If they are accepted, I have a foundation of notes to work off of, but there is some more research that needs to be done and I welcome any comments, suggestions, etc.

The ‘Democratic Police’ under US Military Occupation: Torture and Reform in Korea and Japan, 1945-48

The reform ideals of every postwar United States military occupation have faced one of their greatest tests in the question of how to address the pre-occupation institution of the police: Are they to be preserved largely intact in order to carry out the essential duties of preserving public order, and guarding against new insurgent forces? Or are their post-conflict remnants to be completely dismantled or at least thoroughly purged for having been the most efficient tools of state oppression? This paper examines and compares the attempt by US occupation authorities in early postwar Korea and Japan to balance its strategic need to preserve social stability and its desire to eliminate the worst symbols of police brutality and oppression. It focuses on the campaign to bring about an institutional rebirth in the form of the new ‘Democratic Police’ and the responses to it within the Japanese and Korean police establishment. US occupation officials and post-occupation advisors were forced to acknowledge, often with embarrassment, the failure to eradicate torture. However, the United States police forces that supplied advisors and instructors for the occupation were no distant strangers to brutality themselves, with torture, or “third degree” interrogations reported widespread in the 1931 Wickersham Commission’s “Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement.” Despite a genuine disgust with brutal methods, the very willingness of US forces to quickly disassociate themselves from the ‘dirty work’ of occupation security guaranteed the persistence of such methods by Japanese, and in a more politically violent environment, especially the Korean police.

Pan-Asianism or World Federalism? Raja Mahendra Pratap and the Japanese Empire, 1925-1945

A number of Indians opposed to British colonial rule made their way to Japan and found their voices welcome among Japan’s leading pan-Asianist thinkers. The most famous of these figures include Rash Behari Bose and Subhas Chandra Bose, former president of the Indian National Congress and eventual commander of the Japanese supported Indian National Army. The collaboration between these Indian nationalists, sworn to an anti-imperialist cause, and Japan’s own brutal empire has been of great interest to historians. The more eclectic figure Raja Mahendra Pratap, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1932, was also a fervent activist against British colonial rule in India and likewise turned to Japan for support, but Pratap also developed a highly evolved and spiritually charged conception of world federalism. Pratap found some support for his ideas in China, Japan, and elsewhere in Asia, where he raised money and corresponded with intellectuals long before the idea of World Federalism would briefly enjoy widespread interest in Japan and around the world from 1945-1947. This presentation will show how Pratap worked to prevent his conception of a world federation from clashing with Japan’s imperialist conception of pan-Asian union and suggest the ways in which his exploration of the relationship between the regional and the global foreshadowed postwar and contemporary debates of a similar nature.

Update: The first proposal was rejected and I delivered the second presentation at Columbia University. I’ll try again with the first proposal for another conference in the fall.

Last week’s breathtaking revelation that new middle school teaching guidelines in Japan will include the phrase, “It is necessary to deepen understanding about our country’s territory in a way identical with the Kuril Islands by mentioning that there exist differing assertions between our country and Korea over Takeshima,” amounts to a provocation which provides the Republic of Korea with a clear casus belli.

However, this is only the beginning. In addition to a stealth campaign which is surely behind such outrages as the Library of Congress proposal to adopt the so-called “neutral” term “Liancourt Rocks” there have been a full range of suspicious activities which provide plentiful proof of a perfidious plot by the Japanese.

Revenge of a Japanese Villain

According to a recently declassified US military report found in the National Archives a Japanese youth of around twenty years of age, Tsuji Shintaro, was fishing near the Korean islands of Dokdo in early spring of 1948 when his boat was sunk during a US bombing run in the area during training. He was saved by a nearby Korean who collected seaweed along the coastline. However, the two fought when Tsuji claimed the islands were Japanese territory and, badly beaten by the naturally physically stronger Korean, the Japanese fisherman swore that he would someday get revenge.

Tsuji, who went on to found the Sanrio corporation, is ready to seek vengeance. The popular Hello Kitty character, which is famous for its mysterious lack of a mouth may soon undergo a startling change. As Sanrio spokesman put it in a special press conference last Wednesday, “Sanrio Chairman Tsuji feels that it is time for Hello Kitty’s long silence to come to an end. She must speak the truth about Takeshima, and we are confident that the world will listen.” The addition of a mouth to the Hello Kitty character is to happen sometime before Christmas sales for 2008 set in and many Hello Kitty products will play Takeshima related quotes by the character at random times, according to a Sanrio employee who asked not to be identified. Hearing this news, one excited Japanese fan reported, “The people of Japan, and of the world, have never heard the true voice of Hello Kitty, so we are all looking forward to this.” There are some reports that the first sound of Hello Kitty’s voice can be heard all over Japan through a special radio broadcast at noon on August 15th.

A Bamboo Plot

Oil prices and food grains are not the only products rising in price these days. Market observers and bamboo nursery owners have recently reported an unprecedented 670% rise in the price of bamboo seeds as well as full-grown stock of bamboo over the last 6 months. Jeffrey Haskins, associate editor of the San Francisco based Bamboo Quarterly was alarmed enough to explore what he called, “This clear distortion of the market.” Haskins had no idea that he would stumble upon a Japanese nationalist plot, “Those I approached either refused to speak to me or else warned me that, for my own safety, I ought best drop this entirely.”

After meeting considerable resistance at every step Haskins was finally able to tie up with Kaneyama Chiyo (金山ちよ), a student reporter for the Hitotsubashi Youth Red Flag Journal (一橋赤旗青年ジャーナル). Together they were finally able to identify the true source of the huge purchases of bamboo: an until now largely unknown organization going by the name of, “The New Bamboo Shoot Tribe” (新竹の子族). This insidious group of right-wing nationalist thugs is said to have close ties to Japanese organized crime syndicates and operates out of unmarked headquarters found somewhere in or near an apartment complex called the Harajuku Verdant Heights. In interviews with local residents Kaneyama reported that members of this organization have been seen to hold secret night time rallies in Yoyogi Park dressed in strange attire. They apparently open with a bizarre oath to the memory of former Japanese ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi and have been heard chanting various anti-Korean slogans.

Very little is known about the leader of the New Bamboo Shoot Tribe and her life is largely shrouded in mystery. What is known about Mitarai Aya (御手洗彩) is that she has a long history of violence and gang involvement. First detained by police in 1980 for destruction of public school property, she is said to have led many mass battles between groups of high school students in central Tokyo. She was eventually expelled from high school when she stabbed her math teacher 14 times with a geometry compass in 1982. One year later she was arrested for the death of two Yakuza men found with brutally cracked skulls near Meiji shrine. The charges were dropped after she argued that she had been molested by the older men, who were found still armed with knives, and in response she had to “bust some heads,” in “self-defense.”

A single rare picture remains of a young Mitarai taken some time in the early 1980s. We can already see in her eyes the early indications of someone who would become a cool and cruel Japanese right-wing nationalist fanatic:

The research of Kaneyama and Haskins definitely established the New Bamboo Shoot Tribe as the source of the massive purchases. This has affected prices not only of the popular Phyllostachys bambusoides and other varieties of bamboo common in Japan but a wide range of East Asian species such as Fargesia dracocephala. However, a follow up article slated to be published in Asahi newspaper which was to analyze the organization and its plans for the bamboo was never submitted. Soon after the initial joint publication of the research by these two courageous reporters Haskins left suddenly and mysteriously for Patagonia in southern Argentina to reportedly “find God,” leaving all his belongings and his wife and two children behind in California. Efforts to locate him have been unsuccessful. More shockingly, Kaneyama died soon after in a mysterious fire in a restaurant in the Ōkubo district of Tokyo.

The impact of this price rise should not be underestimated, as it even threatens the Beijing Olympics held in China this summer. The cost of feeding pandas, who depend on the plant, has skyrocketed and rationing of bamboo shoots has been implemented in China and elsewhere. According to panda specialist, Dr. Zhang Zhongxu at the Chengdu Panda Breeding and Feeding Center, “The Japanese have long been jealous of the prestige China will gain this summer with the hosting of the Olympic games. This manipulation of the bamboo market is a direct provocation aimed at sabotaging the games. We can now only afford to feed each of our pandas 4kg of bamboo shoots per day, and our beloved pandas are in dire condition.” One of those threatened and at the point of starvation is none other than Jingjing, one of the five mascots of the Olympics beloved all over the world.

A national campaign has been announced to raise money to feed Jingjing and other starving pandas in the wake of the crisis. However, in the event Jingjing does not pull through, there is discussion about the possibility of substituting the cartoon mascot for the Shenzhen based Internet Friendly Monitoring Division of the Public Caring Bureau, which coincidently is also named Jingjing.

While not as cute as the panda figure, the alternate Jingjing has gained much respect for his considerable mastery of a wide range of Chinese martial arts. He easily won the underground 2007 Worldwide Battle of the Mascots held in the Cambodian border town of Pailin, unseating the 3-year consecutive Japanese champion Custom-kun (カスタム君) whose Sumo skills were thought to be unbeatable.

