1. Neojaponisme – Despite the confusing, infuriating “manifesto” this project from David Marx of Neomarxisme fame (and others) is inspiring and I will be watching it closely and hopefully contributing some time soon.
2. Sweet pictures of Meiji/Taisho era Tokyo from the National Diet Library – As a recent Tokyo convert, I am struck with a healthy dose of fake nostalgia every time I look at these. A favorite:
![日比谷公園音楽堂[拡大画像]を開く](https://www.ndl.go.jp/scenery/images/M/40007751/00000/0006_2.jpg)
people hanging out in Hibiya Park, Japan’s first western-style garden/park built over what used to be part of the Imperial Palace’s moat (and right next to my workplace for another two weeks until we move… I will miss it!)
3. Anti-death penalty demonstration in Kosuge/Ayase (near Tokyo Detention Center) – A testament to how well the Justice Ministry’s policy of executing prisoners with no prior public announcement whatsoever works to suppress dissent, a 60-person protest of the death penalty was held more than a week after 3 prisoners were hanged on Aug 23 as one of former Justice Minister Nagase’s final official acts before leaving office. Pictured is an elderly woman hailing all the way from Oita prefecture in Kyushu holding a sign that says “Abolish the death penalty!”:
I’ve met that old lady in Oita! She’s done “down with US bases in Okinawa” and “protect article 9” petitions. Damn, I won’t be back in Oita for a while, but I should interview her or something….
I am intrigued by what you think is infuriating. The ideas included or the idea of having a retchedly-pretentious parody-manifesto?
The ideas are the inspiring part. It was getting to them that was so infuriating. Do you realize that your writing like that would violate federal plain language laws?
The fact that you were taking parts of the Futurist Manifesto verbatim is no comfort because 1) you didnt use the part about slapping people in the face, and 2) Its an argument that deserves to be made lucidly (though of course that turns me into an angry Penny Arcade fan wondering why they didnt use this punchline instead of that one).
I see.
Well, we have time to be lucid and clean in the actual articles and essays. I wanted to go ahead and use all my Henry IV and Mikado references up at the beginning of the project.
Fair enough!
M: Plz ask her where I can get that hat
Just one word for being added among “The haters”by trevor for this incident.
I’m not against on anything regarding Neojaponism,either it’s design or manifesto.
I was doing my all too usual expat bushing,nothing else.OK.
I was always wondering why china blogsphere is much more interesting than Japan blogsphere.We don’t have equivalent Danwei or East West South North here.
Could be related why Japan Times is not as interesting as The South China Morning Post,because the expat community is linguistically isolated from the local community here in Japan.Whereas in China,there has been a tradition of English speaking educated Chinese community of different nationalities.Even the lack of media freedom there works for the benefit of the expat media,because people rely on them as the source of information thus the accuracy and the depth of konwledge is more required.
But here in Japan,everyone can blog and probably because of that I don’t particulary find one blog that has august authority,probably because the topic is more diversified or more fun based.Maybe we attract much more easy goer than China since living here is seen as a lot more easier.Not to say that is wrong though.But interesting in the way to compare the culture scene of the expat community of the two nations.
I don’t think you are a hater, nor have I ever thought that way.
I don’t know much about the Chinese blog community, but I will say that I feel I am not qualified enough to approach certain topics in Japan because there are SO MANY people who know more about it than I do. This makes me narrow down to a certain area (mainly media, consumerism, and youth culture, although I sometimes overstep my bounds.)
Well all I can say is your doing pretty good job in th field that you know well and certain areas that you think you don’t.(and I say the same thing about MFT here too).
EWSN is basically a blog of translation from Chinese mainstream media.Ofcourse the literacy and editorship is required,but not particulary writing from zero.
Danwei is multi authored.
You in Neomarxisme sometimes write from almost zero and that’s why I was interested in the first place.MFT is multiauthored and everyone has their speciality.
Adamu in the economics and Thailand,Roy in China and Taiwan,Joe in the legal matter and that seemed to be working.Ofcourse they are all being American and close friend of same age helped to make same texture in a blog.(and related with that I’m always amazed how Curzon and his friends are capable in managing the Coming Anarchy)So your new multi authored project may work better in that sense,covering your weakness in the certain field.
