Category: History

“My Japan”

A conversation with a friend last night reminded me of this incredible WWII propaganda film. It was made to sell U.S. war bonds in the final months of the war, and it features an American actor playing a Japanese narrator, explaining why the Americans will never win the war.

During the first couple of minutes, it’s abysmally stupid, as the narrator talks about flowers and bunnies and “Mount Fujama” (a mispronunciation of “Fujiyama,” itself a mistransliteration of “Mount Fuji”). By the middle, though, the film is brutally effective at its aim: terrifying the average American, who was almost sure that Japan had no chance of surviving, into thinking that Japan might pull through and deal incredible damage to America in the process. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the war era.

(There are a few nauseating racial stereotypes in the film, but not the kind you’re probably used to seeing in WWII propaganda. In fact, the film goes out of its way to debunk some of the classic images of short, bespectacled “Jap” soldiers, and that adds to its effectiveness.)

Google and Taiwanese sovereignty

I originally started writing this post in response to this post on Ridingsun and never quite got around to finishing it, but now that Google has announced they are changing their designation of Taiwan from “Taiwan, province of China” to merely “Taiwan,” I figure I’ll just publish it.

The official US position is stated in the Taiwan Relations Act, passed in 1979, and has never been changed since.

Don’t forget Taiwan’s government is still known as the Republic Of China, and according to its constitution still considers itself a claimant to sovereignty over all of China, of which Taiwan is just a single province.

If you look at the actual text of the ROC constitution, Article 2 states
“The president and the vice president shall be directly elected by the entire populace of the free area of the Republic of China.”

By limiting voting to the populace of the “free area”, i.e. Taiwan and the surrounding islands, the implication is that mainland China is “unfree territory of the Republic of China.”

Article 11 also states
“Rights and obligations between the people of the Chinese mainland area and those of the free area, and the disposition of other related affairs may be specified by law.”
again, making clear that Taiwan still legally considers itself part of China (although apparently the best part).

If constitutional interpretation is too dry, you can follow the reasoning at the blog Those Who Dare.

Or simpler yet, they can just look at the vehicular traffic on Taiwan’s roads and take note of the license plates that read Taiwan Province.

Yes, the current president’s party (I hesitate to say ‘ruling party’ since they control oly a single branch of the government, all branches of which are basically stuck in deadlock due to partisan bickering) endorses formal independence from China, but unless they succeed in revising the constitution and changing the country’s official name, it’s very unrealistic to expect foreign businesses to do so.

Incidentally, I would be thrilled to see the ROC officially change its name to Republic of Taiwan, so don’t think that I’m actually in favor of reunification. Just try and realize this isn’t just a matter of Taiwan’s independence not being recognized internationally, it stil isn’t even recognized domestically.

Great article on history of Taiwan’s architecture

The Governor-General Hot Springs

During the onsen’s construction, Japan invaded China after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 1937. The Japanese authorities urged Taiwanese to use bricks in camouflage colors to hinder air raids. These colors–light green, beige, and brown–were often used from the late 1920s through the early 1940s. A kiln in Peitou specially produced bricks of these colors, known as “13-channel bricks” for their rippled surface, designed to reduce buildings’ visibility to enemy aircraft by reducing the bricks’ reflectiveness.

Representative buildings from that period include Taipei City Hall (now Zhongshan Hall), Taipei High School (now National Taiwan Normal University), and Taipei Imperial University (now National Taiwan University). Those buildings were all the work of Ide Kaoru, the influential chief architect of the Governor-General’s Office who advocated “localization” of Taiwan’s architecture. As the Governor-General Onsen was built with the same sort of green 13-channel bricks as the Taipei City Hall, which was completed in 1936 and was also a public building, it is assumed that Ide had a hand in its design.

This article is highly recommended, particularly for language students, as the text is presented in English, Japanese, and both simplified and traditional Chinese.

The story behind the famous Tiananmen photo

The BBC has a wonderful first person account of the story behind this iconic photograph.

I looked around for cover but there was none – the only areas that offered any protection were back up Changan Avenue near the Beijing Hotel. About the time I reached some trees along the avenue the soldiers opened up on the crowd at the top of the square. There was panic as people were being hit.

It was impossible for me to shoot pictures as it was too dark and using a flash was out of the question. I looked around and decided that about the only shot left was from the roof of a building with a long exposure of the square and the mayhem.

I went into the Beijing Hotel, which had a commanding view of the top of the square, but when I went in, I was tackled by members of the Public Security Bureau (PSB), China’s secret police.

One of the PSB ran up to me with a electric cattle prod and hit me in the side with it. Others punched and kicked at me. They ripped my photo vest off me and took all the film I had shot that evening. They were going to keep the cameras but I convinced them they were useless without film, so they returned them and I told them I was going to my room.

The PSB had missed three rolls of unexposed film in an inside pocket of the photo vest.

