I leave Takarazuka and my adventures in the Kansai region tomorrow morning and travel to Beijing and Qingdao for about a week. I’ll be back in Tokyo at the end of the month and leave Japan August 15th. I’ll be back visiting my parents in Bartlesville, Oklahoma until early September, when I move to Boston.
Author: Muninn
Japanese People Discovering Themselves
As a kind of follow up to my recent article at Chanpon.org on Japan “Losing its soul” I have also noticed a lot of posters in recent Japanese advertisements which claim that visiting some place will help you discover yourself—that is, discover one’s latent or forgotten Japanese identity. Today I noticed just such a poster on the bus going from Kinkakuji to Ryôanji promoting tourism to Kyoto:
「日本に、京都があってよかった。こころの風景、うつくしい時間にこだわった、千二百余年。時代をこえて、永遠をつなぐ風がこの町を駆け抜ける。平安をもとめつづけるこの都で、風に吹かれて出会うのは、”知らなかったワタシ”だったりする。」I am so glad Japan has this place called Kyoto. It is a landscape of the spirit that, for some thousand and two hundred years has devoted itself to spending time surrounded by beauty. Spanning the ages, a wind bound to eternity runs through this town. In this [ancient] capital that always yearned for peace (Heian) I think I might have found, blowing in the wind, “A Me that I have never known.”
Feel free to correct my translation, but if it seems a little on the cheesy side, I assure you it was no less so in the original. Sayaka noticed that the “Heian” is probably deliberately used with two meanings, peace (which is a very important component of Japan’s national identity in the postwar period), and as the name for the period when the capital was moved to Kyoto and also representative of its glory days.
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Japan Making a Mess of Its Dietary Habits
I love going through the book offerings at Japanese shrines, where you are almost guaranteed to get some gems. At Kasuga Taisha (春日大社) in Nara, I found a series of childrens’ books entitled “Japan: A Good Country” (『日本いい国に』). Each chapter was designed to give children a lesson in how to be a good Japanese or on how wonderful Japan is. I opened to a random page which came from a chapter on the “Japanese Diet” and found the following passage (running short on time so I’ll just post my English translation):
In France, the French eat mainly French food, in China they eat mainly Chinese food. This is a pretty obvious fact (当たり前) but in each country they primarily eat that country’s food. And yet, in Japan’s case, we are importing all kinds of food from many different foreign lands and eating all kinds of different things. There isn’t any other country which has made such a mess of (バラバラになった) even their own dietary habits (自分たちの主食までも).
Tatami Mats and Escalators
After giving my final presentation at Waseda University, where I have spent the last two years as a “research student” 研究生, I left immediately for the Kansai area of central Japan to join Sayaka and her family in her hometown of Takarazuka 宝塚. The next three days were spent traveling around to nearby sites that I have, in all my time in Japan, never gotten around to visiting. Sunday was spent visiting Nara (see some of my pictures here) while the next two days were spent in Kyoto (some pictures here). It is a bit ironic that I have spent some of my last days in Japan in two cities tourists usually spend their first nights, but I’m very happy to have had the opportunity to visit.
The Kansai region is different from the Kantô area of Tokyo in many ways and since I have spent very little time in the former, some of these differences are quite new to me. Two little tidbits that have escaped my notice all this time: 1) Tatami mats, the size of which are a common measurement for the size of rooms and apartments, are apparently significantly larger in the Kansai area. I am told, however, that the “standard” Tokyo size of tatami mats are becoming more widespread. 2) In the Tokyo area, people stand on the left side of the escalator and walk up the right side. In the Kansai area, people stand on the right side and walk up the left side. Sayaka said something about seeing a TV news clipping which explained this as having something to do with the location of the exit in the first department store in which escalators were used in Japan. I’m really curious to know where this practice switches sides. Presumably, somewhere between Osaka and Tokyo, escalator-standing-culture switches sides…anyone know where? While I’m on this type of topic, I always wondered what the border between Sweden and Norway looked like back in the days when the Swedes drove on the left hand side of the road….two great questions for an idle google moment.
UPDATE: I found out a little more about the history of the Sweden case of switching from left to right on this web page (can’t vouch for its accuracy)
Mongolian Surnames
After losing their surnames during Communist Rule, since 1997 Mongolians have been required to have them again. This interesting saga has, among other things, led to everyone wanting Genghis Khan’s tribal name “Brojigin.” Read more about this on this posting at Keywords and this article. I also talked a little bit about Mongolia’s national fascination with Genghis Khan here.
Annette Lu: Let’s Move Aboriginal Storm Victims to Central America
The Taiwanese Vice President has always been a bit loopy, but really… Read more in the pro-DPP Taipei Times. She also said that, “The government must have an advanced immigration policy, because Taiwan is so small while the population is increasing quickly.” Hmm…shifting an aboriginal population overseas…wouldn’t that make it an emigration policy? Seriously though, this issue does bring to the fore the issue of environmental preservation versus the rights of native populations to hunt and continue traditional practices. (via Taipei Kid)
New DPRK related documents
There is a great collection of Cold War related docs at Woodrow Wilson Cold War International History Project. There is a really interesting collection of articles and (and in many cases newly discovered) primary documents related to the DPRK. (Thanks to Budaechigae for this awesome link) Incidentally, I am not really comfortable with many of the Korea related blogs around which constantly refer to the DPRK as the “norks.” I don’t know anything about the origin of the term but it has a similar ring to “japs”, “chinks”, and “gooks” etc. It is interesting to note that I haven’t seen any of them refer to the South Koreans as “soks” so I think there is a good possibility they are engaging in a kind of classic dehumanizing objectification of a perceived enemy. I hope they might consider using “DPRK” or even “N.K.” or something if they want an easy abbreviation for North Korea.
