島々、大小 - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

Anna Meisel “Is Great Britain really a 'small island'?” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24083162

書き出しに曰く、

A Russian official referred last week to Great Britain as "a small island to which no-one pays any attention". PM David Cameron responded by challenging anyone to name a country with a "prouder history, with a bigger heart, with a greater resilience". But he conceded that the UK was a "small group of islands". Is it?

カナダのプリンス･エドワード島大学*1のGodfrey Baldacchino教授*2によると、大ブリテン島はけっして小さな島ではないという。世界で９番目に大きな島である！

(…) It's ninth, behind Greenland*3, New Guinea (Indonesia/Papua New Guinea), Borneo (Indonesia/Malaysia), Madagascar, Baffin Island (Canada), Sumatra, Honshu (Japan) and Victoria Island (Canada).
That puts it way ahead of some other well-known islands, Cuba for example (17th), Sri Lanka (25th), Trinidad (117th) or Long Island (148th). Russia's largest island, Sakhalin*4, ranks a mere 23rd.

Baldacchino教授によると、グレート･ブリテンはさらに凄いという；

If you look at the world's island states, for example, the archipelago of Great Britain with Northern Ireland (the UK) is the fourth largest, behind Indonesia, Japan and the Philippines… even if, in terms of population density, it falls a long way behind Manhattan, with its paltry area of 87 sq km but population of 1.6 million.

さらに、

Great Britain is one of the few island civilizations that for many centuries served as the centre of a sprawling global empire. It shares that rare historic position with Tonga and Japan in the Pacific and Crete and Venice in the Mediterranean (Venice being a network of 118 small islands).
Britain is also "one of the few islands of significant size that officially calls itself 'great'", points out Professor Baldacchino. Most islands that claim this distinction are actually very small, and are only called "great" to distinguish them from even smaller nearby islands with the same name.
There is the 0.07 sq km Great Captain Island for example, lying off the coast of Greenwich in Connecticut, US. The isle is the largest of a three-island group that also includes Little Captain and Wee Captain.
Or there are The Misery Islands, a nature reserve in Massachusetts consisting of the 0.34 sq km Great Misery and 0.016 sq km Little Misery. The islands were named by a shipbuilder, Robert Moulton, who was stranded there during a winter storm in the 1620s.
And we have The Great Cranberry Island, renowned for its pea-size berries that grow profusely in autumn, or The Great Diamond Island with a year-round population of 77, as of the 2000 census. Both in Maine, US.
All are smaller than Britain.

ところで、この記事は英国よりも日本はエライ！　とも読めるのだ。つまり、本州はグレート･ブリテンよりも大きいし、日本は英国よりも島国として大きい。しかし、大きければいいというものではないということを承知しているのは何よりも日本人、とりわけ「小沢信者」だろう。大沢や中沢は小沢よりもいいとか「小沢信者」の前で言ってごらん。それは彼／彼女らにとっては、一家皆殺しに値する反革命的言動なのだ。
それはともかく、日本の「島」に関して、岡谷公二『島水平線に棲む幻たち』、有吉佐和子『日本の島々、昔と今』をマークしておく。