The sentiment stirred in the Middle Kingdom surrounding the bamboo price increase, however, may have distracted the media away from the real purpose behind the massive purchases of bamboo by dummy corporations set up by the New Bamboo Shoot Tribe. While it hasn’t received much international attention, a short “Research Note” in the forthcoming issue of the International Irredentist Review ties the Kaneyama and Haskins research directly to the Dokdo issue. Professor Kjell Skadberg, head of the Institute of Irredentist Studies at the University of Flekkefjord and author of highly controversial and much criticized work Dokdo/Takeshima and Eastern Greenland: What We Can Learn from the 1931 Norwegian Invasion and Occupation of Eirik Raudes Land has suggested that this massive purchase of bamboo may be part of a new and more frightening stage of Japanese imperialist attempts to boost their international claim to the Dokdo islands through direct action.

“The New Bamboo Shoot Tribe, which must surely have government support to be engaging in such massive purchases, may be planning to somehow cover the contested islands in bamboo. If they could get this normally tropical plant to grow on the rocky surface and cover it with the verdant green of the bamboo (or take) which is part of the Japanese name for the islands, then it would serve as excellent ammunition for the Japanese claims. The equivalent would be if Koreans were to ship all the lonely people of their nation to the islands of that designation.”¹

Could this be the ultimate bamboo conspiracy? Activists have already mobilized to pursue this hypothesis. The first support for Skadberg’s claim has already been found. After Kaneyama’s suspicious death in March, a close review of her possessions turned up three single sheets from a longer roster of the paying members of the New Bamboo Shoot Tribe from 2006. This list included 2 pilots of major Japanese airlines as well as a retired Japanese self-defense air force pilot of high rank. Among them was also an assistant professor of the Department of Agriculture at Mie University, Saito Jun, whose past publications include an essay entitled, “From Tropical Soils to Rocky Wastelands: Increasing the Range and Promoting the Growth of Plants in Adverse Conditions.” Activists have already begun surveillance of these individuals but they have all refused requests for interview or comment.

Fishy Relations

As seen above Skadberg suggests that there is secret Japanese government financial backing behind the conspiratorial designs of the New Bamboo Shoot Tribe. This is undoubtedly the case, but there are other possibilities for funding that go beyond government support and the deep blood chests of Japanese nationalist networks. In an amazing scoop, one more name found on “The Kaneyama Roster,” as the membership roster found in deceased Kaneyama’s possessions has come to be known, suggests a connection between Japan’s neo-imperialists and Korea’s huge network of Dokdo seafood restaurants, which goes by the name Dokdo Marine Products Industry Federation (독도해산물산업연맹, hereafter DMPIF). The list contained the Korean name Choe Sangho (崔尙浩) which is the same name as the DMPIF’s long-serving former chairman (1985-1997) well known for leading the expansion of DMPIF membership by encouraging all failing seafood restaurants in Korea to paint images of Dokdo on their interior walls, add Dokdo to the restaurant name and put pictures of the islands on menus or on the outer walls and signs. Before becoming chairman, Choe was merely the humble owner of his own restaurant in Shinchon, “Dokdo Tuna” and was only inspired to become active in the DMPIF when his wife one day reportedly remarked, “Wouldn’t it be nice if every station on the new line number two had a Dokdo restaurant?”

This would become the campaign theme for the DMPIF barely a year after the completion of subway line number two in 1984, ten years after violent protests against the “pro-Japanese subway” (친일지하철 반대운동, 1973-1975) line number one opened: “A Dokdo seafood restaurant at every station of line number two! Celebrate the completion of our first pure Korean subway line!” With the patronage of patriotic customers and new support of restaurant owners Dokdo-themed restaurants spread like wildfire across South Korea during Choe’s tenure as chairman, with membership in the federation growing from a mere 24 restaurants in 1985 to 432 in 1996. On the eve of the current scandal, member restaurants were said to be over seven hundred.

However, now Choe’s legendary status among students of Korea’s seafood history was being seriously questioned. Was he a selfless patriot who fought for Dokdo through his career as a seafood restaurant owner and chairman of the DMPIF? Or was he perhaps secretly an opportunistic pro-Japanese traitor who actually conspired together with Japanese extremists to deprive Korea of these sacred islands?

Choe naturally dismissed all suggestions that he had anything to do with the New Bamboo Shoots Tribe or other Japanese nationalist organizations. In a short comment given to the press through a spokesman he said, “I have dedicated my life to educating the people about Dokdo and make sure that with every delicious bite of our food they are reminded of the beauty and sanctity of the islands. Dokdo is our land! I am horribly saddened to hear that someone going by the same name as me was found on the roster of this despicable organization.” However, shortly after the statement was delivered he was committed to a “health spa” on Cheju island due to “illness and stress” and has since refused to see anyone. The DMPIF immediately began damage control, quickly distancing themselves from Choe in a press release and emphasizing that, “Choe has not served on any executive body of the DMPIF since 2001 and we are currently conducting an internal audit to investigate possible charges of corruption against him from his time as chairman.”

However, Choe’s potentially treasonous activities sparked the interest of the Korean Institute for Research in Collaborationist Activities (민족문제연구소) who decided to take a look at the leadership of the DMPIF. Fresh from their hard work on the newest release of names of leading colonial period collaborators, they conducted a detailed study of all leading executives of the DMPIF from its founding in 1965 until now. The disturbing conclusions reached by their researchers can be found in the concluding paragraph of their damning 622 page report:

“Of the 78 members holding executive positions in the history of the DMPIF no less than 59, including Choe Sangho are direct descendants of colonial period pro-Japanese traitors. An additional 6 executive leaders of the DMPIF in the 1960s were themselves already in our most recent list of 4,776 traitors. We must therefore conclude that the DMPIF is a pro-Japanese collaborationist organization and will be including the organization in the upcoming release of the post-liberation edition of our dictionary of pro-Japanese collaborationist organizations (일제협력단체사전: 국내 해방후 일제잔재편).

The reaction was swift and severe. Last week a statue of Choe Sangho that had been erected at the opening of the fish market in Noryangjin in 1999 to commemorate his lifetime dedication to the preservation of Dokdo was torn down by angry protesters. More peaceful candlelight vigils were held outside the DMPIF demanding the dissolution of the organization.

Many Koreans were left shocked and confused. Scenes of crying children whose parents denied them the pleasure of visiting their favorite local Dokdo restaurant became commonplace. The very restaurants that helped promote the Korean claim to Dokdo long before children sang the Dokdo song in school were somehow also connected to Japanese terrorists who were trying to steal the islands from them? How could this happen? The scholarly investigations of the Korean Institute for Research in Collaborationist Activities were followed up upon on by another powerful non-profit organization dedicated to the global fight against Japanese neo-imperialism: VANK.

The Very Annoyed Network of Koreans, or VANK, set out to identify the motives and the exact trail of money and meetings that linked the DMPIF with Japanese organizations. First their volunteers infiltrated the mid-tier cells of the DMPIF and recorded a number of revealing conversations that showed the base opportunism at the heart of the DMPIF’s treasonous crimes. The following example gives the clearest voice to this treachery:

DMPIF Traitor: Business was at its peak during the furor surrounding the establishment of ‘Takeshima Day’ in Shimane [Prefecture, Japan] and the issue of the Takeshima stamps a few years ago. However, since then people have gradually forgotten about Dokdo and business has been in steep decline. All people care about now is eating Korean beef! We have to get Dokdo back into the news and for that we need to work together with the Japanese, who have that ability.

VANK Infiltrator: But what if Japan succeeds in its campaign to steal Dokdo from us?

DMPIF Traitor: [Laughing] That would be perfect! Recovering the islands from Japan would become a permanent obsession of all Koreans! Our restaurants would flourish!

There is a sick and twisted logic to the traitor’s comment. Who now remembers the once insanely popular restaurants of pre-WWII France that served Alsatian cuisine and incorporated the word “revanche” in their names or on their menus? If Dokdo were lost, the spirit of revanche would surely lead to a new renaissance for the DMPIF, had their plot not been uncovered. Thanks to the dedicated efforts of VANK members, fired with passionate zeal and love for their nation, massive financial contributions by the DMPIF to a “bamboo fund” and other Japanese plots have been uncovered. Yesterday, the farcical attempt of DMPIF to prevent the scandal from coming out came to an end when the entire executive board of the federation fled to Tsushima island and sought political asylum from the Japanese authorities, who still forcefully occupy the Korean island, properly known as Daemado. “When Korea rightfully reclaims Daemado,” said a spokesman from VANK, “these traitors will receive their just punishment.”

One major battle to thwart the current Japanese attempt to steal Dokdo from Korea has been won but Koreans must remain vigilant. The fight continues, with ever increasing efficacy. Seoul Metro has pulled Japanese condom ads found on subway doors and special crack troops have successfully apprehended and liquidated a flock of pro-Japanese Korean pheasants. Let no Korean man, woman, or child ever forget that Dokdo is and has always been their land!

1. Skadberg, Kjell. “Research Note” The International Irredentist Review 14:3 September, 2008 (forthcoming), 248.

Finally, use of these quotation marks excuses us from having to spend time analyzing the terms themselves, putting them aside as if to say, “Yes, yes, this is a very inappropriate term that needs careful and sensitive discussion, but since I’ve a lot to do in this essay, I just can’t be bothered at the moment to deal with it.”

