Japan's latest contribution to internationalisation

But anyway, the thing is, much as I love the place and the people, it jars so much. I'm all too aware that the general day-to-day realities of being a foreigner in Japan (particularly a Caucasian; Blacks have it far worse) - being stared at, not being taken seriously, being constantly reminded that you are different and not like them - can be an advantage as much as an annoyance.

But that doesn't mean that it's right to have such an institutionalised pattern of labelling the gaijin as potential devils.

By this I mean that it is symptomatic of a general suspicion about foreigners which appears to be based on the sheer criteria that "we are fundamentally different from them, but we are decent people; qed - they must be a bit dodgy."

And did you know that ethnic Koreans born in Japan are not allowed to become full Japanese citizens ?

So it seems right that many will ignore a kind of website like this but not be against it because it's just being extra extra organized and careful with thier system even if it may be wrong.

For any of us, who have ever spent any amount of time in Japan, racism is one thing that smacks you in the face from the minute the plane touches down on the tarmac. We all grapple with the various forms of discrimination that we face just about each and every waking day in Japan in our own particular way. Sometimes it works to be direct and challenge the perpetrator of racist remarks or behaviour, and other times it all just gets too much and it becomes easier just to walk away.

One article that I found particularly enlightening on the topic of the Japanese and their never-ending obsession in pointing their collective finger at the foreigner is this one:

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/geted.pl5?eo20030106jl.htm

Reading this you will realise that much of Japanese racism is subconscious and so deeply ingrained that the bulk of offenders don't even realise the harm they cause. Not that this gets them off the hook. Just that it does go to show that it's a society that's still incompetant when it comes to dealing with the outside world. And for those who come from the outside into their world... better to be forewarned than expect to be accepted.

My point... embarresingly, I don't think I have one! Racism exists in every society. Just a matter of whether you want to live in a society where you form part of the mainstream, or not.

BTW - does anyone have the link to the Japanese website that Debito Arudo referred to? I've done a sweep of the various relevant websites and can't locate it.

What Lehmann is proposing is the cultural equivalent of a hostile takeover bid. He wants to break down nationalism and 'the cultural exception' in the interests of a particular kind of global capitalism which he thinks is less racist and more healthy. I do not agree, and I think his own hostility to difference is plain. A world in which race does not matter simply because money matters more is not a world in which races have the respect they are due.

Lehmann (one of whose examples of racial inclusiveness is the Bush cabinet) calls 'racist' a country which clings to its own racial and cultural difference. Lutzman calls 'sexist' a car which proposes to cater to women. In other words, anything which proposes racial and sexual difference as a more important structuring principle than money can now be accused of 'racism' and 'sexism'. In these new definitions, to insist on the particularities of race is 'racist'. To insist on the particularities of gender is 'sexist'. To resist liberal capitalism is, presumably, illiberal.

Ah, I see what you're saying, Mr Lehmann. We are all racist, but the Japanese are 'primitive racists'. The last 'savages' of the racism world, so to speak. The problem with the Japanese race is that it is a racist race. Racism is, alas, normal, but the Japanese race is so racist that it considers racism normal.

This is an offensive and absurd argument. Does globalism mean that all societies must repeat each other's social structures? Is American and European society really such a shining example when, for instance, the racist ideas of Le Pen and Pim Fortuyn are popular enough to get integrated into mainstream party policy in places like Holland, the UK and France? Is the Bush cabinet really a shining example of black people having an influence on public policy? Is Japan really a pariah when it underwrites the American deficit and participates so successfully in global business that it has completely wiped out, eg, the British car industry?

Is Japan really 'behind' when its literacy and longevity levels are far higher than ours? Isn't 'closure' (or, more specifically, a complex warp and weave of closure and openness) an established part of Japanese history? How exactly is Lehmann's stance different from Admiral Perry trying to open Japan to trade with gunboats?

Does Lehmann want the gangs of disaffected racist youths who roam western cities and fight turf wars with economic / ex-colonial immigrants to roam Japanese cities too? Does he want Japan to be less Japanese, and if so, what is the basis of his desire for global homogeneity? Is he jealous that Japan has fewer racial-social problems than western countries? Does the striking atmosphere of social harmony in Japan -- the safety of its public places, for instance -- annoy him? Can the Japanese only overcome their status as (rich, successful, internationalist) pariahs by importing not just western goods, but also western social problems? Why should the Japanese want to watch their educational levels decline and their life expectancy shrink? Why should they want to live life in a less Japanese way and let their companies be run by aggressive international executives? Why should they want to import cheap labour and go for constant economic expansion? Mightn't they want, instead, to slow down their economy and enjoy life? What if Japan, with the Slow Life movement, were actually ahead of the west: pioneering a post-industrial social model which is about quality of life and sustainability and cultural difference rather than constant economic growth, globalism and convergence?

It would have been more interesting if he'd dealt with the contents of Akio Morita's book, rather than just noted its existence. There's an interesting article by Ian Buruma on Morita's "Made In Japan: Akio Morita and Sony", which as far as I can recall places Morita firmly in the tradition of nihonjinron, a sort of Japanese self-orientalism. What's interesting about nihinjinron is that it creates a 'Japanese identity' which is in part imaginary, nostalgic, idealised (such as Morita's insistence that the salaryman joins his company and stays in it, and loyal to it as a family, all his life - as opposed to the mercenary Westerner. In the late eighties, when this claim was made, staying in one company your whole life was no longer thought by younger salarymen to be the best career option, and less and less were doing it). This 'Japanese identity' is then lauded as the right way to be, held up as a pattern against which one must measure oneself and used in contrast to inferior foreign practice - it's used as a basis for national chauvinism, but it does not necessarily reflect the true state of things in Japan itself.

