Nae Hauf-Way Hoose

The Boy Who's a Girl

2012-01-27T15:47:00.008+13:00

Nitori Shuichi is a 5th grader, a boy who wants to be a girl, although he may not altogether realise that. Takatsuki Yoshino, his friend, is a girl who wants to be a boy. Volume One of Shimura Takako’s manga Wandering Son covers the months leading up to their graduation, and traces with an astonishing beauty the difficulties and excitement of both desires.

The sex/gender distinction is an easy enough one to work with and, whatever later revisions and challenges it may have needed, it still performs useful political work. Our desires and identities – and the not always simple connections between those two – work themselves out in the play between the two terms, as physical bodies and selves are shaped by and shape their cultural context and social construction. So far, so orthodox. There’s a certain frisson in the stretching and bending of these expectations and in the flouting of gendered roles (this is the debased account of Judith Butler current in some circles) and, it is sometimes claimed, these performances do their bit to undo gender binaries and their attendant oppressions. That all-too-easy leap from the personal to the political not only bypasses some difficult problems (to do with social structures of oppression, women and exploitation and so on); it also erases a whole raft of experiences that involve an intensely lived relation to the sex/gender divide, ones that don’t wish them severed. Feeling other to the body one is born with – and having to negotiate that otherness in a society happy to ridicule and damage you for this feeling – is a situation not well served by a lot of the language and theorising of gender.

Shimura’s manga chronicles of LGBT experience have been known from many years in Japan ; what makes Wandering Son so interesting, and so useful, as a representation of ‘this world’ and ‘this path’ is the way it focuses, in this early volume, on that time just on the cusp of puberty (a first period plays an important role in the story), when bodily identity and selfhood need not be associated so quickly with questions of sexuality itself. Wandering Son is a beautiful, delicate and careful tale of sex much more than sexuality – what does it mean to be a boy? And, following that, what might it mean to be a girl?

The most gorgeous, and moving, pages, are, for me, those in which Shimura hesitates over a significant object of identity – a hair tie, an old school uniform, a dress or a sailor suit – and uses the image’s isolation and stillness to prompt our reflection and sympathy with the characters as they invest these objects with identifying powers. Pages of ‘rush’ – people hurrying to school, a knock at the door, train rides – give over to single images or a character’s face. Scott McCloud calls that space between panels – ‘the gutter’ – the area that “plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics,” and this is the sense in which I read Wandering Son’s gutters. It’s a manga of transitions, of never-wholly-realised identities, and so the space between the image of a hair band and an image of a face points to the gaps between the bodies characters live with – alongside their often unwelcome transformations – and the bodies they feel as selves.

The difficulty of these boundaries, and the slipperiness of identity, plays out at the level of style, too. Shimura’s characters are very hard to tell apart (something she, half-jokingly, apologises for at the manga’s end), and her drawings make powerful use of simple contrasts, seemingly unfinished sketches and minimal detail to evoke something of the flux and incompleteness in Nitori and Takatsuki’s sense of self and relations. Her exploitation of Japanese’s ambiguities around personal address and gender adds another complexity still; pronouns having such specific contexts and uses in Japanese (私、オレ and ぼくall translating as “I” and yet in themselves gender- and socially-specific) and proper names appearing in place of ‘you’ in ways that make the English speakers norms for gender identification almost unworkable. Matt Thorn’s translation – and his intriguing Translator’s Note – make good use of this material by transporting it into the English and not trying to hide the problems it poses for his work. Shimura wrote another manga called ぼくは、おんなのこ, a title (and, behind it, a subculture) playing with similar gendered language.

Cultural translation is an altogether more vexing problem, though, and Wandering Son reminds us why the terms gay, lesbian and transgender may not be at all appropriate for discussions of Japanese identities. Mark McLelland has pointed out some of the ways in which the too-hasty translation of specific life experiences can cause us to misunderstand the richness of those lives; I’ve written on his work before. Wandering Son makes great use of Takarazuka – the all-female performance troupe – to allow the characters’ cross-dressing to develop in a social context (the classroom) and also as part of a relationship, as friendships help develop insights into self, clothing, and identity. Takarazuka is, though, notoriously hard to place using Western labels for sexuality. I won’t give too much of the story away here, except to say that a school performance of ‘The Rose of Versailles’ sets much of the anxiety – and excitement – in motion.

There’s plenty of the suffering of LGBT life in Wandering Son, too, of course; homophobic bullying and violence, hostility to ‘perverts’, scenes evoking aching loneliness. My dominant memories from the manga, though, transform these into a narrative that’s much more than a realist account of lives neglected in most representations, although goodness knows we need more of those. Rather, Wandering Son’s beauty, the studied quality and balance of each image, seem to bring something of a utopian sense to this alienation and confusion. There’s a sense of expectation and thrill to the discoveries here, to the moment spent looking in a mirror when wearing a dress or sporting a headband, and a sense of anticipation. That’s a rare enough quality in any serious treatment of ‘other’ sexuality, and it's an exciting, and inspirational, one.

Wandering Son has recently been made into an anime, and Fantagraphics Books have brought out Volume Two as well. So look out for Shimura Takako.

Sources

You can buy a copy of Wandering Son here. The pictures I've used here are from the anime, not from the manga.

Jennifer Robertson’s “The Politics of Androgyny in Japan: Sexuality and Subversion in Theatre and Beyond” you can read here (pdf)

Scott McCloud’s three-volume series Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000) and Making Comics (2006) is very useful.

On Tyrants Only We'll Make War

2011-12-20T11:06:00.013+13:00

I was last in Seoul during the insufferable summer of 2008, attending All Together’s Marxism conference as the Candlelight Movement shook Korean society.

Seoul’s a gloriously chaotic city, beautiful in its shambolic liveliness and, after months in the buttoned-down decorum of Tokyo, its energy and sense of fun were infectious. I have family who are Zainichi Korean and, over the years, getting closer to them has led me to get more and more fascinated and involved with Korean culture: Seoul was a sensory overload. Fundamentalist Christians shuffle up to you on the underground and whisper “embrace Jesus”; before you’ve had a chance to decide whether you will or not they’ve wandered off. Station platforms are crowded with women selling piles of everything from deliciously enticing pickles to perfectly priced socks. In summer months after business hours shopkeepers set up gas cookers outside their stores, and relax by barbequing snacks and drinking a few shots of shochu before heading home. For non-alcoholic treats you can stop at most street corners and buy peaches blended with ice and sugar. Koreans, too, for a puritanical and gauchely awkward New Zealander like me, seem emotionally liberated: after dark the pubs were full of salary men singing together and wandering around arm-in-arm. The summer felt celebratory.