Some people seem to feel that the aesthetic impact on one’s work is such that the frequent use of quotations is just not worth it, or perhaps feel that we simply aren’t accomplishing anything useful by using them for direct translations or referrals to terms as they were used decades or centuries ago. However, not using quotations or confronting problematic terms can earn the ire of book reviewers, as I discussed in a response to a review of the book Collaboration by Timothy Brooks. Brooks was criticized for used the term “pacification teams” to refer to the units the Japanese called “pacification teams” in occupied China during the war even if he is anything but sympathetic to the Japanese in his book.

One strategy is to use quotations once, and then announce that you won’t be using them anymore. I came across this tactic today when reading a Chinese translation of an essay by Matsuda Toshihiko, called 日本帝國在殖民地的憲兵警察制度：從朝鮮，關東州致滿洲國的統治樣式遷移 (English title was listed as “The ‘Gendarme-oriented’ Police System in the Japanese Colonial Empire: The Transfer of Models of Rule Used in Colonial Korea to Kwantung Province and Manchukuo”) After putting Japan’s 內地 (the interior of Japan = Japan proper excluding its colonies) and terms like 滿洲 (Manchuria, 滿洲國 Manchukuo, the largely Japanese controlled Manchurian state from 1932-1945, often called 僞滿州 or the “puppet Manchukuo”) in quotations, he follows each with “一下省略括號” (“Brackets left out below”).

Another strategy that can sometimes be used, which is one I follow for some words like “traitors,” is to embrace a word and use it quite shamelessly in order to deliberately provoke the reader. In English, the word traitor has lost much of its punch of late – a good thing in my opinion – but still holds great power in many other places and languages. The discomfort generated by the word and the way it forces readers to think about what it really means is part of what I aim to achieve when I use the term. Far from wanting to contribute to the term’s legitimacy, my deliberate use of it is partly out of a kind of mockery, but more importantly out of a desire to help set the scene of the politically charged context in which it was used.

Though I can’t speak for them, I suspect something similar is being done in some other famous cases of this. Some scholars of Korean history have been strongly criticized for using words like “terrorist” to describe Korea’s national tragic hero Kim Koo. I suspect these same critics would have much less opposition to him be referred to by his popular nickname, “the assassin.” I really don’t have strong feelings on this issue and I don’t think it is as straightforward as my own case, but it raises some interesting questions. What if these scholars are also engaging in a dual process of linguistic mockery and deliberate attempt at reviving a historical scene? Should the word be off limits entirely, should it necessarily be accompanied with quotations, or are there alternatives? What I think escapes some critics of such scholars is that I believe at least some of them are using the word terrorist not as a way to conjure images of Kim Koo as a suicide bomber in a crowded market but, on the contrary, to show how the word terrorist has itself a history and potentially embraces a wide range of figures we might be less willing to unconditionally condemn. In doing so, they potentially open a space in which to critique the way the word has come to be used and what it now narrowly represents, as well as the wide range of activities and contexts it covered both in the past and now. Can we only engage in such a rhetorical technique through the use of quotations?

I’d be interested in hearing from other students and scholars about this. What strategies do others take when they are faced with the need or potential need to establish quotational quarantines? What conventions do you follow?

I thought to myself, you know, it is kind of depressing to see how little is actually available in Korean sources, as far as I have been able to find out so far, and especially when compared to the wealth of materials of widely varying quality coming out on the various violent uprisings in South Korea in 1948 (Yŏsu, Cheju-do, and so on). Though American military materials abound, in general, I been somewhat underwhelmed by the relative lack of accounts of the 1945-50 period on the Korean side. The explanation I hear everywhere is that the devastation of the Korean War of 1950-3 is much to blame.

Just as I was pondering this problem, two elderly men sat down next to me and carried on a conversation. Although the loud espresso machine in the background made it difficult, I overheard some of their conversation and could recognize my favorite linguistic phenomenon:

わざわざ…followed by some Korean
しがつはつか（四月二十日）완전히…more Korean
근대おれは…more Japanese
すまないな, 지난번…more Korean
あれはね、…followed by Korean sentence.

Some excellent code-switching going on. Sentences seemed to only switch completely into Korean when discussion got fast or emotional, but would switch back to Japanese at the beginning of a new topic with Korean words sprinkled in here and there in the middle of sentences, and the middle of Korean sentences throughout the conversation would get a Japanese word here and there, as if for emphasis.

This is something I have written about here at Muninn on several occasions (A code switching family in Seoul, code-switching in Taiwan, Japanese-Chinese code-switching couple in Taiwan, Chinese-English code switching in a Harvard campus coffee shop). It was something I saw on a number of occasions in Taiwan amongst older Taiwanese though, with the exception of older Koreans speaking to me in Japanese (such the Korean war stories I heard from this gentleman and this retired policeman) I have been looking forward to finding the same thing in Korea, where I know it happens.

After listening for a few minutes, I took advantage of a moment of silence between the two elderly friends and jumped in, using Japanese. A delightful conversation ensued, which eventually ended up in exactly the kind of code-switching between Korean and Japanese that was going on before I joined in, but now with some English thrown in (one of the two had worked 4 years in the US) here and there as well.

Both learnt their Japanese as children, having completed primary school during the colonial period. They were 13 and 14 when the colonial period ended, and were both a small minority in a good quality school made up of mostly Japanese students. “One day, our Japanese friends suddenly told us they had to go to Japan because they lost the war,” said one, “to which I replied, ‘Why do you have to go to Japan? Weren’t you born here?'” One was born and raised in Taegu, but was now living and still working in Japan, while the other grew up in Seoul. I asked the man from Taegu if he remembers anything about the violence in the autumn of 1946, he said someone told him about seeing the corpses of policemen being dragged by ropes through the streets, but he didn’t see anything himself.

I asked them about their Korean war experience. The man from Seoul says that he and his family were kidnapped by North Korean militia and taken to a town north of P’yŏngyang and put into a labor team, and that he was held for 100 days. He said every day was a nightmare there, his mother praying for their survival every day. He says he has almost blocked every memory of the experience out, “When I close my eyes all I can see is an image of the 태극기 flag.” He said that he escaped with his family when the US troops reached the area in the autumn of 1950. He then walked back to South Korea. His friend sitting across the table said, “I have never heard this story! Why do you tell this stranger but you’ve never told me this story?” He replied that this was a really painful (つらい) memory for him and he doesn’t want to recall it (思い出したくない).

I told them the biggest obstacle for people like me studying the period 1945-50 is the lack of materials. Even if the memories are painful, I encouraged them both to write down their stories, and like the boom of Japanese publishing their memoirs and diaries of wartime experiences in Japan in the last few decades has done, give historians and younger generations a chance to hear their stories. One of the guys answered, “いや、韓国は日本じゃない。ここでは、そういうような書く문화がない。” (Korea is not Japan. Here we don’t have that kind of culture of writing) Is that fair? Perhaps that generation just needs a bit more time and a bit more encouragement?

你是韩国人吗？ Are you Korean?

The question came across quite sincere. On the one hand it seems reasonable to ask someone who is “returning” to Korea if they are Korean. On the other hand, one might also say it is reflective of a kind of ignorance of the fact that the vast majority of Korean citizens are anything but blond caucasians. It is possible that this driver may not, like other Chinese I have met here, have been watching Korean dramas and may not know much at all about the people of that peninsula other than, perhaps, that China fought a war there to “resist America” (抗美战争）and its “aggression” against North Korea in the 1950s. Or perhaps the driver assumed, quite reasonably, that, like China with its dozens of recognized ethnic groups, Korea too had an ethnic minority of caucasian-looking people living somewhere up in the hills where we preserve our language and traditional costumes. However, this is the second time that a Chinese person I met (the other time was a student of around high school age I met in Beijing years ago who asked me, in the presence of some Japanese friends, if I was Japanese) who only used my race to put me into the category of “foreigner” when seeing me and not immediately assuming that I could not be a citizen of some other Asian country.

Another example of this kind of relatively rare experience suggests that this doesn’t have to be due to any kind of ignorance about the relative racial homogeneity that still prevails in places like Japan and Korea, despite recent immigration. Once when I was at Taipei airport in Taiwan returning to Japan, where I was living at the time, I met a Korean citizen who was born and raised in Japan (在日), spoke only Japanese and no Korean or much English. We met at the bus stop at the then “Chiang Kai-shek airport” and soon discovered we were both heading to Tokyo. Although she was traveling as a Korean, she told me she was actually right now in the process of getting Japanese citizenship, over the strong opposition of her grandparents in Japan. After a few sentences exchanged in Japanese, she asked me, “Are you Japanese?”

As someone who lived her entire life in Japan and who spoke no language but Japanese, her question, again completely serious, can’t be blamed on any ignorance of the racial makeup of Japan. Instead, perhaps because of her own situation, she didn’t immediately associate being Japanese, as many others who grew up in that country would, with belonging to any particular ethnic group or race. She asked the question as we might reasonably ask someone of any race, who spoke with an American accent, if they were American (though even in this case, racial minorities like Asian-Americans will often get the, “Where are you from from,” question to get them to answer where their non-caucasian immigrant ancestors came from).

Given the reality of immigration in places like Korea and Japan, the time may come, in a decade or two, when this question becomes more common and natural.