Lehmann doesn't seem to have any interest in the reasons behind Japanese national chauvinism - nor does he deal with the other side of Japanese racism, as directed towards Koreans for example.

Really, it's a rather inferior article on a very interesting topic.

Use other cultural myths please. Japan was already open to trade: with Korea, with China, with the Dutch in Batavia.

"Japan at that time was a hermit nation with very little contact with the outside world," says Bill Hosokawa, an active member of the Denver Japanese-American community. "Today Japan is one of America's leading trading partners."

And yet Lehmann tries to portray Japan as 'marginal', a 'pariah', an 'outlier', 'not an actor' on the global stage, having 'no global mindset' and so on. These comments play unsympathetically on exactly Japan's history of ambivalence to world trade, and ignore how its economic and social successes and its very specific character are linked.

But I'm not sure I see how accepting a myth that Lehmann is propounding as part of his argument can help you to counter that same argument.

(Although it wasn't really in 1854 that Japan opened to US trade: it took a few years for more ports beyond Nagasaki to be opened, and only after 1868 was there a full opening to all Western trade interests. But this is so much nitpicking.)

Shinzo Abe has installed the beaver door-knocker he brought back from Canada pic.twitter.com/y7kZE3Bgik

— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) May 2, 2019

Jean-Pierre Lehmann envisions Japanese corporations being headed by executives like Carlos Ghosn, the Brazilian of Lebanese extraction who heads Renault.

and now fifteen years later he's in a tokyo jail.

interesting thread.

Does Lehmann want the gangs of disaffected racist youths who roam western cities and fight turf wars with economic / ex-colonial immigrants to roam Japanese cities too? Does he want Japan to be less Japanese, and if so, what is the basis of his desire for global homogeneity?

One in ten Tokyoites in their 20s are now foreigners

and no gangs of disaffected racist youths yet.

Do you have a link to that Lehmann/Ghosn thread, dylannn? Can’t seem to find it on Twitter and couldn’t google it either.

it's upthread here, posts by momus

Ah, it’s this old ILE thread you find interesting. I thought you were posting a quote from a Twitter thread.
(The link to the article Momus referred to (someone else posted it) is dead btw)

here it is

Thanks!

dylannn, is Gyaru/Yanki still a thing in Japan and if not what has replaced it?

we need a momus type here to answer that kind of thing.

but not really still a thing. the words are still used but there is no distinction often between the two and they're mostly used to describe garish/tacky + big hair rather than gyaru style as it existed in 1998 or even 2008. and even that kind of thing, the general tacky look, living in tokyo, i only encounter it in deepest saitama, maybe lalaport in ebina to choose another random place in the suburbs, or in one of the malls around ikebukuro. the real style, the rare holdouts are the women i see walking to work in yoshiwara who are mostly old enough to have grown up reading egg and popteen, still wearing suburban single mother ageha magazine-ish stuff and carrying those white damier carryalls with shit hanging off them. and then there are nostalgic hobbyists some too young to remember the gyaru golden age, often mimicing extreme ganguro looks, often posting to instagram from small towns in places i've never been.

i guess like a shibuya girl in 2019 is more likely to be dressed in some toned down generic asian streetwear style or just look like a south korean instagram influencer and all the trends at least for 20something women is all direct from overseas or only mildly filtered through japanese designers/brands EXACTLY THE GLOBALIZATION MOMUS FEARED, and my imaginary yankiish saitama girl is going to wear a champion hoodie, skirt she picked up at ABAB in ueno, supreme lv fanny pack (ordered from a contact on line who orders them on taobao and marks them up) or maybe still something from gyaruish brands like cecil mcbee but those styles have been watered down by influence of fast fashion (GU, uniqlo, zara, bershka, h&m etc etc every 50 feet). deep gyaru subcultural stuff, still the hobbyists like i said, but all of that just kept breaking apart into smaller and smaller subcultures and microtrends, so you can still go to shibuya 109 and find the genes in certain looks but yeah not really (also 75% of the customers at 109 like everywhere in the city are chinese tourists now).

https://www.shibuya109.jp/ladies/staff/
the shibuya 109 staff blog thing might give you some idea

Booming answer dylannn thanks! Was wondering if you might have read Ametora by W David Marx btw?

ive absorbed a lot of what's in there through reviews and other w david marx pieces but i haven't come across an english edition of the book yet.

also before writing that i checked back on the w david marx history of gyaru to see if the promised fourth part ever ran, which would have covered the mid 2000s resurgence and eventual death (and its cosplayification by mostly black american girls and niigata teens on instagram). no fourth part unfortunately but i treasure that series https://neojaponisme.com/2012/02/28/the-history-of-the-gyaru-part-one/

Here I was thinking the thread revive would mention that the Japanese government has left the international whaling convention and announced that it will resume commercial whaling. This is because they had been disguising their whaling as "scientific research" for decades and were finally nailed for it and told to stop. They didn't want to stop.