That demotic, free-spirited city life wasn’t everything, though. Travelling by tube, I was struck by the straight backs of all the men, a reminder of the bullying and violence meted out as part of compulsory military training. Soldiers in uniform are a normal, and visible, part of city life. The city was a site of struggle: wherever we went we’d see the banners and placards of the Candlelight Girl, the movement’s symbol, and often stopped to spend time with little clusters of protestors camping out.

More sinister signs were to come. On the morning of Liberation Day – the day of light, celebrating when the Japanese were defeated – I left our guest house to buy some breakfast, and saw that the streets were crowded with riot police. The state had decided to crush the movement.

South Korea is, in the Western press most of the time, held up as an example of democracy. What we saw could, at the very best, be described as illiberal democracy. Our comrades in All Together base their analysis on the ‘state capitalist’ theories of Tony Cliff, and offer no support for the regime in Pyongyang. That hasn’t stopped many in their ranks being jailed for thought crimes, charged and imprisoned for translating works like Alex Callinicos’ Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx. All Together played a leading, and positive, role in supporting and shaping the Candlelight Movement and, for that reason, their conference was targeted. The university in which it was hosted had, at the very last moment, cut off the power supplies – for three days in mid-July heat we struggled through humidity with hastily-assembled generators keeping minimal heating and air conditioning at work. All Together members, who had sought shelter in a Buddhist temple following brutal police repression, were wanted figures, and, to get to the conference you had to walk past a phalanx of riot police, decked out in full battle regalia. The Saturday of the conference there was a major demonstration scheduled. We’d planned to attend but, early in the evening, conference organisers took us aside; they didn’t want us to go, C explained, because they couldn’t protect us or expect us to take care of ourselves in strange streets, and expected the violence to be sudden and intense. That night we spent, somewhat guiltily, in a local restaurant, checking our phones between courses to see how the cat-and-mouse chases of protestors and police progressed. The next morning we saw many delegates with stitches, and some still bleeding. O, our interpreter, had bruises all the way up his arm.

I’m not a physically confident person, and these details intimidated me. What sticks in my memory, though, is the joyousness of the event, the bubbling energy of the movement pointing in a different direction for Korea’s future. There were children from the crèche running about between sessions; the walls were decorated with union banners and campaign posters; the youth and energy of the crowd gave a clear sense of the forces welling up in the protest and social movements. And there was plenty of laughter. Most of the jokes got lost in translation, but some made their way through. Guest speaker Jonathan Neale, a movement veteran, a bear-like and warmly expansive American socialist, gave a talk on alienation: “I carry mine around with me as a reminder!” he explained, slapping against his belly. Jonathan’s been to many international conferences, and he can explain complex ideas in short, simple sentences – the meeting came alive.

All Together have dedicated a great deal of intellectual and political energy to analysing the origins and dynamics of capitalism in Korea, north and south. They’ve got a clear line for how to get the peninsula nuclear free: let’s start by ending the US occupation. They put their trust in workers on both sides of the border, and have never had any illusions in the regime beyond the 38th. A younger generation, impatient with the Cold War rhetoric of their elders, are less caught up in the demonology of the GNP, and the social movements in the South have freed themselves from poisonous legacies of earlier eras. At the conference, though, I was struck by how many people at question time still wanted to explore the situation in the North, and from the view of the North. After a solid diet of Western liberal accounts of Korea, it’s easy to forget that this is a nation dismembered and still at war, and one with a proud history of resistance to foreign occupation. What may seem bizarre and unpredictable from Washington or Wellington still feels dangerous from Seoul, but motives come into a much clearer view.

I left Seoul feeling happy, and having made many new friends and contacts. The Candlelight Movement looked like it would develop.

A year later, I found out my friend O had been jailed, arrested for distributing leaflets in a public place. There’s a chill over those summer memories now.

*

I’ve never been to Pyongyang, although friends have. A contingent from KEY – the organisation of united Korean youth in Japan – went a few years ago, searching out family members they’d never had the chance to meet until then. Those Zainichi in Japan who have refused to rescind their “North Korean” papers have made a very bold choice, and one that’s hard for many of us fully to understand. They’ve taken upon themselves many inconveniences – and have ruled out all sorts of travel, educational and employment opportunities – for the sake of a principle, and a principle around which they’ve few chances to organise. The statement in refusing Japanese or South Korean citizenship involves insisting on certain historical realities, reminding the world about colonialism, drawing attention to the justice they and their ancestors have been denied. It’s an extraordinary gesture, and one I’m glad I’ve never been forced to see if I’d have the courage to emulate.

My friend K went to Pyongyang, then, to seek out family, and to see the land she’s attached to without having been born there or even, to that point, having visited. What she saw won’t surprise, but should still upset; US-driven sanctions have led to widespread hunger. The regime’s autocratic rule prevented any real communication. The constant mobilisation for war (by no means wholly unjustified) lent the city a sinister, fearful air. It was a lonely, and difficult, trip.

Most of the “North Koreans” in Japan, though, aren’t from the north at all – their relatives are, in the main, from southern regions, and, after the war, took on northern identities for reasons of nationalism and political solidarity. In a country as regionally specific as Korea, the north really is another country.

The ruling classes of both Koreas have played shameful and grubby roles in manipulating the lives of Zainichi Koreans over these last decades. The DPRK, with the connivance of Japan’s rulers and of the International Red Cross, set up mass emigration programmes for Zainichi that resulted in many semi-forced removals from Japan. Who knows how many of those people were subsequently jailed or killed in the north. It was from Tokyo that agents of the Park dictatorship kidnapped Kim Dae-Jung in 1973, taking him to what came very close to death. Thousands of people in Korea, China and Japan are separated from family members and lovers due to the borders and ambitions of imperialism.

The Korean Peninsula is the site of an ongoing, and massive, human tragedy.

*

I don’t shed any tears for Kim Jong-Il. Another ruler falls in the year of revolts. Like my friends in All Together, my hopes are for a Korea united from below, by mass democratic movements of workers in both countries.

