[PREV - MULTIETHNIC_AINU] [TOP]
NATIONAL_VOIDS
May 11/Sep 20, 2012
January 21, 2014
October 6, 2016
Trying to identify absences, parts of the story
that aren't talked about...
James Fallows, "More Like Us" (1989):
"Depending on their founding principles, different societies
can use different incentives to make themselves go-- to hold
people together and make them rise to their best. Japan and,
to a lesser degree, Korea seem to rely on an embattled sense
of the national family standing united against the world.
China, too large and varied to be a single family, seems
driven mainly by the effort and honor of its hundreds of
millions of component families. Germany, France and England
each has its national spirit. And America has a peculiar
national genius of its own. The force that motivates the
country is a vision of people always in mortion, able to make
something different of themselves, ready for second chances
until the day they die." (p.2)
Every country has it's blindspots,
subjects that no one wants to talk
about that fall into a zone that are James Fallows, "More Like Us" (1989):
known about (at least in an
intellectual way, perhaps only by "... One of the things that make
specialists) but is not allowed to America most unusual is its
penetrate the country's self-image assumption that race should not
because it goes countrary to the matter, that a society can be
characteristic narrative. built of individuals with no
particular historic or racial bond
to link them together." (p.2)
Part of the United States understanding
of itself is that it doesn't have any
subjects like that left: the treatment It's perhaps true that the United
of the Native Americans, of the States is better than average in
Afro-American slaves, and of the this respect, but if you *think* you
Japanese in internment camps are all know about every national
things that we know and talk about, at embarassment lurking in the US
least to some extent. closet, you might want to look a
little closer. If you haven't been,
say, following Noam Chomsky the odds
are good you're missing some.
In the case of Japan, there's a people
from what is now the northern end of MULTIETHNIC_AINU
Japan named the Ainu, who are arguably
analogus to the Native Americans.
Back in the late 80s, the
well-respected anthropologist
C. Loring Brace concluded
that the Samurai were descended
from the Ainu, not the the
Yayoi descendents that make up
most of modern Japan.
John Noble Wilford wrote about
this is the New York Times:
[ref]
This discovery goes against the
grain of mainstream culture in But then, there also doesn't
Japan, and as far as I can tell, seem to be much follow up, at
it's been essentially forgotten. least none that's leaked out
into the searchable web...
Maybe Brace's ideas haven't
come to much... or could it
be it's hard to do the
research, because Japanese
culture doesn't cooperate?
One thing that struck me about
Hiroki Azuma's "Oatku: Japan's
Database Animals" (2001) is that OTAKU_BASE
there's no mention of racism.
In many respects, this book follows
along with the international
postmodern tradition of politically
correct commentary... but while there
is some discussion of issues loosely
related to "imperialism", there's no
pointification about Japanese racism.
E.g. he talks a lot about something he
refers to as "snobbery", but draws no
connections between that and racism: and
yet both involve finding excuses for
condescenion, though perhaps they're based
on different grounds.
Azuma's work was
very popular in
Japan: perhaps it
might not have been
if it poked fingers
in too many wounds.
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