Scott Sommers: English Teachers as Migrants
Scott Sommers in Taiwan has a very interesting collection of postings on the issue of English Teachers as Migrants over at his Taiwan Blog. While the issues covered in the postings vary and I don’t have time to give my own take on everything here, I found lots of fascinating little tidbits. One of the postings has statistics showing that Canadian teachers outnumber American teachers, and there is a third large group of teachers: South Africans (17.66%) with South Africans being the largest single group in Taipei county. I have noted a similar prominence of Australian teachers in Japan (though I have no statistics on hand) and on the bullet train yesterday, I noticed that all the English announcements were done by an Australian.
Japanese Migration to China
A few weeks ago I attended a fascinating talk at Waseda by Emer O’Dwyer, one of my 先輩 (seniors) also studying under Andrew Gordon at Harvard. She has been very helpful in giving me advice on the PhD program, and I was impressed by her recent talk. She presented her research on “Emigration, Settlement, and Economic Competition: Japanese and Chinese Experiences in Dairen, 1905-1927″. As her title suggests, she talked about both Japanese and Chinese moving into Dalian 大连 (Dairen is the Japanese pronunciation), a city on the Liaodong 辽东 peninsula in northern China, and she focused primarily on a period when there were significant changes in the demographics of the city as the Chinese population grew rapidly and Chinese businesses began to displace those of the Japanese.
The most important discovery I think Emer made was when she explored the Japanese reaction to the increasing dominance of the Chinese in the local market. I would have expected the usual anti-Chinese ethnic slurs and insults. Instead, she found in the many journals and other writings of the period a fascinating phenomenon: the Japanese were deeply impressed by the Chinese laborers and used the Chinese as a model to follow in correcting their own “lazy”,”decadent”, and “inefficient” ways. They even saw Chinese clothes as more simple and economical, while their own was “irrational” and “not modern” in comparison.
Some time after I heard Emer’s talk about emigration to Dalian, I saw an advertisement for the most recent issue of the Asahi weekly AERA (No. 32) which had its focus on 日本人「職の中国」へ大移動」 (Massive migration of Japanese to the “middle kingdom of work”). The main article focuses on Japanese labor migration to Dalian. A closer look at the numbers shows that the migration isn’t exactly “massive” but still has some very interesting features…
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Korean Media and the Political Pendulum
Joel at Far Outliers mentions an article about a trend towards the “suppression of free speech” in South Korea. In addition to the harassment that a “free North Korea” group has apparently gotten from “self-styled ‘progressive'” protesters discussed in the article by Aidan Foster-Carter, Joel mentions the recent bizarre (and inexcusable) banning of online blogs by the South Korean government in an attempt to prevent distribution of footage of the recent beheading of a Korean hostage. He refers us to the great blog NKZone which also has a posting on this (pretty much any blog related to Korea has been talking about this of late).
My only concern with the Foster-Carter article and the sometimes rabid responses to the recent censorship and current left swing of Korean politics on the usually deeply conservative English-language blogs about Korea (in particular Marmot’s Hole and Flying Yangban over at GOPKorea – I should take care to note that despite my own raving liberal politics, I still read these two blogs, which are often excellent sources for recent Korea related news) is that I believe they are portraying Korea—and Koreans—as emotional slaves to political fashion who swing from one political extreme (authoritarian dictatorship and anti-communist ideology) to the other (a pro-unification, pro-North Korean regime) without conceding the exceptionally complex adjustments and changes that are going on in Korean society. One person whose opinions I respect the most on this are those of my friend Lim Jaehwan. His most recent posting on the Korean media emphasizes the continuing dominance of conservative newspapers in Korea, even as populist or left-leaning alternative media sources like OhMyNews are growing in popularity.
The “free North Korea” and “pro-America” segments of Korean society didn’t just die overnight. Nor, for all its faults and recent blunders, does the young and more radical government of South Korea mark the establishment of a North Korean puppet in the south that will crush all voices of “freedom” and dissent. The pendulum has surely swung, but it swung partly as a result, I believe, of a number of contingent political factors (the recent impeachment crisis, desire for reform, etc.) that may not consistently serve the current ruling party in the future. The new Uri Party has had, and will surely continue to have, its share of political excesses, but if it survives another election, it may undergo a process of “professionalization” similar to what is happening with the Taiwanese ruling party now. The adjustment from a party made up of old protesters who, upon gaining power, gathered in the halls of government to sing old anti-government protest songs (Jae – I’m waiting for you to post the details about this!) to one that can function with the bureaucracy, make level-headed and long-term policies, and appeal to mainstream voters in a time when a mass reaction to a political crisis is no longer available—all this takes time.
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