I come close to shedding tears, though, at the coverage his death has received: tears of frustration and anger. The idiocy of the mainstream media and the commentary of the so-called experts and hawkish IR figures, all concerned with Kim’s idiosyncrasies and alleged habits, don’t surprise me. More dispiriting, though, has been the memes spreading through Facebook and Twitter from friends and people who should know better. You’ll know these – Kim looking at things, jokes about Dear Leaders, Kim in Team America singing “I’m so rornery”. (The hilarity! Asians confuse their l and their r!).

Anger or contempt for a dictator I welcome, but this ridicule is dangerous. The racism mobilising it all should be too obvious to deserve mention: we have here another figure of the Asian as buffoon, as a comical figure playing out their foolishness on a European world stage their ambitions are unable to match. That this hinders thought hardly needs argued; that it effaces History, again, is worth pondering. The politics of the peninsula are frequently strange, but they’re strange for a reason, and those reasons are to do with war, invasion, occupation, starvation, and the constant threat of further US intervention. Smug liberal gloating over Kim the clown, Kim the cartoon character, reinforces all the colonialist piety that makes Western readers and thinkers, even the most well meaning, ill equipped to handle the charge and challenge of Korean material.

What images we receive, and what narrativising impulse is brought to bear upon them, matters here too: this Kim Jong-Il isn’t the one we’re trained to view, although the details of clothing here suggest points in common with Japanese life both the DPRK leadership and the Japanese would be at pains to deny.

Kim’s death opens an interesting, and, perhaps, exciting time in Korean history. He was a leader who – on his own terms – was very successful. What comes next will matter for the region, and the world. Chinese and US powers will be closely involved.

Who knows what will happen following Kim’s death. I don’t pretend to have any particular expertise. A cursory reading of US foreign policy intellectuals’ work, though, shows us that strategies have been debated for some years now, and none of them are strategies for peace. The Korean War is a tragedy, not material for the one-liners of the well-adjusted news junky.

*

A more personal note to end with. Paul Gilroy, in his “Multiculture in Times of War” (PDF), argues that the true fruits of anti-racist activity present themselves in a certain metropolitan ‘conviviality’, when racial differences ‘appear ordinary and banal, even boring.’ When different languages and foods and ways of living coexist so often, and so frequently, that they don’t need remarked upon we’ve moved some way, Gilroy suggests, to a better society. Not the racist white myth of assimilation, but not the enforced separation of multiculturalism either. Conviviality suggests the freedom –and political space – to be in one’s own being amongst others, to have the realisation, as Raymond Williams put it many years ago, that ‘culture is ordinary’. If everyone’s parents have ‘accents’, to take the example of primary schools near me, none of them stand out so much, and, equally, all of them are valued.

I’d like to imagine, then, a convivial world where a child growing up with Zainichi heritage can feel comfortable wherever they end up, be that Wellington, Tokyo or Seoul, and where the question of identity, so fraught and important for our struggles now, may seem to them boring, irrelevant, or overworked. The issue of belonging becomes particular acute when others try to deny you that right; left free to explore its implications alone, more complex relations may emerge.

That sort of world can’t be produced from the wilful misunderstanding and caricaturing that leaves so many so comfortable with racist depictions of Kim. It can’t be produced in a region still defined by permanent war, either, as the US mobilises Japanese and Korean nationalisms for reactionary ends of its own. It will take the reconstruction of a particular internationalist culture, one I’ve found, centrally, in the workers’ movement, the unions, and the banner of socialism. It needs, in other words, a conscious internationalism.

So, once more, it’s neither Pyongyang nor Seoul, but international socialism.

A Note

This post draws on others’ stories, and on situations that still present some real political risk. I’ve changed all the names of those involved; the letters I’ve used don’t correspond to real names.

I don’t mean to get into the Stevie Wonder habit here too often, and am sorry if those last paragraphs seem manipulative, or inappropriately personal. I don’t mean them to be, but the conjuncture of events makes it hard not to write about them together.

The young Kim photo is from the Hankyoreh website; I found it via @melnik0v's twitter feed.

Kimchi and Class Struggle

2011-12-09T15:39:00.010+13:00

The best kimchi in Tokyo is to be found very near the Republic of Korea’s embassy. I found this out the difficult way, one particularly humid August afternoon in 2009. Gathered with a group of trade unionists in Hiroo Park, I’d joined a march in solidarity with workers at Ssanyong, who in that year were part of an heroic sit-in struggle, and were facing down severe police and company violence and repression.

Our group was tiny, but it is times like those when solidarity feels like it matters the most. Somewhere along the straggly march I noticed Azabu and was drawn in by the smells and displays. Timing counts in Tokyo shopping; who knows if you’ll be in that particular alley ever again, or, indeed, if the shop you’re visiting has been around since the Edo period or is doomed to an undeserved 5-minute life? I popped in for a few moments and, coming out with two bags of kimchi, rejoined the march.

My situation became more complicated from there. There was the matter of the heat, something no amount of facecloth dabbing or fan-waving could properly manage. The rally itself soon presented peculiarities of its own. We’d arrived a good few blocks away from the Embassy, and well out of sight of its gates, when the police stopped us and penned us in. Long, and detailed, negotiations began and, after much waiting and more sweating, we were allowed, in groups of five, to trek up the hill to the Embassy and, once there, deliver speeches to the lines of police waiting for us. It all seemed, even for Japan’s repressive standards, over the top, and I commented to a friend next to me. Grinning with a baby-boomer’s mixture of pride and embarrassment he explained that, on the first demonstration outside this particular Embassy he’d attended in October 1969, student activists had stormed the building in solidarity with the Koreans struggling under the Park dictatorship, and, in the process, ransacked its central offices. Since then the police had treated all Embassy-based demonstrations with the same aggressive zeal.

So, to no one in particular, and to my surprise, I learnt that day about a particular tradition in the Japanese movement: appeal. Without warning I was asked to “make an appeal”; too tired and confused to try out any Japanese, I made an incoherent hash of a speech in English which was then interpreted, for no one in particular, by a comrade beside me. “A participant from Australia powerfully appealed” (オーストラリアの参加者は「あなたたちの蛮行はインターネットですべて筒抜けだ)」, the official report rather kindly had it; the truth was rather messier and less eloquent. At my feet the bags of kimchi were now giving off a pungent, and distracting, smell.

The cultural alienations have stuck with me since that day and, for me, there is always an olfactory association of kimchi and class struggle.

