Author: Muninn

Economist: The Olympics and the Global Labor Market

My primary offline source of news is The Economist, a favorite I picked up in high school as a member of my school’s Model United Nations team. The consistently libertarian magazine is great for a number of reasons. Its articles tend to be really global in their news coverage, a little less sensitive to the whims of the news cycle, and there is a great deal of general reference information in each article. It has a very simple pattern that almost every article follows: 1) Headline, usually with stupid pun attached 2) Sub-headline which states the main point of the article or the magazine’s position 3) 1/3 to 1/2 of the main body of the article’s text states the issue’s background and argument against the magazine’s position and 4) the article then disagrees with the position stated in (3) and argues its super libertarian position.

This makes it very easy to get lots of basic background info as well as something on the various positions in the issue at stake. If you are pro-welfare, culturally conservative, nationalistic, protectionist, or in any way deeply distrustful of capitalistic market forces, you will probably find yourself agreeing with every article’s first third. The rest of the article will give you most of what you need to “know the enemy” as it were. The magazine has its downsides such as a lack of really cutting edge up to date info from the field and a deep arrogance about its own positions (the magazine often talks to political leaders as if its every issue were in direct conversation with them), but I haven’t found anything better for the amount of detail and analysis it provides.

Now it just so happens that, given my particular political persuasion, I find myself in agreement with The Economist about one half of the time. So what exactly is this “persuasion” in conventional (and thus often misleading) terms? On most social issues, I’m usually somewhere well off the edges of society’s peripheral vision to the left flank. On economic issues related to education and health, I’m something of a moderate “liberal” but when it comes to issues related to global labor markets and globalization in general, I’m kind of irrationally free market. I only say irrational because despite not being that well read on the details of the arguments involved, I will tend to support globalization and the most radically free market positions on the free movement of migrants and labor across borders. In this respect I feel the same kind of frustration Matthew Haughey expresses in his recent posting on Globalism or Nationalism.

I was delighted when The Economist has an article like it did this week (p47 of the print issue) on the Olympics.

…When the games were revived…modern nationalism was on the rise in Europe. Poeple thought history was made, and states were built, by well-defined, hermetically sealed ‘nations’ with a supreme claim on their subjects’ loyalty. No wonder, then, that the modern games became a contest not among athletes [as in ancient Greece] but between countries. Over the course of the 20th century, as the whole world caught nation-state fever, having a fine Olympic team became as important a symbol for newly formed countries as a flag, an anthem, an airline and a big embassy in a leafy district of Washington, D.C.

…[The article goes on to note how the global labor market has led to states buying athletes for their national teams and offering them citizenship]…

But in a world where multinational corporations sponsor the games, why shouldn’t there be multinational athletes? Probably because cheering one’s flag is still one of the event’s main selling points, and a free market in athletes would endanger the national pride that still underlies the event’s commercial success. ‘The money depends on the audience, and the audience depends on symbolisms, which often include nationalism,’ says Laurence Chalip…
Kevin Wamsley…says…’It might be better for sport if people stopped cheering for nations and cheered for individuals, but that’s not what the Olympics have been built on.”

The End of An Age

In less than 24 hours I leave Japan for the USA. I have been here almost two years, mostly as a scholarship research student at Waseda University’s Political Science department studying Sino-Japanese relations history with Hirano, Kenichiro (平野健一郎). He has been incredibly kind to me, supporting me both in my studies with him, and in the half year or so I stayed on and did various smaller things such as helping edit a collection of essays Toyo Bunko, being an English conversation partner for a retired prime minister, traveling around East Asia on my limited savings, and helping out with various things at Waseda’s Contemporary Asian Studies Center of Excellence as a research assistant. Today I’m getting together with a group of good friends for a last gathering and tomorrow morning I leave Japan to begin the last step in my formal education: a PhD in history.