For comparison, here’s a photo I took that shows you the same piece of street on a better day.

Before the Zaibatsu

Time Asia has a great article on Osaka’s Kongo Gumi (金剛組) construction firm, which they describe as the world’s oldest family firm, but I suspect may actually be the world’s oldest continuously operated business of any kind. Sure, if you go back that far it’s probably the case that all businesses are family firms, but since today one term is a subset of the other, the latter is a bit more impressive to the ear.

Built to last

Of the 202 Buddhist sanctuaries in Osaka’s Tennoji neighborhood, there is one that stands out: Shitennoji, the first Japanese temple commissioned by a royal and one of the oldest Buddhist complexes in Japan. Construction began in A.D. 593, just decades after the religion reached the country’s shores. One of the carpenters for Shitennoji, Shigemitsu Kongo, traveled to Japan from the Korean kingdom of Paekche for the project. Over a millennium-and-a-half, Shitennoji has been toppled by typhoons and burned to the ground by lightning and civil war—and Shigemitsu’s descendants have supervised its seven reconstructions. Today, working out of offices that overlook the temple, Kongo Gumi Co. is run by 54-year-old president Masakazu Kongo, the 40th Kongo to lead the company in Japan. His business, started more than 1,410 years ago, is believed to be the oldest family-run enterprise in the world.

Kongo Gumi’s official corporate website is located here (in Japanese of course)

If you look at their ‘corporate summary’ page, you’ll see that their date of founding is listed as Asuka period, 6th year of the reign of the Bidatsu emperor, 30th emperor of Japan. To put that in perspective a little, this would be about the time that the Arthurian legends are generally believed to have been set, so for a more familiar equivalent, think about what it would be like if the construction company that had built Camelot were still in business-AND they’d kept up the maintenance on Camelot the whole time, so you could pay your five bucks admission to walk past the velvet rope in front of the Round Table, and get your photo taken in front of The Stone.

And yes, although now officially organized as a modern corporation, the CEO is still a Mr. Masakazu Kongo.

創業 飛鳥時代第30代敏達天皇6年(西暦578年)
社名 株式会社　金 剛 組
代表取締役 金 剛 正 和

Guns, Germs, and Steel- a reader’s exercise

At the moment I am about 2/3 of the way through Jared Diamond’s book “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” Basically it’s a history of human civilization written by a scientist, trying to uncover root the root causes for the success and failure of civilizations around the world while attempting to destroy the racist and culturalist theories behind the common ‘rise of the west’ narrative. With this rolling around in my head, here is my off the cuff (and in true blog style, completely unedited) attempt at a response to a post over on the blog Cominganarchy.com, in which Chirol argues that Arab cultural values are responsible for their current material backwardness. I don’t normally post this sort of thing here, but it may lead to some interesting comments.

It seems to me that the failure of the Arab world is not at heart a result of their culture, but their lack of significant exploitable natural resources aside from oil. Yes, oil makes a lot of money for them, but it requires only a very, very small percentage of the population to actually exploit it to its maximum potential, creating no incentive for the rest of the population to work. One could argue that in effect, the culture is backwards because there are few good ways for them to modernize in a material fashion.

Why is the West advanced and the Arab world behind? Due to the allocation of natural resources, the industrial revolution could only have happened in Western Europe (or possibly China), and the Middle East was too far away from deposits of iron and coal necessary for industrialization to make such innovations realistic. Only in the later stages of industrialization, when we began using engines that ran on liquid fuel instead of coal did the region have anything of material worth to offer the modern world, and it is only a single raw resource destined for export, not raw materials that could become the bases of a production oriented economy.

Oil is basically the only source of wealth in the Middle East, and it is for the most part controlled and profited from exclusively by the elites. Look at the Saudi family, and the former Saddam Hussein regime. The only places where most of the population is actually well off are those such as Dubai, where oil money is redistributed through a socialist benefits system that works because there’s so damn much money they don’t even have to worry about managing the economy. It’s not even ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,’ everyone just gets free money without having to work at all. Sure, everyone gets a free education, even fully-subsidized study abroad if they want, but to what end? How many of the people you have met in your life would in fact work hard under such conditions, when failure presents no threat of want?

Regardless of whatever ‘cultural values’ people in the Middle East possess, I don’t see how their economies and societies can realistically modernize under the dual strangle hold of oil and autocratic government. If democracy genuinely takes hold in Iraq than we may have the opportunity to make an interesting experimental comparison, but it still remains to be seen how much the free oil money may retard genuine development there as well. Perhaps if they follow Norway’s example, and put the bulk of the money in a kind of trust fund and use some to fund contemporary development of other industries they will actually be able to succeed.