*

The association’s not mine alone, though; in recent years the “Korean Wave” in Japan, and shifts in domestic labour and social organisation in the ROK, have seen important shifts in kimchi’s status as a semiotic object and political marker. Its place in the social formation indicates other, important, changes in North Asian politics.

Japan imports over 20 000 tons of kimchi from Korea each year, and, from the early 1990s on, most supermarkets in Japan have been stocking kimchi as a standard grocery item. At the same time South Korean consumption has fallen, and is falling still - Yonhap News in 2005 reported per capita consumption of 32.4 kilograms in 2004, compared to 35.1 kgs in 1991 – and kimchi is now rarely produced at home.

Kimchi’s status in Japanese culture follows, with the Hallyu, the Korean Wave, the changing relationship between Korea and Japan at both official and popular levels. For decades kimchi’s smell in a house or on a person was taken a sign of the ‘dirtiness’ of being Korean, one of those racist markers that manages to squeeze in a class-based point at the same time as it stereotypes an ethnic Other. Kimchi was the food of immigrant manual workers, the Korean men of day-hire areas, the odd habit of an alien and subjugated people. Now, of course, it is the food of the Wave, a product to be incorporated in various ways (all that kimchi ramen and those kimchi chips) when it isn’t adding a touch of Hallyu glamour to an otherwise ordinary shopping trolley. There’s much that’s positive about this – the Korean Wave has, whatever its seeming superficiality, led to real advances in anti-racist understanding but - as much as these moves ‘from below,’ shifts in power and confidence from above play out in domestic consumption.

The situation in Korea is more complex still. Kimchi was for so long a staple of Korean dining, its status, as Kyung-Koo Han argues, “was peripheral, not central to a meal…This gave kimchi a somewhat ambivalent place in the meal structure of Korea; as a basic item, something always served, it was not counted as one of the proper side dishes in traditional Korean table d’hote.” Now, though, with the consumption of kimchi in the South,

A deep sense of national anxiety about globalisation undergrids kimchi’s prominence as a national symbol in a country traumatized by war, division, and rapid industrialisation and urbanisation.

Han’s essay on “The ‘Kimchi Wars’ in Globalising East Asia” traces this ‘deep anxiety’ across domestic and international politics. The wars of his title are trade wars between Korea, China, and Japan: as kimchi’s appeal spreads, so to does its production, and many Korean nationalists (to say nothing of kimchi makers) fret that Japanese kimuchi (キムチ) and Chinese producers undermine the integrity and essence of the dish. Behind that concern lies regional competition, Korea’s rise as a geo-political player, imperialism, and capitalist competition. Kimchi’s appearance, in modified form, in Vietnamese cuisine reminds us of an earlier tragedy too. It was ROK soldiers fighting in the American War who had it brought to Vietnamese attention.

In the domestic sphere, kimchi enters into the realm of the “jargon of authenticity.” For centuries its production was one of the many pieces of drudgery women carried out in the home and, with manufactured kimchi production developing through the 1970s, working women abandoned the back pain and stained bathtubs of an earlier era. Now, though, it is the wealthy who make their own and, in a strangely reified piece of labour, use the maintenance of tradition to assert their own authenticity and particular cultural connections.

If mass production saved women many hours’ labour it led to important cultural losses too, though, and that story is another example of kimchi and politics. Korea’s (in)famous regionalism matters, and “the industrialisation and commercialisation of kimchi production” in the south fed into other discourses around the ROK as an ‘imagined community.’

Kyung-Koo Han:

Although the customers for commercially produced kimchi were from all over South Korea, the kimchi factories were located in Seoul and the surrounding Kyonggi area and produced kimchi that imitated Seoul tastes, which were considered the least objectionable and most common. One reason why the flavour of Seoul and Kyonggi-area kimchi has become the commercial standard is not that it was the most popular but that it met the least resistance when served in blind tastings to customers from different regions. Kyongsang people may not love Seoul kimchi, but they can put up with it, something they may find more difficult to do with Cholla kimchi. Cholla people may similarly favour Seoul kimchi over Kyongsang kimchi. Industrialisation thus brought about the birth of ‘Korean’ kimchi.

Han’s research draws out kimchi’s connections as part “of a moral panic over Korean family life, Koreans’ health, the Korean economy, and Korean identity itself.”

*

Here in New Zealand, I’m forced into a compromise position. None of the New Zealand-made kimchi I have tried is at all satisfactory; none of the imported varieties are at all affordable. So at our house we take turn about, one week buying a pack of New Zealand kimchi, the other week treating ourselves to a kilogram Chongga’s Chinese cabbage or radish kimchi.

It’s a trivial, and domestic, detail, but one, I suspect, not all that uncommon in our city now.

We’ve just seen a new parliament elected, including the reactionaries and anti-immigrant forces in New Zealand First. Already calls for assimilation are being repeated. And to what is the immigrant to assimilate into? It doesn’t suit the forces of racism, yet, for the answers to that question to be made obvious. They will in time and, perhaps, passing the Korean supermarket Haere Mai on my way down Dixon Street someday soon, I’ll find myself on a protest with a week’s kimchi all over again.

Sources

Kyunng-Woo Han’s essay is chapter in Laurel Kendall (ed.), Consuming Korean Tradition in Early and Late Modernity (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011).

Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee’s book Eating Korean, as well as containing some fabulous kimchi recipes, has some wonderfully moving, and beautifully written, short pieces on the cultures of food, immigration,and memory. She’s a great author.

The two protest photos I have reproduced from the LaborNet blog.

Crisis in Korea

2011-11-29T16:00:00.008+13:00

When quizzed about what drew them to political activity, friends my age often bring up the sanctions against Iraq as an example of a world event that forced them into action. It was hard, observing that ongoing criminal brutality through my teenage years, and, later, learning of Madeleine Albright’s obscene justification of that cruelty, not to see in these figures a symbol for all that was wrong with US power and privilege. Hundreds of thousands of children dead was an acceptable price for a proponent of ‘humanitarian intervention’ to pay. What did she purchase for this price? The results of that are visible to this day.

