿(mào)市場打開大門迎進一群不耐煩的蔬菜愛好者時，人們粗暴地推搡著尋找“最綠色”的蔬菜皺葉甘藍。除此以外，你很難想到橫須賀(Yokosuka)處于戰(zhàn)爭邊緣。

And yet, the recent pitch of speculation makes you feel it should be. This port town, 50km to the south of central Tokyo, tucked up against one of the world’s busiest commercial ports, a huge industrial sprawl and the world’s largest urban area, is a major Japanese naval hub. It is also the headquarters of the US Seventh Fleet — a 70-vessel, 300-aircraft banquet of geopolitical muscle and the largest of America’s forward-deployed naval units.

然而，最近的一些猜測讓你覺得它應(yīng)該是處于備戰(zhàn)狀態(tài)。這個港口城市位于東京市中心以南50公里處，背靠世界上最繁忙的商業(yè)港口之一，是一個巨大的工業(yè)區(qū)。它是世界上最大的城市地區(qū)，同時也是日本主要的海軍樞紐。橫須賀還是美國第七艦隊的總部所在地——美國第七艦隊是一支擁有70艘艦艇和300架飛機的地緣政治力量，是美國前沿部署的最大海軍部隊。

It must therefore rank, my local barber merrily points out from his shop at a notional Ground Zero for the apocalypse, among the most obvious places for Kim Jong Un to aim one of his nuclear missiles.

因此，這個地方必定屬于最明顯會遭受金正恩的核導(dǎo)彈打擊的地方之列，我在當(dāng)?shù)乩戆l(fā)時，理發(fā)師興高采烈地指著外面某個可能會成為核爆炸地點的地方。

The hairdresser is not, of course, the first to reach this conclusion: he could have read it in one of several recent Japanese or South Korean articles grimly citing strategic experts agreeing that Yokosuka is Japan’s juiciest initial target for annihilation. It has been an obvious centre of Pacific influence for ages. The Americans themselves attacked it as a key strategic target in 1945, taking out Japanese warships just a couple of weeks before the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

當(dāng)然，這位理發(fā)師并非第一個得出這種結(jié)論的人：他可能在日本或者韓國最近發(fā)表的文章中看到這樣的觀點，這些文章不約而同地引用了戰(zhàn)略專家的觀點，認為橫須賀是日本最有可能遭受毀滅的目標。幾十年來，它顯然是在太平洋上構(gòu)建影響力的中心。美國人自己在1945年將它作為關(guān)鍵的戰(zhàn)略目標進行攻擊，并在向廣島和長崎投放原子彈的數(shù)周前消滅了這里的日本戰(zhàn)艦。

As Pyongyang’s vituperation and President Donald Trump’s tweeting over the possibility of war have rendered the unthinkable a bit more thinkable in the minds of some pundits, the Japanese side of Yokosuka has quietly got on with the daily grind of being theoretically right in harm’s way. When the Yokosuka city authorities finally got around to putting a “duck and cover” style public awareness video on their website a couple of months ago, the messages were decidedly mixed.

平壤肆意叫囂，而美國總統(tǒng)唐納德•特朗普(Donald Trump)宣揚可能爆發(fā)戰(zhàn)爭，這讓一些專家從戰(zhàn)爭難以想象轉(zhuǎn)而認為有可能爆發(fā)戰(zhàn)爭，就在這個時候，橫須賀的日本人仍然若無其事地在險境下繼續(xù)理論上正確的日常工作。當(dāng)兩三個月前橫須賀市的當(dāng)局終于在網(wǎng)站上發(fā)布了一個提醒公眾注意的“臥倒找掩護”類型的視頻的時候，其中傳遞的信息顯然有些混雜。

On one hand, the video seems to imply everyone is already on a panicked hair trigger. It recommends, for example, not playing the film at too high a volume, in case the short example noise of a warning siren were taken for the real thing. On the other hand, the film soundtracks mock-up footage of an incoming warhead with the kind of music used for car adverts in the 1980s, suggesting a wish to keep things light.

