Shimizu Ikkō's “Silver sanctuary” (Gin no seiiki): A Japanese business novel

Abstract

“I want to describe lots of people who are directly involved in business,” says Shimizu Ikkō. Shimizu Ikkō (1931- )is the pioneer of Japanese “business novels” (kigyō shōsetsu) and one of the most prolific and popular novelists today. Born in Tokyo, Shimizu attended Waseda University and was active as a freelance writer contributing articles to weekly magazines until he was recognized as a novelist. His An Artery Archipelago (Dōmyaku rettō) was awarded the 28th Japanese Detective Story Writers Association Prize in 1975.     

Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity,Phantasm, Japan by Marilyn Ivy

Abstract

Discourses of the Vanishing has been anticipated for several years now; it won't disappoint. Despite the rising number of authors who seek to “explain” Japan or attack its essentialism, Ivy is one of the few who have the understanding of modernity and the methodological tools to excavate the celebration (Japanese and American) of Japan's “uniqueness.” Discourses is by far one of the most sophisticated inquiries into what Ivy calls—properly I believe—the “Japanese thing.” The juxtaposition between the singular, thing, and plural, discourses, suggests her overall theme: to discuss the always incomplete reconfigurations of the many pasts that have existed within the archipelago into a singular ideology of Japan.     

INHERITING “JAPANESE-NESS” DIVERSELY

The late twentieth century saw a rise of global discourse about heritage. Research on heritage politics, however, has shed little light on heritage practices in schools, especially regarding language, that is, how heritage language is constructed and how it is “inherited” by students of various backgrounds. Heritage language education is often viewed as a means to empower heritage language speakers or to address the diverse needs of students in language classes. In existing works, the individual’s link to “heritage” is assumed as given and stable. More recent works show that the processes and effects of heritage language education are complex and nuanced due to diverse personal backgrounds and changing political economy and cultural politics. The role of schooling in the process of “inheriting” language, however, has not attracted much attention: how students are grouped or tracked into a particular class, for example. After ethnographically investigating various views and practices at a weekend Japanese language school in the northeastern United States throughout 2007 and 2008, the authors of this article argue that heritage language school is not merely a place to reproduce “heritage” by passing it on to students, but it is also a productive site where ways to imagine “heritage” and “inherit” it proliferate. The article analyzes the processes by which what would be considered as merely “speaking Japanese” and “being Japanese” outside heritage language school are differentiated into diverse ways of being Japanese. It suggests a need to investigate school as a site of heritage politics as well as a need for researchers and practitioners to view heritage language education not only as a way to teach language but also as a means to gain an understanding of heritage politics.     

Jews in the Japanese Mind: The History and Uses of a Cultural Stereotype,by David Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa

Abstract

The virulent anti-Semitism that characterizes many of the books found in the “Jewish” corner in Japanese bookstores bewilders the casual browser. Instead of dismissing these texts as hallucinogenic ravings, however, David Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa offer a welcome historical analysis of the ways in which Jews have figured in Japanese ideology. As the authors emphasize, their work “is not about Jews or about the Jewish experiences in the Far Fast; nor, while it touches on them, is it a history of actual Japanese-Jewish relations.     

Social Darwinism as History and Reality: “Competition” and “The Weak” in Early Twentieth-Century Korea

ABSTRACT

By the time of Korea’s forced integration into the Japanese Empire in 1910, Social Darwinism was established as the main reference frame for the modernizing intellectual elite. The weak had only themselves to blame for their misfortune, and Korea, if it wished to succeed in collective survival in the modern world’s Darwinist jungles, had to strengthen itself. This mode of thinking was inherited by the right-wing nationalists in the 1920s–1930s; their programs of “national reconstruction” (minjok kaejo) aimed at remaking weak Korea into a “fitter” nation, thus preparing for the eventual independence from the Japanese. At the same time, in the 1920s and 1930s some nationalists appropriated the slogan of solidarity and protection of the weak, nationally and internationally, in the course of their competition against the Left. After liberation from Japanese colonialism in 1945, “competition” mostly referred to inter-state competition in South Korean right-wing discourse. However, the neo-liberal age after the 1997 Asian financial crisis witnessed a new discursive shift, competition-driven society being now the core of the mainstream agenda.     