This blog will change accordingly. At least for a while there won’t be any more first hand stories of my experiences in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and China and probably more academic sounding babble as I dive into my studies. The frequency in postings will probably drop somewhat (not that it was ever high to start with). I plan to be in Korea next summer and the summer after studying Korean language but I don’t know when my next extended stay in Japan will be.

East Asian International Affairs Blog

I am starting 4 or 5 new blogs, all with the goal of increasing communication and cooperation between graduate students in places like the US and those in places like Japan, China, etc. The first of these to go online is the East Asian International Affairs Blog (temporary title until we think of a cool one, recommendations welcome). It will focus primarily on East Asian international relations, international security issues, and foreign policy in the region. Starting off our line up of initial authors are Sayaka, Jaehwan, and at least until we get more people, myself. I have invited a number of other people and I hope Sayaka and Jae will be recommending some more people but we will be expanding slowly over time. The other group blogs I will be setting up will be related to modern history in Japan, China, and Korea, and a separate blog idea for studying intellectual history in Japan. More on that later as I get some people together…

Lars at Tokyo Station

My friend Lars, dressed like a Western tourist might, emerged from Tokyo station’s ticket gate yesterday to be suddenly swarmed on by three police officers. “Are you a tourist?” Lars answers, “Umm, No.” Then they ask, “Do you work here?” and Lars replies, “No. I am a graduate student [at Waseda University]” The police officers then asked him for his “Foreigner Identification Card” He handed it over but asked, “Can I ask why I have been approached?” They told him, “There has been a terrorist attack.” Lars asked, “Where?” to which they replied, “Spain.” Lars then replied, “Oh really? When was it?” The police then replied, “Several months ago.” They soon let him go and Lars then went on his way, wondering what a terrorist attack that happened in Spain several months ago had to do with him walking out of a train station. This happened to my Canadian friend Andrew, also at Waseda studying engineering a few months ago as well. When Andrew asked why he was stopped by a police car when walking down a street, he was just told that, “We have a lot of crime. Foreigners often commit crime.”

Japanese War Poem

I just read a beautiful Japanese war poem. I don’t know who it is by. It was in an collection of essays by the scholar 田中正俊 called 『戦中戦後』

敗戦の祖国へ

君にはほかにどんな帰り方もなかったのだ。
−海峡の底を歩いて帰る以外。

To the motherland that lost the war

For you there was no way to return,
Except to walk the channel’s deep.

(As always feel free to email me suggestions to improve the translation) I discussed this poem with Sayaka, I kind of feel like there is an interesting potential ambiguity in the title here which changes the answer of “Who is the you?” Reading this I picture the dead soldiers returning home, but if the you is the motherland this poem is then about Japan itself.

Major Bookstore Discovery: Junkudo

I have been living in Japan for almost two years now and exactly two weeks before I leave, I found what is perhaps Tokyo’s best non-used bookstore for academic nerds. Many friends have told me that there is a great bookstore in Ikebukuro (池袋) and I thought I had found it long ago. There is a nice multi-story bookstore near the station but yesterday I realized they were all referring to a completely different 9 floor bookstore: the ジュンク堂書店 (本店）. It is not far from the south exit, closest to the 西武池袋駅. The store has lots of academic books and like many Japanese bookstores, their in-store search engine (on each floor) is great (you can quickly print out lots of little book detail slips). History and philosophy (my favorites, as always) are both on the 4th floor. The philosophy section also has lots of English books (with separate sections divided into “analytical” philosophy, “post-structuralist”, and “Japanese thought” – we could have an interesting discussion just about this division itself). What is different about this store is that they keep in stock a lot of huge collections of 資料 which usually have to be ordered, and some of the more obscure history books that would never make it to regular bookstores (though usually only very recently published ones).