As some of my previous postings indicate, I have become more and more interested in the geographies and narration of museum exhibits. As a student of East Asian history, I was especially interested in how the museum portrayed the cultures of that region.

The museum of natural history is not just home to dinosaur bones and stuffed animals. Between the hall containing the stuffed lions and the one containing the stuffed birds, one can find the “Hall of Asian Peoples.”

In the hall of Asian peoples, with “Asia” defined in the broadest old use of the word, we can find all sorts of exhibits. The hall provides a lot of interesting material for comment, from its exhibit on “the Lure of Asia” to its portrayal of Islamic cultures and China, but I’ll just make a few comments on its portrayal of Korea and Japan. Take a look at this hall plan (click for a larger version):

I was struck by the central location of Japan in the large square room to the right. Surrounding Japan were a number of exhibits, including the “Introduction to Primitive Asia” and others. Among the exhibits on the outside of the Japanese center was one portraying the Ainu peoples.

The Ainu, of course, where almost eradicated by the Japanese. Next to this, also on the outside of the Japanese center, we find the Koreans. The entire mapping of these cultures in the museum closely mirrored the Japanese imperial order of old.

The Korean government, however, has done what it can to spruce up the exhibit a bit, which portrays a Yangban scholar at his studies, with his hanbok-clad wife working nearby. The title of the exhibit is, “KOREA: The Uniqueness.” Ah yes, that familiar claim brought back so many memories. A sign reports that, “This exhibit was made possible through the generous assistance of the Korean Cultural Service.” It saddens me that, far outside of the host countries, the arm of nationalists can reach into the heart of museums. When I was there, a crowd of delighted Korean tourists were snapping pictures. The Ainu next door were less popular with the cameras.

The heart of the square room, with its Japan exhibits, was hardly any better. I could smell the hand of Japanese government influence upon the contents of the exhibit, even if some of the contents showed unmistakable evidence of a non-Japanese hand. See, for example, the kanji characters in this numbered list of photo identifications:

Besides the general sloppiness of the handwriting, you may notice the number four (四) shows a little excess creativity. These problems, however, are found in most museums. The element of the Japan exhibit that most showed potential Japanese government or other suspect dabbling was the description of the Japanese emperor system (click for readable version):

This description of the Japanese emperor would not pass muster in a student essay in the most introductory course on Japan. The over-attribution of agency to the emperor in the Meiji period, the description of the “restoration” of Shintô which was more accurately the birth of state Shintô, is bad enough. The most interesting problem with this little snippet is what it leaves out. Notice how the paragraph jumps from the triumphs of the Meiji period, over the decades of Japanese imperialism, directly to Hirohito’s denial of divinity after World War II. How clean this picture looks: no imperial responsibility for the war, no outside pressure of Hirohito to deny his divinity hinted at.

In case the rosy picture of the text failed to persuade, no “Hall of Asian Peoples” could be without a photo of the Japanese imperial couple:

curry, n.2 A preparation of meat, fish, fruit, or vegetables, cooked with a quantity of bruised spices and turmeric, and used as a relish or flavouring, esp. for dishes composed of or served with rice.

but seriously, I think it is time for us to take a stand and reserve the use of the word for the spicy curries that truly deserve the name. One of the first to go should be what the Japanese call 甘口カレー, or sweet curry. It is simply shocking that this can decorate the shelves of grocery stores in Japan along side “moderately spicy” and “very spicy” curry blocks. “Not very spicy at all,” this I can accept, but “sweet” curry does violence to the word it modifies. Curry has to be more manly, more aggressive, it has to have bite! If anything it has to mean something slightly closer to another, now obsolete, use of the word curry also listed in the Oxford English Dictionary:

curry, currie, n.3 The portions of an animal slain in the chase that were given to the hounds; the cutting up and disembowelling of the game; transf. any prey thrown to the hounds to be torn in pieces, or seized and torn in pieces by wild beasts: see QUARRY.

You see, at least that has much more punch than “a quantity of bruised spices”!

Today I was reading in the Harvard-Yenching library with Sayaka. She abandoned studying for a time and with her headphones on watched Youtube movie clips of Downtown, her favorite pair of Osaka comedians. The silence of the library was disturbed by the occasional muffled chuckle emerging from her side of the table. After we left the library I asked her what was so funny. The Downtown clip she showed me was brilliant: Matsumoto Hitoshi basically laid down the law on this ridiculous concept of 甘口カレー. For those of you who understand Japanese, you can view the clip here: 甘口カレー Downtown Clip.

Tragically, however, like so much other extremely rare and otherwise completely unobtainable video content now or until recently available on Youtube, I doubt the link above will last long.

This kind of writing portrays Japan as a friendly, civilized, and eminently rational state surrounded by dangerous and evil neighbors. Japan, the writer will claim, is provoked and insulted, and forced to react to this outside pressure either by concessions or the rare and just stand against its attackers.

I find this style of writing particularly annoying not only because it is essentially a perfect reproduction of the Japanese nationalist line on foreign policy, but because it resembles the writing of so many of Japan’s misguided supporters in earlier times. This kind of expository can be found in the English language newspaper articles and books written by those friendly to Japan from the end of the 19th century and through the Manchurian incident of 1931. In earlier times it showed the degree to which contemporary diplomats and politicians within Japan were able to successfully portray themselves as enlightened members of the world club of nations while continuing to describe their neighbors as, at best, half-sovereign unruly children awaiting the benevolent and guiding hand of the Japanese empire. Both then and now, this kind of writing essentially avoids the need to address the problem at hand face on, since any accusations can be dismissed as the pernicious ranting of outsiders.

Let us take a closer look at Will’s article in order to offer more concrete criticism. Let us reduce the article to a series of more basic clips:

[*] 1. Japan is a history-haunted place living in a dangerous communist neighborhood with “truculent” China and “weird” North Korea.
2. “World War II still shapes political discourse because of a Shinto shrine in the center of this city”
[C] 3. “In 1978, 14 other souls were enshrined [at Yasukuni] — those of 14 major war criminals.”
[*] 4. “Between that enshrinement and 1984, three prime ministers visited Yasukuni 20 times without eliciting protests from China.”
[*] 5. China and South Korea have national identities partly formed from being victims of Japan, but ” significant extent, such national identities are political choices.”
[*] 6. “Leftist ideology causes South Korea’s regime to cultivate victimhood and resentment of a Japan imagined to have expansionism in its national DNA.”
[*] 7. “China’s regime, needing a new source of legitimacy, seeks it in memories of resistance to Japanese imperialism.”
[*] 8. “Actually, most of China’s resistance was by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces, Mao’s enemies.”
[*] 9. Mao killed millions more Chinese than the Japanese did.
[*] 10. One of the reasons that Koizumi and Abe want to visit the shrine “China should not dictate the actions of Japan’s prime ministers.”
11. “Nelson picked up a poker and said: It doesn’t matter where I put this — unless Bonaparte says I must put it there. In that case, I must put it someplace else.”
[C] 12. Shrine has problematic museum but Koizumi and Abe don’t include the museum in their visit.
[C] 13. It would be helpful if Abe would discontinue visiting Yasukuni. After all the emperor stopped going because of the war criminals being enshrined.
[*] 14. China had “vicious” riots against Japan, has refused to support Japan’s permanent seat on Security Council but back in 1972 Mao said both Chinese and Japanese had been victims of Japan’s militarists
[*] 15. China’s submarines and aircraft are making incursions into Japanese territory and Japan says China is not in full control of its military.
16. Lots of travel and other relations good between China and Japan
17. Don’t be mystified by Yasukuni, we can understand it, since, after all, its kind of like the issue of Confederate flags and how to honor the dead without honoring the cause.

I have marked some of these clips with a [*] or a [C]. The former are statements which make it difficult to describe this article as having anything to do with Yasukuni. In fact, this article doesn’t discuss any of the major controversies surrounding the issue whatsoever, including whether or not the Prime Minister’s visits are constitutional, whether an alternative memorial for the war dead should be set up, whether the war criminals should be removed, whether the war criminals were unfairly judged by victor’s justice, or whether, more generally, the visits to the shrine are necessarily or just empirically done in order to honor both the cause and the dead, let alone the issue of whether one should be honoring the dead if they include major war criminals responsible for wars of aggression.

Instead, a full majority of the claims in this article are in fact provocative and insulting statements made about China and Korea. “Truculent” China which is apparently not in full control of its military, “weird” North Korea, the “leftist ideology” of South Korea appear to be the main topic of this short article. He drags out such completely irrelevant claims such as the idea that Chang Kai-shek was more responsible for the resistance than Mao’s communists and that Mao killed millions more Chinese than the Japanese did.

These national-ad-hominem attacks are both completely irrelevant to the issue of whether or not the Japanese prime minister should be going to Yasukuni but they should also be dismissed for other reasons. It is certainly true that Chang’s more equipped and mechanized forces were the primary opponent of the Japanese during the war, thus the primary “resistance” against the Japanese. However, no Japanese commander at the time would dare underestimate the incredible draining effect of the powerful Communist resistance throughout China behind Japanese lines, which contributed greatly to gradual attrition of forces, sabotage, attacks on supply lines and logistical targets, and incessant guerilla warfare that forced the Japanese to station many forces and resources in China even in areas it had already conquered. A comparison of the two is to miss the different strategies and roles of the two, especially in the later stages of the war.