Anyway good luck and looking forward for Neojaponisme!
Basically, there is SO much more important stuff going in China that it is not all that surprising that the blog coverage is much better (but also ESWN is a special case – hes some kind of statistics genius who is in such high demand he can dictate his hours)
Done and sorry that was careless of me. Regarding the issue, I think youre relatively safe on blogs, but Wiki makes it easy to tell who you are esp with the new tool
Never wrote for neither 2ch nor wiki,or intending to write there in the future.
Blog writing actually helped me A LOT in my work,It diminished all the hours of meeting people and making connections (although I always prefers that but cannot do much as before since I’ve been assigned to a desk jobs in the past few years and not a foot soldier anymore)and you really cannot separate that from private/official dimention.I spend hours and lots of my income learning for what I do for living.Maintaining curiousity requires most than anything in our practise,you know.
But yeah I will learn to behave…
I understand China is in the process of important stuff going on,but so have been in the past 40 years,Isn’t that a cliche of the China watcher?All they say is “China matters” all the time,as if they are in the center of the universe(or maybe so,perhaps).
I gotta say that Japan expats are haste in making judgement especially Japanese are this and that.Partly because not as they say that Japan is different from the west but the standard of value and practice can apply in Japan then anywhere else in the none western nation but not enough to satisfy them.If it is a total different world(i,e China or India)then the expat would just shut up and spend more time educating themselves to adopt for their own good.No?
By the way,what ever happend to our beer time we’ve been talking.I’m not going anywhere for at least another year.
Check your mail!
“M: Plz ask her where I can get that hat”
Shockingly enough, I think that I know the shop in Oita where she bought it….
Are we talking about a country of 125,000,000+ here or a town of 6000? This whole baasan thing just blows my mind.
Ace – About China…. I think that some of the writing is more interesting because…. whatever problems Japan may have China is far and away more #$%@ed up and that leads to more passionate, heated blog posts. I’ve also noticed that while English-sphere academia is very critical of Japan, China often gets a free pass. For example, take a survey history of Japan and one of China. I’ll bet $50 that there is more about burakumin in the Japan one than there is about Tibet in the China one. That has some scary implications. The experience of the two minorities don’t compare in terms of the quantity of human misery. As a result, the blogs are picking up some of the slack.
Also, it is easy to explain why expats often go nuts in interpreting aspects of “the Japanese mind”. We can blame it on Benedict and a whole tradition of trying to “get to the bottom of everything about Japan by studying the Japanese mind” in English-language scholarship. There are few academics trying this any more, but the mark that it has left on popular surveys, etc. is amazing.
There is also the fact that many people get their intro from popular culture before they even go to “the Orient”. Chinese pop culture (especially from the mainland) tends to sketch out Chinese history in terms of a couple of major motifs – honor and prowess, downtrodden Chinese against Manchurians, or Mongols, or barbarians or whatever. In effect, the default is not critical of Chinese history which gives people a nice fuzzy feeling about WongFeiHong or whoever. Japanese popular culture on the other hand is fundamentally critical of the state is many famous cases. Two generations of Americans got into Japan through Akira and Ghost in the Shell and the image of the Japanese state, military, authority, etc. in those is far from flattering. The second Ghost in the Shell TV series even has a scion of the GSDF trying to commit genocide to keep Japan foreigner free…. This depresses a lot of people about the Japanese order, etc. If they thought about it for a while, however, I think that they would soon realize that Japanese popular culture (or the leftwing press) is, in many cases, what is providing the outside commentators with their critical motifs (ideas that would be banned in China).
Speaking of EWSN, the author Roland Soong (he used to blog anonymously, but now is merely humble) is also a product of Hong Kong. The number of people who grew up bilingual in Chinese and English due to British colonialism in HK, Singapore etc. absolutely dwarfs the number of people who are truly bilingual in English and Japanese.