You cite above “Inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure” as a trait of “failing cultures.” It seems to me that in fact success and failure are to a large degree determined by ones environment, and the current environment of the Middle East, awash in oil but no other opportunities, is one which offers precious little hope for more than a small minority to improve their personal circumstances significantly. The other conservative social and religious values on your list make more sense when you realize that religion is primarily the refuge of the weak, there is nothing like the promise of Heaven to justify one’s sorry lot on Earth, and nothing like calling those who are more successful than you infidels or heretics to sooth one’s self esteem.

Ishihara to produce movie on kamikaze

Toei Co. will begin shooting a film next year on the lives of young kamikaze suicide pilots in World War II with Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara as the executive producer and scriptwriter, the film producer said Monday.

Ishihara, a novelist before turning to politics, is known for his nationalist views. He wrote the script based on his past conversations with the late Tome Torihama, who operated a canteen in Chiran, Kagoshima Prefecture, and took care of young kamikaze pilots there before departing on their suicide missions.

“The young people who headed for their deaths were saved spiritually by Ms. Tome, who was like a bodhisattva to them,” Ishihara said at a news conference.

The Japan Times: Aug. 23, 2005

Funny how he brings bodhisattva into the mix. Why do they need to be saved by Buddhist figures if they were dying for the honor of their god-Emperor? You need to keep these things straight Mr. Ishihara, whatever happened to shinbutsubunri?

Japonisme

The Washington Post just posted a dual review of two books discussing the impact that Japanese art had on the European art world during the late 19th century, as Japanese art began to flow into the West following the ‘opening’ of Japan by Perry and the subsequent Meiji restoration.

Japonisme is filled with firsthand observations from a slew of artists such as Renoir and Monet. The author pinpoints the relationship between James McNeill Whistler’s oil paintings, especially his “Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony,” and Torii Kiyonaga’s work. A woodcut print of a group of Japanese courtesans entertaining a customer is juxtaposed with Whistler’s painting of Western women dressed in kimonos: The composition and the perspective, with its view of the water, were clearly inspired by Kiyonaga’s print, which, in fact, Whistler owned.

JAPONISME
Cultural Crossings Between Japan and the West
By Lionel Lambourne
Phaidon. 240 pp. $69.95

THE ORIGINS OF L’ART NOUVEAU
The Bing Empire
Edited by Gabriel P. Weisberg, Edwin Becker and Evelyne Possémé
Mercatorfonds. 295 pp. $69.95

The Zimmerli Art Museum, located on the campus of my alma mater, Rutgers University, has a well put together collection also entitled Japonisme, which primarily focuses on art created in France under the influence of Japanese works. I recommend that anyone at Rutgers or in the vicinity check out this exhibit (I believe admission is free, but that may only be for students. Or I may be wrong.) Unfortunately, they have but a single image from it online.

Japonisme:

Comprising turn-of-the-last-century European and American works on paper and ceramics as well as related Japanese art, this collection reveals the strong influence of the art of Japan on the art of the West and in so doing reflects the pervasive cross-cultural interchange which took place between Japan and the West beginning in 1854 when, after 200 years of isolation, Japan opened its doors to the West.

Yukio Mishima’s lost film version of “Patriotism” found

The Japan Times reports that the film version of Yukio Mishima‘s famous short story “Patriotism,” thought to have been destroyed by his wife following his suicide, has now been found.

Mishima’s widow, Yoko, who died in 1995, was believed to have destroyed the original along with all copies of the film.

But the negative was found in a wooden box by Hiroaki Fujii, producer of the 30-minute black-and-white film, according to publisher Shinchosha Co.

Fujii had persuaded Yoko, who pulled all copies of the film from theaters and burned them after Mishima’s suicide in 1970, to hold onto the original.

The film includes scenes that foreshadow Mishima’s suicide in 1970 at the Ground Self-Defense Force’s regional headquarters in Tokyo’s Ichigaya District.

A character in the film, a lieutenant involved in the Feb. 26 Incident, a failed 1936 military coup, commits hara-kiri.

Mishima also committed hara-kiri at the GSDF regional headquarters after calling on officers to launch a coup d’etat.

I managed to find a digital copy of the story from a dead website with the help of google cache, and I’ve mirrored it here.

Patriotism, by Yukio Mishima

Tibet in exile

Following my post yesterday about the Dalai Lama’s upcoming visit to my former university of Rutgers, I thought this very recent Time Asia article describing his government in exile.

Around me, matrons from Lhasa are buying bread from vendors outside the temple, and walking their children to the Tibetan school down Temple Road. Recent escapees from Tibet are setting up tables and preparing lattes and chocolate cakes at the sleek Moonpeak Café and at Chonor House, the elegant guesthouse run by Tibet’s government-in-exile. Everywhere are monks in red, reciting sutras, sweeping their temple grounds, streaming into Internet cafés, and just whiling away their day in the shadow of Himalayan foothills, almost as if they were at home. What I’m seeing, improbably, is a vision of Tibet that you can never see these days in Tibet itself.

Also see a brief post I did earlier about Tibetans in Taiwan.