The sanctions against North Korea, though, receive far less attention and draw far less outrage; it’d do us well to ponder why, and to consider consequences. Until the early 1990s, when they were still, loosely, part of the world around the Soviet Union, the North Korean economy was in something like a reasonable shape. Isolated following the Soviet collapse, and in the face of a programme of US-drive sanctions, the results for ordinary people in the North have been catastrophic. Almost 18% of North Korean children are malnourished. The regime of sanctions, unsurprisingly, and like elsewhere, serves no purpose other than hurting the weak, the poor, and the vulnerable – in a grisly irony, though, this piece of US war by other means is in turn used now to justify further US threats and interventions, all bolstered by claims that the North is a ‘failed state’ unable or unwilling to feed its own people. Having denied the possibilities for trade and food that might lift living standards in the North, the US now uses the misery it has created as a spur to further aggression and threats.

The political class in the West, in other words, whilst happy to circulate decontextualised and well-nigh racist accounts of North Korea as a ‘bizarre’, ‘secretive’ rouge state, plays an active role in the region’s subjugation. The Koreas are still at war, and the tragic history of colonialism, imperialism and occupation on the Korean peninsula plays and active, and determining, role in shaping its deformations and sorrows. And yet one could read great stacks of works about the peninsula, putatively scholarly as much as journalistic, and never learn anything of this historical and geopolitical context.

Tim Beal’s important new book, then, Crisis in Korea: America, China, and the Risk of War, is especially welcome. This book is insightful, careful, and considered – rare enough qualities in commentary on Korean affairs – and I have learnt a good deal from reading it. For some decades now Beal and a small group of co-thinkers have been compiling reports, documents and analysis trying to give a sober view of the dynamics of the Korean Peninsula, and this latest book is an intervention into a situation Beal sees, convincingly in my view, as extremely dangerous. That this work is carried out from the obscurity of New Zealand is nicely appropriate, New Zealand having played, after all, a grubby and bloody role both in the Korean War and in the oppression and sometimes forced removal of Koreans from Japan after World War Two.

Crisis in Korea describes the North as an “autocratic Confucian state”, one that survives because it is “an expression of Korean nationalism”. Opposing wilder stories of Kim Jong-Il as an unpredictable evil genius, Beal shows that the North’s ruling class are trying to do what ruling classes around the world try to do; survive, trade, and stay secure. The North – with tens of thousands of US troops at its borders, and facing the hostility of the world’s largest nuclear-armed state – can have nothing beyond defensive ambitions. Beal documents how, when faced with compromise from Washington, Pyongyang has in turn compromised; when faced with aggression, however, they have responded in turn.

Two factors complicate this situation now, though, and in worrying ways. One is the rise of China. Beal writes that “in the long term, especially with the reconnection of rail and road links, ROK-China economic interaction will be to the benefit of the DPRK” (2005, 73), and it is obvious how direct land links between Seoul, China and the European continent would suit capitalists in all three areas. It’s precisely this prospect, though, that encourages hawks in Washington. If there is to be a confrontation between a declining US hegemon and a rising Chinese one, the Korean peninsula is the obvious place for this confrontation to take place. That’s an obvious tragedy for the Koreans, north and south.

Another complicating factor Beal ponders is how Korea fits in the Obama administration’s plans. George Bush had a coherent, if terrifying, Korea policy – he and John Bolton talked up the prospects of war, included the DPRK in the “Axis of Evil”, and generally pursued the grand strategy of the American Empire via provocations and swagger. This was a disaster for the peninsula, undoing many of the gains worked up slowly through the years of the ‘sunshine policy’, but it did have a kind of narrative coherence and clarity. Bush chose Korea as one of the places a neoconservative US imperialism could gain the edge over its Chinese rival.

The Obama years, in contrast, Beal argues, have been characterised by “strategic paralysis.” Distracted by domestic opposition, and bogged down in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, Obama and Clinton have, on Beal’s reading, offered little in the way of Korean policy. In this gap Lee Myung-Bak has pushed an aggressive, and confrontational, line, for his own political ends and geopolitical ambitions. South Korea, like Japan, may have started out as a client state of US imperialism – Beal shows how its economic growth spurs some in its ruling circles to imagine moves that may benefit them without the US overlords being as keen.

Central to these recent years, and to this tension between a distracted White House and an ambitious Blue House, was the sinking of the Cheonan. This has been widely reported as an open-and-shut case of DPRK aggression, motivated by the succession issue. Beal unpacks the detail of the sinking, and its aftermath, and shows how unlikely this explanation in fact is: the DPRK has scarce motive for carrying out the attack (it has cost the North millions, Beal reports, in lost revenue as a result of sanctions following the sinking), and the circumstances of the sinking are unclear and confused. Some of Beal’s reviewers have painted him a conspiracy theorist, but this is unfair: Crisis in Korea doesn’t posit a villain for the Cheonan incident. What it does, rather, is show how suspicious – and swift – the apportioning of blame was, and whose interests it served.

Besides, why, if they wanted to use the incident to bolster Kim Jong-un’s credentials and threaten its neighbours, would the North then deny they were responsible?

This book – like his North Korea: the Struggle Against American Power – makes for difficult reading. In part this is due to the subject matter, which is complicated in upsetting ways and full of examples of useless suffering and the needless waste of empire. Beal’s a pedestrian stylist at best, too; what makes the book so difficult, though, is also what makes it important. He has set himself the task of generating a kind of anti-narrative, unpacking the assumed wisdom and detail of the mainstream reports of the DPRK, insisting on the complexity and context underneath all the fervid speculation about Kim Jong-Il’s consumption tastes or fairy tales about a rogue state set on world war. Where other books might be breezier and easier to follow, Beal’s work insists on stray details, difficult or unsatisfactory explanations, and complex motives. If, at times, this feels like reading a book of marginal glosses and commentaries, that may be no bad thing: if the conventional account has this many inconsistencies and problems, what does this tell us about the standard of mainstream reporting?

Those fairy tales have consequences: 52% of Americans surveyed in 2009 felt that North Korea posed a “very serious threat” to America’s security. The very great virtue of Beal’s book is that, if read carefully, it demolishes each and every assertion on which that fear and concern has been generated.

The agonies of the Korean Peninsula, in almost Beckettian ironies, reflect the absurdity and grisly strangeness of the global order. Were the stated goal of the US military presence in the South to be realised – a peacefully united Korean peninsula – this would generate a crisis for the US itself, undermining the justification for its mass of bases in the region and bolstering its rival China. The north’s most vociferous opponent – George Bush Jnr – who made so much of his enemy’s dynastic succession, himself is part of a political dynasty. The South was long ruled by Generals eager to take up civilian titles as Presidents; the North has a leader and leader-in-waiting who both have military titles but no experience as leaders of armies. The US possesses weapons of mass destruction, and has used them, and produced a concoction of lies to justify invading Iraq, but the North’s weapons, and the strange bombast of its public statements, are used as reasons for US aggression.