Danwei is something much more like Marxy’s new project than his old one or this blog. Mutantfrog has never been a deliberate “project”- it just started as my personal blog started so my family could keep track of my travels without writing mass emails all the time, then it merged with the personal blogs of two other friends when we realized we weren’t really doing personal blogging anymore, and that’s pretty much as far as it’s gotten. We have been lucky enough to get a loyal and very intelligent (if small) readership and several times I’ve had people suggest expanding in some fashion, but I don’t particularly feel like making this web site into my job.
But back to Danwei- one of the guys there did invite me to write a regular column for them about Japan/Taiwan relations and issues, while I was in Taiwan and writing about it much more frequently, but until my Chinese is good enough to actually sit down and read a newspaper etc. I’m still more comfortable keeping my thoughts to a blog which is not trying to be a magazine or journal.
Roy:
So DANWEI guys wanted you to take the cup of poison eh?You’d better be super bullet proof in both logic and the knowledge to write either on Japan or Taiwan on China blogs.or else you would get thousand of Beeway like trolls coming at you.
OK,so EWSN guy is a Hong Konger…That fits my guess,because there were some pictures of the bookshelf added with books in Chinese, lots of Latin American lit and Geology and post modern philosphy.Not exactly a bookshelf of a western china hand wannabe for the range of books were too wide.So naturally I thought these books belongs to some bilingual chinese person.Is he making living by blogging now?I know he could.
M-Bone:
“The second Ghost in the Shell TV series even has a scion of the GSDF trying to commit genocide to keep Japan foreigner free…. This depresses a lot of people about the Japanese order, etc. ”
That’s exactly what Yasuhiko Yoshikazu was worried about in the interview in Eureka.He was criticizing Oshii Mamoru and his “children”like Kamiyama Kenji(Ghost in the Shell SAC)and Okiura Hiroyuki(Jin-Roh).Especially changing Sci-fi into quasi alternate history and political fiction.Yasuhiko expressed concern about taking Jin-Roh abroad because foreign audience don’t understand how alternate history that is and could cause confusion.I can understand for the anime is full of Nazi outfits and quasi fascistic in theme.
On China,I have no intention of denying it’s charm or challenging it’s status as attention magnet in the west(or elsewhere).But the attitude you’ve rightly reffered.
I was reading a Korea blog and there was an argument pretty well sums up what I wanted to say regarding Japan/China perception in academia.
“On one side you have a country that is talking about a peaceful rise, while on the other side you have a country that wants to scrap the peace clause of its constitution. On the one side you have a country that, at its strongest, has mostly been a friend of Korea. On the other side, you have a country that, at its strongest, tried to wipe Korea off the map. It’s obvious which country one should keep an eye on.”
This is a word from a Korean American commentor,but if you switch the word “Korea”into “the world” you get the idea.
I was actually pretty shocked when Orvill Schell and Ross Terill passionately supported Iris Chang’s “The Rape of Nanjing”and her claim on Japan today without any hesitations.Both Schell and Terill are known for uncovering the Tienanmmen papers and knows well that nowhere in the world but in China where facts and opinons are confused and it takes careful examination of the information before acknowledge it as the truth.They also know very little about Japan(just like many Sinologists usually are)but that never stop them for making judgements.
“I’ve also noticed that while English-sphere academia is very critical of Japan, China often gets a free pass.”
When I read these I instantly thought about Japan Focus crew(no offense to you by the way)
I was doing some research on Baiji,Yangtze River Dolphin couple month ago.Because Japan was sending ODA and a Japanese researcher was among the crew of the international expedition team to confirm it’s extinction in May.And I was looking The South China Morning Post if I could find something on the issue.and did I find an article about dolphin.I found a piece written by Dave Macneil on Japanese killing of the dolphin in Wakayama.It was relatively a moderate tone for an Irish man but nonetheless it was usual “Japan vs the internaitonal-community” article.
The cover photograph was a pair of chopstick holding a dolphine and the pond of blood beneath is duplicating the rising sun.