一方面，視頻似乎表明每個人都已經(jīng)處于一觸即發(fā)的恐慌狀態(tài)。例如，它建議不要以太高的音量播放這段視頻，以免片里簡短的警報聲被人們當(dāng)真。另一方面，這部影片為彈頭呼嘯而來的模擬畫面配了上世紀80年代用于汽車廣告的音樂，這表明它又希望人們不要過度驚慌。

On the US side of this, any fear of Armageddon has always been answered with the comforting growl of superpower braggadocio. Yokosuka, in common with other US-base towns in Japan and elsewhere in the world, has learnt to live with the rowdy swash and backwash of its guests, whose numbers, appetites and capacity for chest-thumping swell when the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan returns to its home port. Talk about North Korea with anyone drinking at a bar just outside the US naval base gates, and the nuke threat is assessed robustly: “Anything you read about this is bulls***,” says one US sailor to the emphatic nods of those around him. “If he [Mr Kim] sends something this way, we take it out of the sky. Then we kill him.”

從美國方面來說，任何對世界末日的恐懼總是會令人欣慰地得到超級大國傲慢的咆哮回應(yīng)。橫須賀與美國在日本和世界其他地方的軍事基地城鎮(zhèn)一樣，已經(jīng)學(xué)會了忍受其客人帶來的嘈雜——當(dāng)里根號(USS Ronald Reagan)航空母艦返回其母港的時候，他們的人數(shù)、胃口和吹噓能力大幅膨脹。與任何在美國海軍基地門外的酒吧喝酒的人談?wù)摮r，他們肯定會以一種堅決的態(tài)度談到核武器的威脅：“你所讀到的這方面的東西都是狗屁，”一名美國水手說道，周圍的人點頭附和。“如果他(金正恩)往這邊發(fā)射了什么，我們就把它從天上打下來。然后我們會殺了他。”

And yet, as two other US sailors explained from a Starbucks overlooking the dock where Japan’s giant helicopter carrier, the Izumo, is moored, the Yokosuka braggadocio is, these days, more measured. This is a wounded fleet, all the more raw for those wounds coming during peacetime activities. Last summer, in a pair of incidents that were separated by just two months and claimed a total of 17 lives, two Seventh Fleet destroyers, the USS Fitzgerald and the USS McCain, collided with civilian vessels.

然而，就像另外兩位美國水手在一家星巴克所解釋的那樣——從這家星巴克可以俯瞰日本龐大的出云號(Izumo)直升機母艦停泊的碼頭——這些天來橫須賀的傲慢有所節(jié)制。這是一支受過傷的艦隊，而且更讓人難受的是全都是在和平時期的活動中受的傷。去年夏天，在短短兩個月時間發(fā)生的兩起事件中——第七艦隊的兩艘驅(qū)逐艦菲茨杰拉德號(USS Fitzgerald)和麥凱恩號(USS McCain)分別與民船相撞——共有17人喪生。

Almost harsher than the anguish of loss, and the visuals of mangled military hardware, was the US Navy’s official assessment that both accidents were “entirely preventable”. A humbling catalogue of identified faults included leadership failures, lack of training, shortcomings in navigational skill and, arguably most damning, “hubris”.

幾乎比損失所帶來的痛苦和軍事硬件設(shè)施損壞的視覺效果更讓人難以接受的是，美國海軍官方評估說這兩起事故都是“完全可以預(yù)防的”。可以確定的一系列讓人感到羞恥的錯誤包括領(lǐng)導(dǎo)不力、缺乏訓(xùn)練、航行技巧缺陷，而最該死的可以說是“傲慢”。

Nearly two months on, those comments clearly still smart. Yokosuka has been a pre-eminent projection of US might throughout the cold war and conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. If its greatest test is indeed coming soon, it needs its hubris-free swagger back.

近兩個月過去了，那些言論顯然還是很明智的。橫須賀一直是美國在冷戰(zhàn)、朝鮮戰(zhàn)爭和越南戰(zhàn)爭期間的一個突出的投射武力的地方。如果說它最大的考驗真的即將來臨，那么它需要找回的是不帶一絲傲慢的自信。