Forays into Japanese cultural psychology

Abstract

The search for a theory of Japanese personality and culture has been an epic endeavor among foreign specialists, filled with all the mystery and fantasy of discovering Atlantis. The inquiry began nearly a century ago when the venerable William Griffis described the moral character of the “average Japanese” as being “frank, honest, kind, gentle, courteous, confiding, affectionate, filial, loyal.” Reviewing his own inventory of personality traits, Griffis felt obliged to conclude that the “Japanese are simply human, no better, no worse than mankind outside.”     

Introductory essay to symposium on modes of production and social formations in Asian Societies

Abstract

The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars and the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars have always attempted to provide alternatives to “established” scholarship in the Asian studies field. When CCAS came into existence in the mid-1960s, the main task was to formulate a critique of the cold war inspired scholarship of the 1950s, and to attempt to counteract the prevailing views concerning the communist countries and national liberation movements of Asia. This in turn led to an analysis of the structure of academic inquiry and academic funding in the United States, and to a realization of the political character of the “apolitical” stance of the Asian studies academic establishment.     

“Analytical Eclecticism” in Theorizing Japanese Security Policy: A Review Essay

Abstract

This review essay explores the conceptual parameters of the contemporary “Japan Rising” thesis. It stakes out the debate between three prolific scholars in the field of Japanese security affairs and considers the different analytical approaches that may be applied to understand the current evolutions in Tokyo's grand strategy. It concludes that “analytical eclecticism” in theorizing Japanese security policy is a worthwhile and necessary endeavor, one that may be further augmented by the addition of multi-sector and human security concepts.     

The U.S. military and sexual violence against women

Abstract

The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (BCAS) created the “Notes from the Field” section in 1992 in an attempt to bring BCAS closer to its activist origins and goals by publishing brief reports on events and issues of particular concern in the world today. Not intended to duplicate BCAS's usual in-depth and well-documented analysis and research, these reports are meant to be a less formal equivalent of “field notes” describing what is happening or being debated or studied out there in the world of action. Although analysis is usually a valuable part of these presentations, the “Notes” are more akin to urgent notices or offerings for discussion. The name “Notes from the Field” is not meant to imply the colonialist concept of people reporting back from the so-called Third World, and even though the name can be seen to loosely apply to the field of Asian studies, it does not refer to reporting on the more strictly academic aspects of fields of study within academia. The hope is that the information and opinions presented in these “Notes from the Field” will inspire readers to concern themselves with issues that matter, either through further study and analysis or by speaking out or taking action more directly.

It has been reported that on 4 September 1995 two U.S. Marines and one U.S. Navy man stationed at Camp Hansen Marine Base in Kin, Okinawa, raped a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl. This situation caught the Okinawan, Japanese, and international media's attention, brought out an Okinawan demonstration of 90,000 people in the latest of “U.S. Bases Out Of Okinawa” demonstrations that go back at least to 1972 with the reversion of Okinawa to Japan, made apologies by U.S. president Clinton mandatory, and resulted in the turning over of the three servicemen to the justice of Japanese courts, itself an act reflecting the need of the U.S. military and civilian authorities to try to defuse the situation.     

Imperialism and Chinese nationalism: Germany in Shantung,By John F. Schrecker

Abstract

Professor Schrecker's book is basically a defense of Qing foreign policy during the 1895-1911 period. He demonstrates a concern of nationalism in late Qing with protecting the legal sovereignty of the Chinese state by showing how turn-of-the-century governors Yuan Shi-kai, Zhou Fu, and Yang Shi-xiang labored to defend the territorial integrity of Shandong [Shantung] province against German imperialism. The book's strength lies in Schrecker's conceptual analysis of Chinese foreign policy and its intellectual roots in the late nineteenth century. He argues cogently and with originality that in their concern for defending “sovereignty,” officials like Yuan Shi-kai combined the militant conservative qing-i school of the 1880s with the internationalist approach after 1895 of radical reformers like Kang You-wei. But Schrecker also argues that Qing foreign policy succeeded in stopping German imperialism in Shandong by 1911 and in terms of the empire as a whole that “in the last decade of the dynasty the Chinese government made considerably more progress in its struggle against imperialism than has generally been believed.” (p. 254) In such judgments about the success of late Qing foreign policy, he betrays the bias of what Bulletin readers have come to know as the Harvard school of apologetics for Western and Japanese imperialism. Schrecker deserves credit for drawing attention to the nationalist posture which the late Qing took after 1901 but he goes too far in his defense of the dynasty and the “progress” actually made against Western and Japanese imperialism.     