I’ve found the article was pretty odd for first of all,the Chinese do care little about eating wildlife and secondly,Beijing is a supporter of whaling on IWC.Thirdly,dolphin hunting in Wakayama do not threatens the survival of any dolphine species,while Baiji was said to be extinct as the result of the current polution in the Yangtze,thus made Baiji,the first extinction in catacean caused by the human impact.But there were no mention of it in the article.
I don’t exactly know the editorial policy of SCMP.But one thing for sure is their primal motivation of letting Mcneil writing the article was not exactly the wildlife conservation.
“We can blame it on Benedict and a whole tradition of trying to “get to the bottom of everything about Japan by studying the Japanese mind” in English-language scholarship. ”
“If they thought about it for a while, however, I think that they would soon realize that Japanese popular culture (or the leftwing press) is, in many cases, what is providing the outside commentators with their critical motifs (ideas that would be banned in China).”
And I always think about my favourite Dr.Doom,Gavan McCormack and his “The Emptiness of the Japanese affluence”.This book is full of quote from the Japanese sourses,in fact 90% of them are and that comes the forward by Univ,of Chicago prof,Norma Field’s “This book is not a Japan bushing because most of the arguments are coming from the Japanese themselves.”
According to McCormack the immorality of the Japanese passtime is caricatualized in the colossal SSAWS indoor ski slope in Funabashi and Gigantic indoor swimming pool Wild Blue Yokohama.Both now gone.
The irony is that the book was translated instantly into Chinese and Korean and now that the world’s biggest indoor ski slope is being built in Beijing and the biggest indoor swimming pool in the world is in the outskirt of Seoul.I wonder how he theorize that!
“I’ll bet $50 that there is more about burakumin in the Japan one than there is about Tibet in the China one. ”
Oh yeah,another thing about Dr.Doom.His son Noah McCormack is now teaching at Ritsumeikan what-else but the history of Burakumin….Not that I’m blaming him for anything though.
and Orvil Schell has written a book about Tibet called “Virtual Tibet” and it’s about west’s idealization of Tibet and sinically criticizing why Hollywood celebrities are rushing for Dalai Lama.Not that I’m against seeing Richard Gere crusading for aTibetan freedom is sort of a celebrity passtime.
I felt Schell isn’t very fair to Tibet for the mainstream media /academia /diplomatic circles are reluctant with talking about Tibet for the fear of making China angry and thus take the blind eye and that is the reason why Tibet can only have Richard Gere on their side and not Henry Kissinger.
and I’ve got a lot to say about that Tessa Morris Suzuki on that terrible “Exodus to North Korea”….but time to take my kid to bed…
“I can understand for the anime is full of Nazi outfits and quasi fascistic in theme.”
I have more faith in audiences outside Japan. That movie IS about how fascism destroys individuals / happiness so I think that it usually gets filed under a “good” theme.
“When I read these I instantly thought about Japan Focus crew(no offense to you by the way)”
JF publishes a lot of stuff. There is some hard criticism of China going on, some excellent writing about China-Korea history problems (something that does not get a lot of buzz elsewhere) and some very positive Japan interpretation (they ran a survey of Hokkaido students about “race and ethnicity” that pretty much quantitatively shreds a lot of what is being said about “blood” and “Yamato-race” centric thought, great stuff) and a lot of writing by good people all around. For a web journal, it is doing a lot of stuff and has pretty much eclipsed the big print ones like Journal of Japanese Studies.
McNeil’s stuff can get extreme on the whale issue but he did publish a very good article on “hysteria” in the UK over the hostess and English-teacher murders.
Haven’t read “Exodus to North Korea” yet. What’s the beef?
“some excellent writing about China-Korea history problems (something that does not get a lot of buzz elsewhere)”
The one from Andrei Lankov?He is good.In fact he is the reason I start reading comments in blogs or even think about commenting in a blog,after I found his comments in The Marmot’s hole……
“McNeil’s stuff can get extreme on the whale issue but he did publish a very good article on “hysteria” in the UK over the hostess and English-teacher murders.”
Should he be,or else I would lose total trust on the guy’s intellectual integrity….
“Exodus to North Korea”.
You may not be reading the book yet,so might don’t understand what I mean here,but.