As to the issue of Mao killing more Chinese than the Japanese this too is really a problematic claim. Mao and the Communist Leadership must take responsibility for the millions of deaths during the famine of the Great Leap Forward and the violence that ravaged China during the Cultural Revolution, not to mention the political violence throughout the postwar period. Mao was a horrible leader both for what he ordered, but more for what he neglected.

However, you cannot simply line up these numbers with wartime casualties in the war with Japan and declare Mao to be Satan’s champion. People who died at the hand of a bullet, a sword, or a bomb surely belong in a different moral category of victimization than that those who died of starvation as a result of economic policy which exported grain during a massive famine or encouraged government grain procurement at high levels in order to meet impossible growth projections. This is even a more clear division, in my mind, than the persuasive distinction Richard Overy makes in his recent book, The Dictators between the horrors of Stalin’s gulag, and that of the concentration camps and holocaust of Germany, “Though Soviet camps were prisons of a particularly brutal and despairing character, they were never designed or intended to be centres of extermination.” (608)

The only criticism of Japan, or anything nearing a critical approach, can be found in a statement thankfully mentioning the fact that war criminals were enshrined at Yasukuni in 1978 (though the press didn’t find out about it until 1979), a statement noting that there is a completely revisionist museum, Yûshûkan at the shrine, and finally one line saying it would be “helpful” if Abe stopped going.

Even here, Will fails to mention that not only the museum but the entire shrine and most organizations which support it are extremely revisionist and clearly honor the cause as well as the dead. For example, when entering the shrine, you can find pamphlets at the entry in both Japanese and other languages, including one for children, proudly proclaiming how the shrine contains the spirits of the “Showa martyrs” who were unjustly condemned at the “puppet trials” of the early postwar. The official Yasukuni website contains similar passages and the entire shrine, despite its non-government status is, whether we like it or not, historically an absolutely central symbol of Japanese war and militarism for more than a century.

Will is also totally irresponsible when he mentions that, “between that enshrinement and 1984, three prime ministers visited Yasukuni 20 times without eliciting protests from China,” without providing the slightest bit of context. This statement is clearly designed to give the reader the following impression, “China never thought Yasukuni was a problem until suddenly it became nationalist all of a sudden, then it started complaining.”

This strategy: delegitimization by historicization is classic but without context here it is unacceptable. Two very important points have been left out. First, the Yasukuni issue did not suddenly become controversial in 1985, it had long been protested by Japan’s left, and Prime Minister Miki’s visit in 1975, for example, got a lot of press. It was protested then, as it is now, as a violation of the constitution (because of the shrines former state status and the ambiguous status of the prime minister on his visit) but perhaps more importantly as a horrible message to send by visiting such a powerful symbol of war, militarism, and most of all, the emperor. This was made much worse by the enshrining of the war criminals.

China’s government started paying closer attention to the Yasukuni issue from Nakasone’s visit in 1985 is because 1984 was the year of the first “Textbook incident” – which inflamed Chinese public sentiment. The mid-1980s was a period in which Chinese public sentiment and something of a relaxation of controls on the public sphere combined with the textbook incident to create the first massive wave of anti-Japanese sentiment which then, as it did in the recent riots, frightened the government as it tried to juggle strategies of repression with co-option.

It is true that China’s government has encouraged a more nationalist education but in no period was China’s communist government not made use of nationalism, whether directed at the Soviet Union, the United States, or Japan. Its character has changed shape and has acquired a mass character, but has not been invented out of nothing in the mid-80s.

Yasukuni became the powerful issue it was for Chinese because after 1984 there was the widespread, and largely justified realization that the issue of history and memory in Japan was anything but resolved. The repentant words of Tanaka on his visit to China in 1972 may have soothed but in 1984 Chinese throughout the country realized that there was anything but consensus in Japan about how to interpret the past war of aggression against China. Yasukuni, especially from the Chinese perspective, cannot be separated from the broader fear and realization on the behalf of the Chinese people that a significant proportion (though exaggerated in their own writings and propaganda) of the Japanese public still viewed the war as one of liberation and were continuously trying to rewrite.

국수: 그 나라나 민족 고유의 정신상・물질상의 장점이나 아름다운 점.

To compare, I then looked up the same word in Japanese in the Japanese dictionary 広辞苑 which had the following definition:

国粋：その国家・国民に固有の、精神上・物質上の長所や美点

If you know Japanese and Korean you can see that these two definitions are, down to the order and specific wording, almost exactly same. It can be roughly translated as:

The spiritual and material virtues and strong points specific to a nation and its [people/race]

The only differences between the two definitions is that 1) the Japanese uses the word 国民 (nation; people; citizens) whereas in the same position, the Korean definition uses the word 민족(民族) which has a similar meaning but includes a kind of conception of race or ethnicity in it and as far as I know, cannot be used to merely refer to the citizens of a state. 2) The Korean uses 아름다운 점 for 美点 (good point; merit; virtue; beauty; excellence) when they could have used the same Chinese character compound 미점. However, the meaning is pretty much identical in either case.

While it is not surprising that a character compound like 国粋, which probably had either a Chinese predecessor (I haven’t bothered to look up its origin) or was a modern neologism from Japan is similarly defined in the dictionaries of the languages that adopted the compound. However, the similarity in word order and phrasing is really too close to be anything other than a direct copy. The question then is, who copied who? Or perhaps more likely, did the 広辞苑 and 새국어사전 take their definition from the same older source (the 諸橋 or something like it perhaps?)

I turned on the television just in time to catch the replay of the goal that was scored and created such joy all around me. Australia had just scored a goal against Japan…

The museum is actually quite small, but nicely done, and you can get a reasonably good feel for it through their online exhibition page. All the signs are available in both Korean and relatively decent English, and many displays have small Japanese translations as well. The history of kimchi, displays of common types of kimchi, a discussion of their ingredients, etc. are among the highlights. One long narrow passage, which we might call the “hall of propaganda” has cartoons on all of its walls extolling the endless virtues of kimchi for one’s health. We rushed perhaps a little too fast through this section but were trying to outrun an army of older Japanese tourists who were being guided through the museum behind us.

In the last room there is a kimchi tasting room (the “field work” part of the museum?) and a number of computers set up where you can view, in Korean, Japanese, or English, movies showing you how to prepare kimchi from all regions of north and south Korea.

On one wall of the computer room there were two interesting articles posted from Western newspapers. One of them was particularly interesting article by Calvin Sims from the New York Times February 5, 2000 edition. Here is the opening:

Kimchi, as the cabbage is known, has been a staple of the Korean diet for centuries, and in recent years has become an increasingly popular and lucrative export — particularly to the Japanese market. But now, the Korean kimchi industry is seething because Japanese foodmakers are increasingly marketing their own copycat kimchi (pronounced KIM-chee) — and worse, calling it kimchi.

The Koreans have even brought their complaint to international food regulators, accusing the Japanese of subverting the value of authentic kimchi. A favorable ruling for the Koreans could force Japanese makers of kimchi to call it something else.

Japan has countered that Korea has no monopoly on the term kimchi, any more than Mexico can lay claim to tacos or India to curry. But that argument does not fly with the Koreans.

“What the Japanese are selling is nothing more than cabbage sprinkled with seasonings and artificial flavorings,” said Robert Kim, assistant manager for the overseas sales team here at the Doosan Corporation, a South Korean food manufacturer that operates the world’s largest kimchi factory. “This debate is not just about protecting our market share. We are trying to preserve our national heritage.”

Apparently some 90% of kimchi exports at the time were going to Japan and a map in the museum showed clearly that the stats for Japan were huge in comparison to all other nations. Unlike the more recent Chinese kimchi scare in Korea, according to the article what was seen as especially frustrating to the Koreans was the specific ways that kimchi were made:

In a reversal of the traditional pattern in which Korean manufacturers often copied popular Japanese products at lower cost, competitors in Japan, using cheaper and less time-consuming production methods, are homing in on South Korea’s biggest kimchi export market.

Many Japanese producers skip the fermentation and add artificial sour flavoring using citric acid and gum. The Japanese sometimes use rice paste to give their kimchi a gluey consistency similar to that found naturally in the Korean version.

Critics of the Japanese kimchi say it lacks the depth of flavor and health benefits of its Korean counterpart and that Japanese cabbage contains more water and is not as crispy.

The South Korean government has petitioned the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Codex Alimentarius commission to establish an international standard that would require products using the name kimchi to be fermented according to the Korean tradition.

In negotiations with representatives from South Korea and Japan, the Codex commission is drafting a kimchi standard that is scheduled to be ratified next year by the 150 member countries of the organization, which sets codes for food processing to ensure minimal health standards.

So far, neither the Japanese nor the Koreans seem satisfied with Codex’s draft standard. It defines kimchi as a “fermented” product but permits the use of citric, acetic and lactic acids, none of which are used in the traditional kimchi process.

