当心美国的傲慢让横须贺港毁于一旦

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点30分整，当著名的Sukanagoso农贸市场打开大门迎进一群不耐烦的蔬菜爱好者时，人们粗暴地推搡着寻找“最绿色”的蔬菜皱叶甘蓝。除此以外，你很难想到横须贺(Yokosuka)处于战争边缘。

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，最近的一些猜测让你觉得它应该是处于备战状态。这个港口城市位于东京市中心以南50公里处，背靠世界上最繁忙的商业港口之一，是一个巨大的工业区。它是世界上最大的城市地区，同时也是日本主要的海军枢纽。横须贺还是美国第七舰队的总部所在地——美国第七舰队是一支拥有70艘舰艇和300架飞机的地缘政治力量，是美国前沿部署的最大海军部队。

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，这个地方必定属于最明显会遭受金正恩的核导弹打击的地方之列，我在当地理发时，理发师兴高采烈地指着外面某个可能会成为核爆炸地点的地方。

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.

当然，这位理发师并非第一个得出这种结论的人：他可能在日本或者韩国最近发表的文章中看到这样的观点，这些文章不约而同地引用了战略专家的观点，认为横须贺是日本最有可能遭受毁灭的目标。几十年来，它显然是在太平洋上构建影响力的中心。美国人自己在1945年将它作为关键的战略目标进行攻击，并在向广岛和长崎投放原子弹的数周前消灭了这里的日本战舰。

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.

平壤肆意叫嚣，而美国总统唐纳德•特朗普(Donald Trump)宣扬可能爆发战争，这让一些专家从战争难以想象转而认为有可能爆发战争，就在这个时候，横须贺的日本人仍然若无其事地在险境下继续理论上正确的日常工作。当两三个月前横须贺市的当局终于在网站上发布了一个提醒公众注意的“卧倒找掩护”类型的视频的时候，其中传递的信息显然有些混杂。

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，视频似乎表明每个人都已经处于一触即发的恐慌状态。例如，它建议不要以太高的音量播放这段视频，以免片里简短的警报声被人们当真。另一方面，这部影片为弹头呼啸而来的模拟画面配了上世纪80年代用于汽车广告的音乐，这表明它又希望人们不要过度惊慌。

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.”

从美国方面来说，任何对世界末日的恐惧总是会令人欣慰地得到超级大国傲慢的咆哮回应。横须贺与美国在日本和世界其他地方的军事基地城镇一样，已经学会了忍受其客人带来的嘈杂——当里根号(USS Ronald Reagan)航空母舰返回其母港的时候，他们的人数、胃口和吹嘘能力大幅膨胀。与任何在美国海军基地门外的酒吧喝酒的人谈论朝鲜，他们肯定会以一种坚决的态度谈到核武器的威胁：“你所读到的这方面的东西都是狗屁，”一名美国水手说道，周围的人点头附和。“如果他(金正恩)往这边发射了什么，我们就把它从天上打下来。然后我们会杀了他。”

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，就像另外两位美国水手在一家星巴克所解释的那样——从这家星巴克可以俯瞰日本庞大的出云号(Izumo)直升机母舰停泊的码头——这些天来横须贺的傲慢有所节制。这是一支受过伤的舰队，而且更让人难受的是全都是在和平时期的活动中受的伤。去年夏天，在短短两个月时间发生的两起事件中——第七舰队的两艘驱逐舰菲茨杰拉德号(USS Fitzgerald)和麦凯恩号(USS McCain)分别与民船相撞——共有17人丧生。

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”.

几乎比损失所带来的痛苦和军事硬件设施损坏的视觉效果更让人难以接受的是，美国海军官方评估说这两起事故都是“完全可以预防的”。可以确定的一系列让人感到羞耻的错误包括领导不力、缺乏训练、航行技巧缺陷，而最该死的可以说是“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.

近两个月过去了，那些言论显然还是很明智的。横须贺一直是美国在冷战、朝鲜战争和越南战争期间的一个突出的投射武力的地方。如果说它最大的考验真的即将来临，那么它需要找回的是不带一丝傲慢的自信。