These ironies fit a more sinister pattern, for, as Beal argues “those who want an authoritarian society in the South also want one in the North to justify it and they also want a continued state of tension” (2005: 165).

This book is an essential resource for those who want to understand, and argue against, that state of affairs. It’s in imagining the alternatives to the present, though, that I’m in least agreement with Beal. He taught for many years in a business school, and this current work – deeply informed, useful, and scholarly – reflects that background in good ways as well as bad. At one point he remarks that “only the left uses the term ‘imperialism’, and since the left does not remotely influence US foreign policy there is little point spending much time on it here.” (2011, 59). He goes on to remark that imperialism is “ultimately the most important construct for analysing America’s interaction with the world”, but the tension is evident.

Most of Crisis in Korea documents the history and geopolitics of the peninsula as seen from above, from the corridors of power. But what of the self-activity of ordinary Koreans, of the workers’ movement and so on? The great developments of recent Korean history – democratisation, the end of the rule of the generals, the rise in social movements that could sustain the Sunshine Policy – all came about through mass mobilisations, and through political formations determined to, as the saying went, be realistic and demand the impossible. Those dynamics will be, hopefully, as significant in any resolution of the Korean War as the machinations from above.

In Beal’s conclusion from his last book, though, a conclusion this latest book only reinforces, I’m in full agreement:

We can hope that peace, and prosperity, will prevail, but we cannot be confident. All we can be sure of is that the decision will be made in Washington. Not without outside constraints and influences, to be sure, but ultimately the power for Korean peace or war, for continued privation or for economic growth and transformation, lies with the United States. And that is where the responsibility rests as well.

Sources

You can buy both Crisis in Korea (2011) and North Korea: the Struggle against US Power (2005) here. A radical publisher like Pluto faces all sorts of business constraints and challenges, and we need more heterodox and dissident voices on Korea being heard, so, if you can’t afford to buy this book, I would try and get it into your local library. Beal’s an important critic, and I’m glad his work is available.

Drifting into a certain vein of thought

2011-11-18T12:03:00.009+13:00

I’ve always been hostile to what Seamus Heaney, following Wilde and “The Decay of Lying”, calls “the Japanese effect, the evocation of that precise instant of perception” that stands in as the legacy of Imagism in so much contemporary poetry, for which we “are ready to grant such evocation of the instant a self-sufficiency of its own.”

This is what accounts for the ghastliness of so many poetry readings, where you’re expected to keep your features frozen in pretence of rapture as someone offers loving details of their refurbished kitchen, recent meals or other suitably ‘sensitive’ and alive experience. Direct confrontations with Japanese material compounds the situation, and, as I’ve argued elsewhere, poetic responses to Japan have sustained older rhetoric as much as they’ve offered new ways of seeing.

Field of Autumn Leaves

Haiku, responsible for so much of this mess, have irritated me as much for their effects elsewhere as they have for any individualised failing. Besides, don’t those rules – the seasonal word and so on – seem somehow to exclude so much that’s important, and exciting, and true? Why settle for sakura when you’ve got Akihabara?

Frederick Seidel, whose poetry I still remember discovering in the LRB one sweaty morning, crushed in the rush hour of the Tokyu line, captures my desire for Tokyo:

Tokyo is low
And manic as a hive.
For the middle of the night they have silent jackhammers.
Elizabethan London with the sound off. Racially pure with no poor.

Mishima himself designed the stark far-out uniform
His private army wore, madly haute couture. He stabbed the blade in wrong
And was still alive while his aide tried in vain
To cut his head off as required.

Moshi-moshi I can’t hear you. I’m going blind.
Don’t let me abandon you, you’re all I have.
Hello, hello. My Tokyo, hello.
Hang up and I’ll call you back.

What Seidel’s creepy energy points to is the exhaustion and slackness in so many English-language haiku, the ponderous and deadly self-importance that blights even innocuous and inoffensive observation. Where, amidst all these heavy-handed nature poems, is the English equivalent of the senryu (川柳) the short poem with wit or humour?

The pathos of things

Roland Barthes’ lectures on the haiku felt, at first, like they were going to help sustain my antipathy:

Second problem: “poetic” translations of haiku. Some translators have sought to translate the 5-7-5 syllables into (unrhymed) French verse (cf. Etiemble). But to do so makes no sense. Our ability to detect a meter, a beat, a syllabic rhythm is dependent on having already had the metrical formula whispered to us by our poetic culture, on the code functioning like a route, a path, imprinted onto, incised onto our brains that’s then retraced, recognised in the performance of the poem; there is no rhythm as such; all rhythm is cultural; otherwise, the formula falls flat (it isn’t a formula): it doesn’t work, it exerts no fascination, it fails to send us to sleep. What I mean is: the function of all rhythm is either to excite or to calm the body, which, on a certain level, at some, distant, profound, primitive point in the body, amounts to the same thing (25)

The poetic is the enemy of poetry here, as in so many other instances, but Barthes’ case for the haiku has led me back to the form. More than the “Japanese effect” being a case of imagism assimilating to some sort of impressionism, Barthes demands that the haiku be read as “the conjunction of a “truth” (not a conceptual truth, but of the Instant) and a form.” The combination of image and observation, for Barthes, should startle, not settle, a reader: “a good definition of the haiku: it doesn’t stabilize movement; it divides Nature up rather than abstracts it.” (51) To work in languages other than Japanese, this approach demands more than a sing-song stillness.

Dorothy Molloy has composed a haiku that, I suspect, Barthes would have taken great pleasure in reading:

Sunlight in a gutter,
butterbright, apricot, peach,
October, leaf-theif.

Paul Muldooon’s sixty-first “Hopewell Haiku” managed a similar sort of fun and inventiveness:

Bivouac. Billet.
The moon a waning of lard
on a hot skillet.