Though I really don’t know what methods were used in its production, it is true that I have often been left unsatisfied with the cheaper supermarket kimchi I have found in Japan when I lived there. It had less of a garlic taste, felt less “meatier” and so on. However, higher quality stuff can always be found at higher prices. I have to admit that, to some extent, I’m sympathetic to the following kind of argument raised in the article by the Japan Pickle Producers Association as the article continues:

“Should the same standard be applied to curry?” said Toshio Ogawa, an adviser to the Japan Pickle Producers Association, which represents several Japanese kimchi makers. “Everyone knows that curry was invented in India, but the curry that Indians eat is quite different from the curry that Japanese eat.”

On the other hand, at least part of the problem here isn’t about Japan taking Kimchi, throwing in some natto and calling it kimchi. Instead, there is at least something to be said for the idea that a product of significantly less quality is being produced. I think it is certainly reasonable to establish, at the private level, some kind of international standard, and let products which meet that standard carry some kind of mark on them. However, just because there is a rich tradition behind kimchi, there shouldn’t be any kind of legal monopoly over the name “kimchi.” I don’t know how this developed since the article was published in 2000 but the existence of other dangerous precedents of this kind are not comforting. Don’t we have enough problems with intellectual property rights run wild?

Update: One of the other precedents for this kind of national monopolies of a kind of food I had never heard of: Feta Cheese. For more on this read an interesting post by Kerim on the subject.

I read the article while in a subway station in Seoul. I asked Sayaka what the lyrics for 君が代 were again and she proceeded to sing the song. She did this three times, struggling each time to remember the words, before it suddenly occurred to me that it probably isn’t such a good idea for a Japanese person, in a Korean subway station, to be singing the Japanese national anthem out loud. I stopped her and reminded her that her father had explicitly emailed her before she left for Korea and issued her a very formal and detailed warning on how not to provoke the Koreans by, for example, bringing up sensitive historical and territorial issues. He had neglected to tell her not to sing the Japanese anthem in crowded public places.

As you might expect if you have read any of my previous postings, I’m sympathetic to those who want to resist the reintroduction of flag and anthem rituals in the Japanese schools and find it unfortunate that the government affirmed both officially in a 1999 law. On the other hand, from a tactical standpoint, I really don’t think this fight is worth the effort. I don’t think it is possible in the current global and Japanese climate, to make any progress in a movement to oppose the national anthem and flag—even when it evokes images of a troubled national past.

I understand, however, that for younger students, this is one of the only issues where they may personally get involved. They can feel the exhilaration of refusing to sing an anthem which celebrates the Japanese imperial reign and thus get their first taste of civil disobedience. Though far less controversial than their early predecessors, they can join in a long tradition dating back to that historic moment when the Christian Uchimura Kanzô refused to bow at the reading of the Imperial Rescript on Education.

Instead of disrupting school ceremonies, refusing to show, or remaining silent, I think a humorous parody of the anthem is a wonderful idea. If translating the US anthem into Spanish is enough to get US nationalists all wound up, then a witty parody of the Japanese anthem if students are able to get away with singing it. I can almost see their devious chuckles as they sing it. Unlike the provocative Danish cartoons, which I think were simply a bad idea on pragmatic grounds and not problematic in principle, this is highly unlikely to cause violent riots in, say, Kagoshima.

Then I read the lyrics:

Kiss me, girl, your old one.
Till you’re near, it is years till you’re near.
Sounds of the dead will she know?
She wants all told, now retained, for, cold caves know the moon’s
seeing the mad and dead.

What the…?! Oh no…is it possible that my favorite T-shirt company was commissioned to write the lyrics of the parody?

The Sankei article tries to help us understand how on earth this resembles the anthem enough to go unnoticed:

歌詞は、本来の歌詞と発声が酷似した英語の体裁。例えば冒頭部分は「キス・ミー・ガール・ユア・オールド・ワン」で、「キー（ス）・ミー・ガー（ル）・ヨー・ワー（ン）」と聞こえ、口の動きも本来の歌詞と見分けにくい。

I’m sorry, this is just pathetic. The song does bear some resemblance to the sounds of the original lyrics when you pronounce the English words in their Japanese katakana equivalents, but it is neither humorous nor does it make any sense. This is nowhere near the talented work that lies behind something like Hatten är din (Flash).

I suggest we help these students by giving them something better to work with. Any volunteers to help?

Here are the original Japanese lyrics:

君が代は
千代に八千代に
さざれ石の
いわおとなりて
こけのむすまで

The pronunciation:

きみがよは
ちよにやちよに
さざれいしの
いわおとなりて
こけのむすまで

Romanized:

Kimi ga yo wa
Chiyo ni Yachiyo ni
Sazare ishi no
Iwao to narite
Koke no musu made

Remember, if we make alternate lyrics, our satirical bite will be limited somewhat since we have to make the new version sound as phonetically close as possible to the original. Also, since it will be sung by young Japanese students, we should avoid English sounds that are difficult for Japanese to create. Post your recommendations in the comments! Finally, like the original Japanese attempt we should keep in mind that the Japanese pronunciations of English words aren’t always what you might expect.

Sometimes though I leave the bookstore with really mixed feelings. In fact, I feel a rant coming on… The sections of the bookstore I spend most of my time in (Modern Japanese history, Modern China/Korea history, and the 文庫 paperback section) inevitably have a range of offerings that just disgust me. I can’t help feeling like Shibuya Book First’s selection has gotten worse since when I lived here last in 2004.

Book First is not like the more heavily populist/right-wing smaller bookstores and does have a decent selection of materials. Today I bought the new introduction to modern history of East Asia (『未来を開く歴史』） written cooperatively by historians from China, Korea, and Japan who are trying to develop educational materials for the future. I was also pleased to see several volumes of a new series of books published by the joint Japan-Korea history group with some great looking articles in them (a bit pricey, I’ll get them at the library). Today there was even a full display dedicated to Edward Said translations which included some kind of showing of a documentary about him.

On the same floor though, as you approach the history books, I couldn’t help but notice a whole slew of new editions of Nitobe Inazô’s Bushido and various silly books on how contemporary Japanese should recover their Bushido warrior spirit and a pride in their people.

For the love of Lugalbanda, why can’t the nation just roll over and die…please…doesn’t the 21st century have enough to deal with? What I would give to be alive the day when we can all tear up our passports and laugh at how nonsensical the whole national project was. Those of us who wish to destroy the nation find ourselves continually narrating its violence in the tragic mode, but no one has mastered the tragic mode better than the nationalists themselves. At some point we have to embrace the comic mode and highlight the resounding stupidity of it. We have to move from celebrating the creative and imaginative nature of these communities to a more focused effort at reminding ourself of its farcical core. When it is someday finally severed from the state and that unholy union is finally broken, leave it be…but until then I say spare it no satirical sting; offer it no shred of credibility.

Ok, where was I? The history section seemed to have gotten a bit worse. Maybe it is just me but the selection for nationalist revisionists seems to have expanded somewhat. While not a very scientific measure, to give you an idea, in the standard “Nanjing incident” (Nanjing massacre) section, 4 out of 12 books were of the “what massacre?” variety. This despite the fact that three of the remaining volumes were compilations of interviews with Japanese soldiers who admitted participating in the slaughter (two of them) and of interviews of victims. I have written about one of these important works here at Muninn. I just cannot understand how, with such excellent empirical material out there, any major publisher can still put out such crap. What made it worse was that both of the books about the Nanjing occupation out on display were of “what massacre?” variety. One was a whole book dedicated to talking about the problematic pictures of the massacre (there are indeed many pictures used in Chinese materials about the massacre which have nothing to do with the occupation of Nanjing in 1937 or are otherwise problematic), and the other was a work discussing KMT party archives showing how they mobilized propaganda to spread anti-Japanese sentiment in the aftermath of the occupation of Nanjing. I don’t have any problem with either of the central claims at work in these two prominently displayed books (that there are many problematic pictures about the massacre and that the Nationalists and later Communists milked the massacre for all its propaganda potential) – it is just that neither of these facts prove a damn thing in the face of a mountain of evidence about the widespread slaughter.

Another really well-done right-wing book out by the fascist PHP publishing company I saw prominently displayed was a guide to “Must-know history facts about modern Japanese history” This book was essentially a well-organized manual for those sympathetic to any and all Japanese nationalist silliness. Divided into about fifty short and very concise chapters, it covers all the most controversial themes in modern Japanese history (with bonus chapters on the Dokdo/Takeshima crisis, all of Japan’s other “indisputable” disputed claims, etc.) There was about as much nuance and balance in these books as there is blue in the Japanese flag. Unfortunatley, unlike the many other babbling works by various nut jobs out there, what I think makes this kind of book highly effective was its “executive summary” approach – kind of a briefing booklet. For example, to take the Nanjing massacre chapter as an example, it provided nice one-paragraph summaries of the key arguments of the opposition and counter-arguments so that the defensive nationalist reader will be well-prepared for any debates they might get into with “masochistic” and unpatriotic countrymen. For example, it had one paragraph with pre-war Nanjing population estimates (to prepare the reader for a triumphant take-down when Chinese casualty estimates are shown to be higher, no mention of course of the swelling population of the city due to refugees), it counters the “Safe Zone” violation arguments with the classic “Chinese soldiers were throwing off their uniforms and pouring into the zone [Implied follow-up: so what was the poor Japanese military supposed to do if not charge in and start grabbing/killing males at random]” Of course, there is no mention of the fact that captured soldiers were gunned down by the thousands (Of course, if they had to admit this fact, which many Japanese soldiers there at the time do, they would respond with the classic and feeble, “But we had no food to feed them, and no resources to detain them indefinitely…it is the Chinese military which must take responsibility for leaving its forces in Nanjing to die while its commanders fled.”)