China Trip 1: A 34 Hour Travel Day

I’m going to post a few things about my recent trip to China. See also Sayaka’s recent postings on our trip. July 23rd, 2004: I’ll post this next time I have a net connection. I’m currently in Qingdao (pictures here), a coastal city in China’s Shandong province. Getting here was a thirty-four hour adventure that began in Takarazuka, Japan.
Continue reading China Trip 1: A 34 Hour Travel Day

Japan Review: The 47th Ronin

I took a great seminar on the history of the Chûshingura (忠臣蔵 or the story of the 赤穂浪人: the famous Japanese saga of the revenge of the 47 ronin) with Henry D. Smith at Columbia 2 years ago. We focused mostly on the imaginative potential of a historical event and the many fascinating ways that this event has moved through Japanese culture since the early 18th century. We all covered one aspect of this, my own being the changes in the portrayal of Chûshingura in prewar and wartime Japanese elementary school textbooks (some passages of which I translated if anyone is interested in reading more).

In his article “The Trouble with Terasaka” in the 2004 (No. 16) of the Nichibunken Japan Review Professor Smith writes about Chushingura and the controversary surrounding the mysterious samurai number 47, Terasaka Kichiemon. Not everyone who knows the famous story (google Chushingura, no time for links right now) knows that only 46 were sentenced to death by seppuku suicide and Terasaka lived a quiet life in the aftermath. Smith’s fascinating article explores not only the difficult question of what happened to Terasaka, but like our seminar did, tracks his changing face through the Chûshingura “imagination” in Japan in the centuries that followed. He ultimately concludes that Terasaka was not allowed to join the others because he the only one of the low ranking ashigaru (足軽) status.

As seen by the bushi elite, he was reduced to an expendable menial, but from the vantage point of the chônin audiences who were the most ardent consumers of the Chûshingura legend, he could be a heroic striver, living proof that even the lowest could become an honorable hero through dedication and skill. Terasaka functioned as a literally pivotal character in both the history and legend…since Terasaka could cut in different directions, he was thus a “troubling” figure who was often claimed and contested by rival audiences…The foot soldier Terasaka Kichiemon…occupied a…marginal place within the overall story, but one that by its very marginality sheds much light on the changing structure of Chûshingura over three centuries. (4)

Professor Smith has previously written on the common myths of Japanese history, such as the famous 4 level class system of early modern Japan, and in this article he expands on this to talk about the interesting marginal status of Terasaka and also the “in between” class of the 足軽 samurai.

Foreign Affairs: Sanctions Were Working

The assumption has always been that sanctions just don’t work. Additionally, in an argument more persuasive with those of us with soft spots for the humanitarian side of the equation, the feeling is that sanctions often end up causing massive amounts of suffering amongst those outside a country’s ruling circle.

George A. Lopez and David Cortright argue in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs in their article “Containing Iraq: Sanctions Worked” that only in the aftermath of the Iraq war have we discovered, but largely ignored the fact that the sanctions were in fact working. They had contained Iraq, kept it from recovering its military capabilities, as well as its unconventional weapons programs, especially the development of a nuclear program.

“…The sanctions worked remarkably well in Iraq—far better than any past sanctions effort—and only a fraction of total oil revenue ever reached the Iraqi government. The funds that Baghdad obtained illicitely were grossly insufficient to finance a large-scale military development program. The government had no other major source of income, in part thanks to the economic impact of sanctions. Revenues from smuggling and kickbacks went mostly toward maintaining Saddam’s massive army and internal security apparatus (as well as to building palaces and paying bribes to political loyalists)…”

Essentially, the article argues in support of Hans Blix’s statement, in his recent book that, “the UN and the world had suceeded in disarming Iraq without knowing it.” I won’t go into more detail about their argument here but regardless of your position on this issue, the article gives a good overview of the history of Iraqi sanctions and is worth a read. It briefly addresses the recent UN kickbacks issues in its sections on how to improve sanctions, but does not say too much on the issue of the effect of sanctions on civilian populations. I don’t know enough about sanctions (either their effectiveness or humanitarian impact) to take a strong position but the article was educational.