Ernest Cole: the perspective of time

Ernest Cole’s photographs reveal the contradictions and paradoxes of apartheid South Africa. At a very young age, and with little formal instruction Cole instinctively produced a significant documentary photo-book titled House of Bondage (1967). This article makes a close reading of some of Ernest Cole’s photographs in relation to the historical circumstances of apartheid and how they can be perceived through the lens of hindsight in postapartheid South Africa. The work offers a potent argument for the power of perception to uncover overlooked moments of the period. As an African, Cole’s photographs construct a narrative of apartheid from the position of an “invisible” black insider. In so doing, they tellingly reveal how he used the system of apartheid to his own advantage in his photographic practice. His photographs ask us to consider his modus operandi and the courage it took to make them at that time, offering the opportunity to behold moments that cut across gaps of space and time.     

The Study of Religion and Society in Contemporary Asia: Colonialism and Beyond; Asian Visions of Authority: Religion and the Modem States of East and SoutheastAsia

Abstract

In 1989, the Islamicist Bruce Lawrence suggested that, in a global context, the term fundamentalism should be replaced by the term antimodernism, which, to Mark Juergensmeyer, “suggests a religious revolt against the secular ideology that often accompanies modern society.” The papers in this volume are similarly concerned with the social implications of “religious revolt,” i.e., of continued religious vitality in lands that had presumably adopted “modern” patterns of secular nationalism. Such thinking, however, raises deeper issues about the very notion of “modernity.”     

The American-Japanese ‘Co-prosperity sphere’

Abstract

For many years Jane Hamilton-Merritt has carried out a publicity campaign in support of Vang Pao and the so-called “Lao resistance,” while condemning the government of the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) and anyone who challenges her own views. Hamilton-Merritt has demonstrated great effectiveness in marshaling the mainstream media, reputable public figures, and otherwise respected institutions as the channels or even mouthpieces for her campaign. The publication of Tragic Mountains highlights her ongoing efforts to find acceptance for her fanciful vision of the recent history of Laos (and the United States). Her success in this campaign has been possible only because few in her audience know the facts behind her distorted misrepresentations. In this book, Hamilton-Merritt constructs a fantastical account of “the Hmong, the Americans, and the secret wars for Laos” that bears little relation to the truth of the events and personalities she discusses.     

Imperialism and Asia: A brief introduction to the literature

Abstract

From 1910 (formally, de facto earlier) until 1945 Korea was under extremely harsh occupation by Japan. During this period, when every component of Korean culture was cruelly suppressed, Korean women suffered specific oppression. Very large numbers of Korean women were forcibly driven into prostitution, both in Korea itself and throughout the Japanese empire. Many were forced into prostitution for Japanese troops in appalling conditions, often in the front lines, and many were killed in the trenches. Within general Japanese sexism, there was a specificity to the attempt to degrade and exploit Korean women. Certain aspects of contemporary Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) official culture must be understood as attempts to combat the legacy of this colonial past. The emphasis on “purity”—for women—which is articulated by both men and women in the DPRK is justified officially by reference to both the Japanese colonial past and the contemporary degradation of women in South Korea, which is usually attributed mainly to US and Japanese influences, such as sex tourism.     

The politics of China's peasant revolution

Abstract

Efforts to explain the success of the Chinese Communist revolution have preoccupied more than a few American historians and political scientists in recent years. Most of these scholars, following the trail blazed by George Taylor's The Struggle for North China, have focused attention on the War of Resistance period (1937–1945) in search of the factors responsible for the phenomenal growth in Communist power. Chalmers Johnson, with his famous thesis of “peasant nationalism,” emphasizes the importance of the Japanese invasion for rural mobilization in China. Mark Selden, by contrast, identifies the Communist Party's positive wartime policies—the “Yenan Way”—as the key to revolutionary victory. Carl Dorris, while agreeing with much of Selden's explanation, locates the source of these successful wartime policies not in the capital of Yenan, but in the guerrilla bases of North China, especially Jin-Cha-Ji.     

Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir,by Kayano Shigeru

Abstract

In an Asahi Shimbun interview (31 May 1994) Kayano Shigeru (1923-), author of Ainu no ishibumi (An Ainu Memoir, 1980), recalls the fireside uwepekere or folktales told to him in the Ainu language by his grandmother and remarks that “since there's no written Ainu language, it's only the ear, not the eye, that matters.” Our Land Was a Forest, Kayano's autobiographical memoir, impresses the ear as well as the eye of the reader, as Ainu voices—seldom listened to in the past—reverberate between the lines of the original Japanese version and this English language translation by Kyoko Selden and Lili Selden.     

Review essay: Agrarian transformation,agrarian struggles,and Marxist analyses of the peasantry

Abstract

After some years of living in an Indian village, on family land that by the standards of most Marxist scholars puts us in the category of “capitalist farmers” or “kulaks,” I find myself taking scholarly discussion of “agrarian transformation” and “agrarian class structure” quite personally. There is something that jars against the reality of a daily life that includes hauling water for household use in the morning, enduring frequent blackouts or “load sheddings,” trying to decide whether to purchase first a TV or a refrigerator or a washing machine and not really being able to afford any of them, to be told that in moving from a salaried position in a U.S. university to an Indian village one has made a class jump upwards, from a section of the “expanded working class” or at worst “petty bourgeoisie” to membership among the capitalists and even (according to some scholars) participation in India's “ruling bloc.”     

Kamikazefication and Japan's wartime ideology

Abstract

A number of recent works have focused on the personal experiences of kamikaze pilots, but very little has been published in English on the Japanese government's effort to “kamikazefy” the civilian population in the final year of the Asian PacificWar (1937-45). To illustrate this effort, this article employs images taken from the author's personal collection of over 2,500 Japanese wartime publications (predominantly periodicals). In early 1945, the Japanese government announced a “fight to the death for the home islands,” in which civilian “home-front warriors” would fight alongside troops in the event of an Allied invasion. Civilian combatants were expected to follow the “no surrender” policy hammered into Japanese servicemen and to emulate the kamikaze pilots' spirit of supreme sacrifice. The article begins with a brief discussion of the ideology behind kamikazefication, inviting comparisons with suicide missions in other times and places. Historical context is further established by an overview of media accounts of Japanese suicide missions in the Asian PacificWar, beginning with the mission carried out at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. An analysis of media reportage shows how members of suicide missions were glorified and made into role models for all Japanese, even women and children. Servicemen who died for their country were enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. The article concludes by suggesting reasons why civilians, even those who died fighting in the war, have not been similarly honored.     

DIALOGUE WITH THE WEST

Abstract

This portrayal of China by one of the most respected intellectuals ever to emerge from the shadowy labyrinth of the American diplomatic establishment mirrors twenty years of concentrated work by American China scholars. Not every China expert would accept all of Kennan's assumptions or express them in such strident form. Yet over the last two decades the China profession has evolved a style of thought, a mode of asking questions, which has largely substantiated such views in both the public and scholarly worlds. The majority of China watchers have pleaded for “tolerance” and “patience” towards the People's Republic as she gradually learns, aided by a flexible American containment policy, to “adjust” to the “international community of nations” and the “rationalizing” qualities implicit in the “modernization” process. While protesting against certain aspects of America's foreign policy toward China, however, their thought and work has reinforced, at times deepened, the ideological justifications that support America's role in Asia and her attitudes towards China.     

A review essay

Abstract

It was thirty-six years ago, on August 6, 1945, that Colonel Paul W. Tibbets and his crew, military men representing the United States in the Allied War against the Japanese Empire, flew their B29, Enola Gay, from the Tinian Air Base to Hiroshima in order to drop a 12.5 kiloton uranium 235 bomb dubbed “Little Boy” (after Franklin D. Roosevelt) on this enemy city. The hypocenter of the bomb was in the vicinity of Shima Hospital; the time, approximately 8:15 a.m. A few days later, on August 9, 1945, Don Albury and his crew left the Tinian Air Base to drop a 22 kiloton plutonium 239 bomb over Kokura, Kyushu, only to find a heavily clouded sky. “Fat Man” (after Winston Churchill) was thus destined to detonate over Nagasaki. The hypocenter of this bomb was in the vicinity of the main intersection in the township of Matsuyama; the time, approximately 11:02 a.m.