It is so exhausting to see this kind of crap. I’m so tired of it. It is so distracting. I wish I could just ignore it, as I usually do, but the fact that this kind of material reaches a growing audience, in ever more effective formats means that it would be irresponsible not to keep myself relatively familiar with the kinds of vacuous claims being made. Of course, the best way to deal with this is not always to get into the trenches and lower ourselves constantly to their level of repetitive and simplistic discourse, but it remains important for historians in our field to issue the occasional royal smack-down. I am happy to report, however, that what I saw today confirms that they don’t seem to have produced any significant new material other than their regular score of long-ago refuted or irrelevant nonsense. The demand for their drivel though, seems to continue unabated, and I suspect it will grow if nationalist sentiment continues to grow. Ultimately, any time spent thinking about this distracts those of us interested in Sino-Japanese relations history or wartime/colonial history in modern East Asia from the more challenging and, I believe, important work of moving beyond the huge shadow of some of these (non-)controversies. It is not just for the sake of reconciliation in the region, but because the violence of war goes well-beyond a few symbolically important events. There are so many questions to ask, so many issues worth addressing and I so wish we could finally get to the stage where the study of violent wars and imperialism can move beyond the perpetual national mudslinging and nationalist whitewashing that continues today.

I didn’t talk to any of players and kept my Japanese language ability “to myself,” but perhaps somewhat sneakily read over the shoulder of the team’s trainer sitting next to me. During our 12 hour flight the trainer spent several hours on two tasks: 1) He seemed to be contemplating game strategy for the team by writing notes feverishly on the back of his notepad, and evaluating the performance of the team in their last game (against Germany’s team it seems, guessing from the game performance worksheet he was filling out). 2) He spent a lot of time filling out daily workout summaries for the team. The detailed worksheets he filled out had some fascinating details. Under the category for “Morning” he wrote what they had for breakfast, and had the option of putting check marks next to two options for “A stroll” (散歩) and “Stretching.” He also detailed other meals the team ate during the day, and there was space on each worksheet for details of up to 5 daily workouts or “team gatherings” (集合) which he seemed to fill up with ease.

Most interesting was the fan mail which was, of course, none of my business, but which I read along with him nonetheless (He saw me staring at the letters but probably assumed I was a curious foreigner fascinated by all the funky Japanese characters rather than actually reading them). If any of you are fans of the Japanese wheelchair basketball team you can rest easy, your mail appears to be getting read. One particularly touching letter came from a Japanese junior high school student, who was a really dedicated fan (closing her letter with “Go Japan! Go Go Go Japan!”). After seeing its somewhat personal contents, I started feeling guilty about my reading and drifted off to sleep again.

A Swedish Speaking Immigration Officer

At Narita airport I decided to use my Norwegian passport. My US passport is out of pages, falling to pieces (one immigration officer in Amsterdam thought it was forged and tried to pick off the already peeling plastic from the front page), and is generally not as convenient to travel with these days (shorter visa-free stays in some countries like Korea and expensive visa fees in places like Chile). As I was going through the passport control I was met with an unusually chatty inspector. The only other pleasant and friendly passport control inspector I have met was in Taiwan, where once I was asked about visiting Sayaka, learning Chinese, and whether Sayaka enjoyed living in Taiwan or not.

This time, the inspector look at my passport, smiled, and said, “Hei!” I thought he was speaking to me in English and that I was thus being greeted with an exclamation of some kind. I looked around to see what he might be trying to bring my attention to. He then said, “Can I say…Hei!” Then I realized: He is saying “Hei” in Norwegian – that is “Hello.” He said, “In Swedish I can say Hei! Can I say Hei! in Norwegian?” I said, “Yes, it is the same in Norwegian.”

My immigration officer went about continuing to process my visa and after a few seconds he looked up and said, “Norwegian and Swedish is all the same right?” I replied, “Umm…ya Danish, Swedish, Norwegian are all very close, think of it as something like Osaka dialect and Tohoku dialect.”

A few more stamps got issued and mysterious commands entered into his computer as he went back to looking like the stern mechanical immigration officer I have come to expect. Then, suddenly, he asked, “Can I say, ‘Jeg elsker deg.'” I felt a bit weird, looked around to see if there were any laughing Scandinavians nearby but smiled and said, “Yup, in Norwegian ‘I love you’ is also ‘Jeg elsker deg.”

He seemed delighted. He finished processing my entry into Japan, handed me my passport and said something like, “Takk så mykke” (sp?) I explained that while that made perfect sense in Norwegian (with a slightly different pronunciation), there were other terms for “Thank you” that we used in Norwegian if he wanted to master our particular Scandinavian dialect. He took note of my suggested alternatives on some piece of paper and continued to the next person.

An Apologetic Train Conductor

On the Keisei line train I rode from Narita airport into Tokyo, I frantically continued translating portions of my English seminar paper into the 30 minute Japanese presentation I was to deliver the next morning (I would finish at 5am and Sayaka, who was still in the US would return an emailed copy of this in corrected real Japanese only two hours later in time for my trip to the conference).

Suddenly the lights in the train went out and the train slowed smoothly to a stop. As soon as the lights went out the conductor’s voice could be heard on the intercom, “Please wait just a moment.” When the train had completely stopped the same voice explained, “I passed a signal light which I was not supposed to pass. As a result our train and an oncoming train have both automatically been forced to come to an emergency stop. The train will resume moving in just a moment. My deep apologies for the inconvenience I have caused everyone.”

Sure enough the train started moving again a moment later and passengers around me looked at each-other, some showing their disapproval that such an error could occur. I, on the other hand, was impressed at the forthright confession I had just heard, then I remembered what country I was in.

Asian Values

The conference I presented at, “The Second Annual International Conference of Prospective Researchers on Contemporary Asia” was sponsored by Waseda’s Center of Excellence – Contemporary Asian Studies and brought together some very interesting papers and presenters who were mostly young professors, post-docs, and graduate students. I was once a research assistant at the center and enjoyed seeing old friends and professors. It is difficult to spend much time active with the center without noticing its strong desire to further the creation of an “Asian community” or an “Asian identity” of one sort or another. Their motivations are of the most admirable kind: the multinational group of professors and graduate students active in COE-CAS want to overcome the deep distrust and tensions between Japan, Korea, and China, as well as welcome stronger ties with Southeast Asia and Mongolia. They are often highly critical of US arrogance, and of Western claims of universalist values. They are sensitive to the failures of previous efforts at Asian community building and especially the dark legacies of Japan’s own government support for pan-Asianism during its period of imperial expansion. Some of the supporters of an Asian identity or community at the center have highly nuanced and fluid conceptions in mind, emphasize the importance of multi-layered idenities, and some, such as in the case of my own advisor, have a deep awareness of the complex issues related to large scale world migration.

Despite this, however, I have deep reservations about the center’s mission. In debates and discussions with friends there I have on many occasion expressed my own doubts about the need for the active creation of a regional based “Asian identity” which is constructed at the hands of intellectuals or political policy based on what will inevitably be a contradictory set of perceived commonalities between participants. Also, beyond economic integration, I don’t see the need or necessarily the desirability of the creation of an institutional “Asian community” since I fear the potential for a gradually increasing exclusivity built into the concept.

Some of these concerns can be seen in the content of the conference’s final talk. At the end of the conference, Iwate University president and former Waseda professor Taniguchi Makoto gave a speech about Asian community in English. I was the only non-Asian at the talk (or at the conference for that matter) and couldn’t help noting the irony that English was the necessary choice of language given that some of the guests from Thailand and Mongolia didn’t speak Japanese (they were also the only participants not to make their presentations in Japanese). Taniguchi speaks fantastic English and his eloquent presentation fit his Cambridge education and long years of experience working for Japan’s foreign ministry, the UN, as deputy head of the OECD, and elsewhere. After an interesting analysis of Japan’s recent failures in negotiations related to the formation of “an Asian community” (indeed, he argued that after losing control of the movement, the foreign ministry is actively trying to torpedo all attempts to make anything meaningful out of the concept), he launched a critique of “Western values”. In passages that remind me of the confidence of the bubble period Japan or Asian leaders before its humbling economic crisis, Taniguchi suggested to the audience that Asia should take pride in its own values and take a more critical stance towards the West.

He offered two pieces of evidence for the inferiority of Western values. He recounted a story of when he was criticized by colleagues in France for having dined with his own chauffeur, thus violating the aristocratic separation of classes. His second anecdote lamented the inhumane behavior of New York City police officers he witnessed rudely expelling the homeless sleeping in Grand Central Station. The message was clear: Asian values have a higher degree of compassion and are less class conscious. The problem, of course, is that this is absolute nonsense. I have indeed accompanied Chinese company managers when they have dined and socialized happily with their chauffeurs in Beijing, but I have also seen Korean executives treat their chauffeurs as barely human slaves on the streets of Seoul. And as for compassion towards the homeless, it is interesting to note that one of Japan’s leading headline stories today (January 31st) is about violent clashes between Japanese police and homeless being evicted from a park in Osaka; their blue tarp tents being torn down.