If TMS is writing to Japanese audience who has some idea on this wide reported incident of the return of the North Korean led by the Chongyron,that’s OK.But the way she write based on the internal papers declassified from the archives of the International Red Cross is nearly suggesting that this case is Japanese version of French Jewish deportation during WW2.She’s unfarily accusing the head of the Japan Red Cross who was in charge of helping their return and there are waaay too much cherry picking,reading between the line and speaking her own imagination to support her case.
She writes”この本を書くことは私にとって困難を極める実験だったし、時には気力の萎えることもあった。これは政治的に極めてデリケートな物語で、どんな風に語っても、あらゆる方面から批判を浴びるのは必至である。この物語に登場するさまざまなアクターの歴史的責任については、人それぞれに判断や考えがあるだろう・・・・・・”
”世間一般に”学術論文”と称される文章書くことが多い研究者のひとりとして、自著の仲でこれほど自らの体験を語ったことはなかった。こんな書き方にひどく居心地の悪い思いがした。当事者でないことは自覚している。それなのに他人の記憶という繊細な風景に土足で踏み込んでいるような後ろめたさを覚えることもしばしばだった。けれど結局そのまま書き続けた。ほかの当事者ではない人たち、帰国運動などまったく知らない日本人、帰国のことなど耳にしたこともないアメリカ人やヨーロッパ人などが歴史上この複雑な瞬間について、それが今日どのような意味をもつのかを理解する一助となるには、これが最良のスタイルだとおもったからだ。”
I totally disagree with what she writes here.Because there are just too many things missing in her books for anyone(especially those who has no knowledge about this case) for understanding why Chongyron/Japanese leftism/North Korea had such a huge influence over Japanese society that made possible of the return inspite of huge protest from Seoul.
Anyway after all the effort of TMS attempting to illustrate Inoue Masujiro,a JRC official who was in charge of the negotiation with Pyongyang,as Japanese Maurice Papon.(based on one sided observation by a Swiss ambassador and her own imagination)And trying to blame the Japanese for not having any crystal ball foreseeing the future of North Koreans who were then oppressed by the regime after the return(what she’s suggesting is Japan should’ve just take a blindeye to the countless requests and mass protests of North Koreans in Japan whose only demand is just wanting to go back to North Korea and keep them in Japan against their will just like Pyongyang is doing to them right now.Not that she IS saying directly so,but that is the logical conclusion of her argument)
I can’t accept her whole heartedly saying”他人の記憶という繊細な風景に土足で踏み込んでいるような後ろめたさを覚えることもしばしばだった。”.She just sets a fire in somebody’s house, getting acclaimed for it and then come saying ” I feel sorry for what happened to you all”?That’s hypocricy in my book.Anyway there are hundereds of more things I want to say on this book(I can talk about this for at least three days),but that’s enough for a day.
“Is he (Roland of ESWN) making living by blogging now?I know he could.”
He’s well established in his career as an analytical statistician and makes his living doing that, and I believe he’s also in his 50’s and has a good enough reputation and pay for his work that he only has to do a few hours a day. Also, his professional specialty is more Latin America related, but his hobby interest in Chinese affairs is what got him a following online. Notice his blog has no advertising or any other way to generate income- so it is just a hobby for him.
Sounds to me the guy is a very interesting man and in a way lives an idealistic blogger life.
You Know, that confirms me why China watchers are more interesting animals than Japan watchers and Roland Soong reminds me of another China watcher,
There used to be a Hungarian Jesuit by the name of Father Laslo Ladany who reside in HongKong and solely edited small circulated but highly influential periodical called China News Analysis from 1950’s to early 80’s.Subscribed by the China watchers around the world.It was more influential than the CIA reports.Father Ladany edited that mostly by reading Chinese official papers(some said he also used clandestine Catholic believers to gather info,but I can’t say how much).and this was in the day of Mao and the cultural revolution.It tells you how much you can gather information just by reading every day newspaper but reading it very carefully.
While many Japanologist/expat/correspondents just seek one logic to explain all about Japan.Recent publication “Shutting out thr Sun”by Michael Zielenger is one example.It explain everything by hukikomori….