These two poems are among many delights in Our Shared Japan: an Anthology of Contemporary Irish Poetry put together by Irene De Angelis and Joseph Woods. Irish-Japanese literary engagement has been intense and sustained since the late nineteenth century, and the works in this collection show how much energy and inventiveness contemporary writers – in both English and Irish – are able to take from Japanese literary and social material. Ireland hasn’t the complicated history of racism and violence marking its connections to Japan that still burden imaginative relations in the white settler colonies of New Zealand and Australia so, in some ways, the poets’ tasks are simpler. They go, look, and listen. There is, though, a sophisticated awareness of what to avoid apparent in a number of the poems collected here (Ciaran Carson: “Investing in the Zen is inadvisable”), and a good sense of exploration.

The pleasure of an anthology, too, is that, after a while, it doesn’t matter so much which poet you’re reading; the poems themselves do more of that work of recognition. Barthes linked this sense to the productiveness of the haiku form itself:

in haiku, ownership trembles: the haiku is the subject, a quintessence of subjectivity, but that’s not the same thing as the ‘author.’ Haiku belong to everyone in the sense that it can seem as if everyone’s writing them – in that it’s plausible that everyone could be writing them. That is what convinces me that the haiku is of the order of Desire, in that it circulates: in that ownership – the auctoritas – is passed on, circulates, takes turns, as in Pass-the-Parcel. (33)

In keeping with his own training and outlook, Barthes recognised in the haiku the potential for something like alienation effects, poetic shifts in register that force a new way of seeing from the reader:

Classical schema: perception via one of the senses conveys a generic sensation: a sound conveys music, etc. Now, haiku can reroute these circuits, make “faulty” connections: a sound will convey a tactile sensation (heat, cold); a kind of heterogeneous, “heretic” metonymy.

Here’s Paula Sheehan:

My head in the clouds
in the bowl of Akiko’s
mother’s white miso.

At its best, though, an alienation effect will do more than alter seeing; it will also demand new thinking. Barthes: “Between haiku and narrative, a possible intermediary form: the scene, the little scene. Cf. Brecht, street scenes and the gestus.” (88) The “Japanese effect”, deployed this way, is of use not in its access to prettified description, but in the way it offers short-cuts to representations of History. Tony Curtis manages this in his “Northern Haiku”:

On an Antrim bog
a wall divides the wet land,
planted in the past.

Shot twice in the head.
Once in each astonished eye.
History is blind

Over the dark Foyle
the bark of Kalashnikovs,
an old Derry air.

Sources

All quotes I’ve taken from Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, trans Kate Briggs (NY: Columbia UP, 2011). This is an English translation of notes from his Lecture Courses and Seminars at the College de France 1978 – 79 and 1979-80.

Seamus Heaney’s phrase, and all the poems quoted here, are from Irene De Angelis and Joseph Woods (eds.), Our Shared Japan (Dublin: The Dedalus Press, 2007). You can buy Our Shared Japan here. Wilde’s account of “the Japanese effect” is much cleverer, and funnier, than the use I’ve put it to here: you can read “The Decay of Lying” online.

The editors maintain an extremely useful website documenting Japan in English-language verse: Emerging from Absence.

Fredrick Seidel’s “My Tokyo” I’ve quoted from his Poems 1959 – 2009 (New York: FSG, 2009), p. 350.

Occupied City

2011-11-01T14:45:00.012+13:00

The violence dealt out to the Occupy movement – from Oakland to Melbourne – indicates the worry it’s causing our rulers, and the productiveness of its disruptions in ordinary civic life. The Occupy assemblies have been a place for frustrations to be aired, and for strategy to get debated: the refrain that the movement “lacks demands” misses the point that it’s precisely the paucity of established political demands on offer that calls for protest. Links with labour movements are being made – most excitingly in the United States – and old political questions and traditions re-examined. All this is exciting, and enormously welcome.

Amongst the excuses for bringing in the cops to hurt and harass, the argument that public spaces aren’t to be occupied is common, fanciful, and insulting. Ignore the question of democratic space for a moment (so many of these Occupations are happening on land that was public but has, in recent decades, had its status changed in favour of business interests) as there’s useful writing on that elsewhere. What’s different about the Occupy events – and thus unacceptable to power – is the class formations of those occupying, and their confidence and self-activity. Because city centres are always, in the normal run of things, occupied, it’s just that they’re occupied by those at the margins, those the police feel confident beating up and bullying at a whim. Its the collectivity and connections of the Occupy movement that unsettles - were any of hte individuals involved to be left, on their own and in difficult circumstances, on the streets, then there'd be less outrage from on high. Visible resistance offends.

The homeless are – liberal protestations of horror to the contrary – an acceptable part of any modern city, swept away only for major events. The Occupy movement’s visibility contests precisely these sorts of decisions over urban space – and the class rule and class democracy behind them – and so forms a political demand all of its own.

**

Raymond Williams, in a celebrated passage on Jane Austen in The Country and the City, writes of the Austenian world of country houses that

Neighbours in Jane Austen are not the people actually living nearby; they are the people living a little less nearby who, in social recognition, can be visited. What she sees across the land is a network of propertied houses and families, and through the holes of the tightly drawn mesh most actual people are simply not seen. To be face-to-face in this world is already to belong to a class. No other community, in physical presence or in social reality, is by any means knowable.

Ideology works upon us, often against our self-presentations. My first time in Yoyogi Park, walking alone in late afternoon of the autumn of 2007, I spent several minutes feeling the strangeness of being in a deserted area in the middle of a city as large as Tokyo. It took a shocked change in perspective to realise that there was movement all around me; at the edges of my vision were tarpaulin sheets and bundles of sticks, signs time in Japan would teach me to associate with homelessness.

Later in the same day at Ueno Park I thought I saw a political demonstration, only to realise closer up that it was a crowd of homeless people queuing for a meal. Ueno is a difficult area to visit without some unsettled sense of complicity, and Walter Benjamin’s thesis on the philosophy of history that “there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” never feels overused . The path to the Tokyo National Museum and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum runs straight through the main site of homeless occupation. The National Museum – site of so much Meiji-era imperial ambition – is full of documents of civilisation. The place of barbarism in official discourse isn’t so clear.

(The park as an ideological fantasy. From the Tokyo Metropolitan website)

Family registers, family values

The homeless, most works from the archive are at pains to convince us, symbolise personal collapse, disastrous life choices, irresponsibility and the damage of alcohol and drugs. The familiar narratives are all to do with personal, individual choices and chances. Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers presents his characters are transformed through the chance of something like nuclear family life.