If you want to look for a critique of Western “values” or enlightenment universalism, you can’t do it by attacking class inequalities or lack of compassion for the poor. Liberal reformers and socialist revolutionaries around the world, who are born in of the fires of enlightenment thought, attack these same problems. I think a sophisticated and careful look at the contradictions of enlightenment thought is needed, and Western arrogance always needs a good cutting down to size, but this clearly doesn’t work.

More than this, however, what concerned me is when the speech (and this is not the only time I have seen this) started to make heavy use of “We” versus “them” kind of language, throwing around essentialist descriptions of “The West” and assuming that there is some unproblematic “Asia” to which a whole host of generalizations can be applied to. I was trying, for example, to imagine what some of the Mongolian participants (who incidentally spoke an excellent English laced with a sharp and distinctively Russian accent that I found delightful to listen to) could claim to share in common with their Thai counterparts, and yet did not share with me? While all sorts of unexpected forms of identification can develop organically, why spend so much effort explicitly attempting to form a common identity which include these two, and yet excludes a New Zealander, a Lebanese, or a thoroughly identity confused Norwegian-American. When I asked this of someone at the evening reception, I was informed that I did not have to personally worry about being excluded myself since I was an “honorary Asian.”

While I was obviously in no position to make this point at the conference without confirming everyone’s worst stereotypes, I am equally suspicious of a discourse of “resistance against the West,” especially when it proposes the defense of some presumably superior set of particularistic values but even when it proposes a presumably unmolested coexistence. Why does universalism, for all its historical associations with imperialism and oppression, have to be countered by particularism? This particularism will inevitably contain its own internal kernels of dissent and seeds of contradiction that bear the same relation to the whole as that whole bears to universalistic claims. This is precisely the problem with multiculturalism, for instance. This is an issue that I still struggle with…

Tenshoku Boom

The “tenshoku” (changing jobs) boom, which was already very prevalent when I was in Japan continues unabated I see. I passed many train advertisements everyday advertising job related websites, many posing questions to workers about their current job or future expectations (are you learning cutting edge skills? are you valued for your ability?) which I know rarely entered into any realistic equation of consideration for my friends when they graduated from college.

I also saw a number of advertisements specifically targeting women, but in one way or another was directed to career women and not for those who might be satisfied with “office lady” jobs.

Yokoso Japan

Japan is currently running a new tourism promotion public relations campaign. Sayaka’s father, who is a professional “tourism producer” and has worked for various city and provincial governments promoting tourism through events and campaigns once explained to me the many struggles that Japan’s local governments have with trying to attract foreign tourism. He lamented the serious infrastructure, language, and cultural problems which prevent Japan’s beautiful countryside from attracting more than the most adventurous backpackers and Japanese speaking foreigners, and he has tried all manner of drives to overcome some of the issues one by one. Whether it is the language obstacles of getting foreigners comfortably housed in Japanese minshuku or ryokan inns or the fact that English on signs throughout Japan exhibit some of the most creative use of grammar and spelling of the language in the world, the problems are manifold.

On this trip to Japan I noticed that considerable advertising revenue is being spent promoting a new “Yokoso Japan” (Welcome to Japan) program. The posters are not targeting foreign visitors but the Japanese themselves – trying to get them to actively participate in “making foreigners feel welcome” in Japan. I wonder how likely it would be to find this kind of plea coming from the government in the US or in Norway. In a year when keeping unwelcome visitors out is the priority, can you imagine a sign in New York saying, “Let us work together to make foreigners feel welcome”? There is of course at least one famous example of such a sign in the city, at the Statue of Liberty no less. However, I occasionally feel that Lou Reed’s rendition of the lines is more accurate (e.g. “Bring us all your huddled masses and we’ll piss on them…”).

Prominent in many of the signs are pictures of a smiling or laughing Japanese posing next to a grateful looking blond Caucasian. While they may be out there, I have yet to see any posters with non-Caucasian foreigners, which may allow us to say something interesting on the racial level. At the bottom of each poster is request for submissions of pictures of foreigners and Japanese interacting with each other. As a blond caucasian perhaps I should submit all my photo albums from my three longer stays in Japan, in which one can find hundreds of pictures of me standing next to or interacting with some Japanese person, many of them almost complete strangers, who I owe a great deal of gratitude. Whether it is a child expanding my Japanese vocabulary and knowledge of Cicada anatomy in a Tateyama kindergarten, a Kisakata family taking my uncle and I for a hike deep into a mountain forest in Akita, or an old man who I met in a Yokohama park taking a whole day to guide me through his favorite temples in Kamakura, almost every fond memory I have of being in Japan is appropriate material. I wish all visitors and migrants who come to Japan might be as spoiled as I have been.

On that note, I was delighted to read in today’s Asahi that Osaka Prefecture has launched a program to train about a thousand “official” volunteers to help its over 200,000 non-Japanese residents with problems in their daily life and in emergency situations. The program apparently includes some training in six different languages. It apparently also includes volunteers who are themselves non-native speakers of Japanese but who can operate smoothly in Japanese society.

UPDATE: I found an online site where you can see some more of these posters here thanks to this posting by Mutant Frog.

The Classical Cafe

My friend Tony took me to a most unusual cafe yesterday. We met in Shibuya for coffee in the afternoon and the bustling district was as noisy and exhausting a place as it always is: advertisements were being blasted from every corner, smokers left their poisonous trails all along the sidewalk, and the sickening smell of thickly applied makeup emanated from every passing female. And yet, somehow in the middle of this, there is a place of serenity to be found. A little further up the hill from the station, hidden amid cheap sushi restaurants, shops selling gaudy knickknacks, and at the gate of Shibuya’s love hotel district is an old cafe serving classical music.

Inside the cafe is barely lit, as if to hide the dusty, cracked and discolored walls. The walls on three sides are covered in old portraits but against one wall is a huge speakers system, looking almost like a large church organ. Classical music is played with concert quality (when I first entered I thought there was a grand piano hidden somewhere) from the speakers into the silent darkness of the rest of the cafeteria. The cafe itself spans two floors but most of the seats are found in twos, side by side, facing the speakers, and each sharing a small table for drinks or books or papers. Besides us were perhaps half a dozen mostly elderly types, listening to music but also almost all reading or writing on a pile of papers in front of them.

A brochure reveals the day’s music repertoire, while a waiter introduces music between pieces in a voice so soft that one might think he is afraid to awake any dozing guests. When the day’s music has been played the speakers will blast some other classical music requested by a patron to the cafe. If they made the place non-smoking and added a few desk lamps for the tables, it would be a great quiet place in Shibuya to camp out and study while drinking the cafe’s unusual hot or cold “egg milk” drinks.

Definite Match

Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese I speak to often claim that they can identify their own. Indeed, the clothes people wear, the way they walk, or even the movement of their head can betray their origin and allow someone to be identified as coming from one country or other, even from a distance. Just last week, a Korean friend of mine who I showed around Yokohama for a day was able to correctly identify a group of Koreans from behind a full two floors away in Landmark plaza shopping mall. On the other hand, I know for a fact that the “hit rate” of correct identification among some of my friends for recognizing “their own” is a lot lower than many like to think. What about Europeans though? Sometimes someone looks distinctly southern European, but how much better can you get just judging by facial features (not even accounting for the growing ethnic and racial diversity of European countries today)?

Today, passing through emigration at Narita I saw a man ahead of me that I was absolutely 100% sure was a Norwegian. What does that even mean? When Japanese ask me if I can tell likely Scandinavians out of a crowd without hearing them speak, I usually say no (even though I venture the occasional, often mistaken guess), since even “stereotypical” Scandinavian-looking types can turn out to be French, Dutch, British, Russian, not to mention American, etc. Somehow though, today as I was waiting in line, I couldn’t get it out of my mind that this guy could be nothing but Norwegian. If ever there was a “representative type” of the Norwegian male, a racial stock image that could be plastered on nationalistic posters with a viking helm or fishing cap for good measure, this guy was it.

When I finally tuned in and overheard his conversation with another more “generic” blond man, sure enough, he spoke in an extremely heavy northern Norwegian dialect, marked by (to my southern ears) erratic patterns of intonation and emphasis that so many other Norwegians (myself included) often patronizingly think of as, “cute.” His fellow traveller responded in Oslo dialect. I felt a sudden and strong pang of home sickness. Then, suddenly becoming self-reflective I wondered if that feeling really told me anything at all meaningful about my attachment to the cold north? The answer, I concluded, was no, not at all. I tried to remember the last time I felt the same feeling and the result was a bit surprising. It happened last time in Bergen airport last summer. I was on my way back to the United States after spending a month in my hometown, Stavanger. Before that I had been in Seoul for two months. I was standing in line for the flight to London when ahead of me I saw half a dozen elderly Asian tourists. When I heard them speak Korean to each-other I felt exactly the same pang that I felt today in Narita airport and suddenly yearned to go back to Korea or at least be together with my Korean friends in Japan.