Akihiko Nishizawa’s research into the changing face of homeless in Tokyo in the modern era suggests a more complex situation. The Meiji government’s family registration system – the koseki, still more-or-less current today – provided, Nishizawa argues, “a standard for exclusion.” Urban populations without the identity the koseki demanded could be, in this new system, driven from both state responsibility and state recognition. The ‘ideal’ citizen – in a nuclear family unit, tied to a stable address and work pattern – was thus not just an ideological construct but also a product of a particular system: “the state welfare system…maintained standards that assumed all citizens would exist within families and therefore excluded non-ideal citizens who didn’t.” Wanderers, foreigners, people who don’t fit the heterosexist demands of family life all become vagrants in this set-up. It’s one that, as any Zainichi with koseki problems could tell you, causes problems in people’s lives through to today.

Homelessness, then, Nishizawa argues, “is the result of the social and systematic exclusion of fluid and non-family peoples” (200). It is a result of Japanese government policy and strategy.

This strategy had a racial, and racialising, component. Journalist Gennosuke Yokoyama’s “The underclass of Japan” (1899) called unregistered children “no nationality”, while in the 1930s, a high proportion of working-class Korean immigrants to Japan found themselves amongst the ranks of the homeless.

An urban underclass?

The misery and difficulty of homelessness are obvious, if difficult fully imaginatively to comprehend, but, sometimes, a stress on the suffering and weakness of the homeless can distort our view. The oppression is real, and painful; it provokes a complex response, and is part of a complicated class relation.

Because Japan’s slum-dwellers and homeless can and do resist, and have done so many times. In Osaka’s Kamagasaki slum, over 2000 residents rioted for many nights after one of their community was left dying without ambulance attention following a road accident. In 1990 and again in 2008 there were major riots, the uprising in 1990 lasting some six days. The poor and marginalised in Japan, as elsewhere, actively resist their marginalisation.

Understanding the class position of the homeless is essential, too, and often confused by phrases like “underclass” or lumpenproletariat. Japan’s homeless – especially in a centre like Kamagasaki, with thousands of residents - are part of its working class. Nishizawa cites research from the 2000s showing that 50 to 80 percent of Tokyo homeless were day labourers and construction workers. The ‘net cafe refugees’ of recent times represent a new, and youthful, form of homelessness; they too are connected to the working class through their casual employment, involvement in contract work and service industries.

Japan’s ‘outside’ homeless tend to be male, middle-aged and associated with construction and day labouring. Their vulnerabilities are clear, and often commented upon: intimidation and the chance of abduction and slave labour with the yakuza, health problems from the cold sleeping in parks, police harassment. The homeless of the ‘net cafe refugee’ generation are younger, white collar, and, often, refuse the label of homeless and its potential solidarities (Nishizawa discusses the label nakama, or comrades, that homeless men use for one another).

Both groups, though, whatever fragmentation and alienation in their current situation, are connected, through labour, to the wider Japanese working class. The state that refuses to recognise them as full citizens needs to rely, in other contexts, on their efforts as workers. The challenges they face, then, can be connected to challenges facing the Japanese labour movement more broadly: the shift to casualised labour, the need to organise those without traditions of organisation, the importance of developing politics of independence instead of collaboration.

The title of Kenji Hashimoto’s 2007 book gives us a good sense of direction: New Class Society, New Class Struggle. Hashimoto is alive to changes within Japanese capitalism, and his analysis is fresh and unafraid of revising old assumptions. But his perspective is clear; those on the margins, whether they’re in parks or netcafes, need brought in to the centre, and it’ll be via struggle that this is achieved. Other countries’ construction industries have proud fighting heritages – there’s no reason for one not to re-emerge in Japan.

That project demands politics, and intellectual and social ambition. Some of the energy, and audacity, required, is visible in the Occupy movements the world over. They’ve made the invisible visible and, in doing so, pose a challenge to the smoothly ‘post-political’ neo-liberal order.

Sources

Akihiko Nishizawa’s excellent chapter is in Richard Ronald and Allison Alexy, Home and Family in Japan: Continuity and Transformation (London: Routledge, 2011).

Hashimoto’s newer book isn’t available in English yet, but Transpacific Press brought out his Class Structure in Contemporary Japan.

Shannon Higgins has a photo portrait of Kamagasaki here.

Cruel, Usual

2011-09-29T16:38:00.007+13:00

i.m. Troy Davis: mourn, and organise

Yoshimura Akira’s bestseller On Parole ends as its story begins, with grisly and intense violence, a ‘crime of passion’ and, eventually, death. The literary and the populist meet in this finale: the figure of the frenzied killer – draw here from Maurice Gee’s Loving Ways or David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet or Yoshimura’s own Kikutani Shiro, amidst countless other examples – is familiar to us from both ‘liberal’ literary production and right-wing law-and-order, ‘sensible sentencing’ shrillness. It’s an easy way of thinking about crime, and criminals, and manages to be at once frightening and comforting, both in ways helpful for class rule. Imagining criminal behaviour as, in the main, wild and unfathomable is terrifying for the obvious reasons (I have those worries walking home too); the comfort, for a section of middle-class society, is in the way the figure functions as a screen, allowing the projection of certain racial- and class-based fears while at the same time relieving ‘us’ of responsibility for reflecting on what might lead other people to commit awful acts. Tough on Crime never ended up, in the NewLabour cliché, Tough on the Causes of Crime.

Japan is no worse than many other ‘developed’ country in this respect, although it’s hardly better either, and its reputation abroad for social cohesion obscures some deep injustices and cruel – but all too usual – punishments worked into its social order. The current Minister of Justice may have called for a ‘debate’ on the status of the death penalty, and Keiko Chiba, minister a few administrations ago, was an abolitionist of sorts, but the death penalty still stands, and its popularity, and practice, disfigure Japanese society.

David McNeill, in the English-language press, has worked over some years now to document the criminality of Japan’s criminal justice system. (Critical examination of the death penalty in the Japanese media, including ‘liberal’ papers like the Asahi, is extremely rare.) The period after sentencing is, for prisoners, a form of torture itself: many never know when their execution is scheduled and have limited, or no, access to journalists, lawyers, and campaigners in the world outside. Years can be spent in a state of perpetual uncertainty and isolation.

Public support for capital punishment is, by all accounts, high, and seems, in many cases, to be linked to a sense that justice is served by executions: criminals have confessed to their crimes, and must be held responsible. Whatever the wider questions over how executions serve ‘justice’, though, the role of confessions themselves need examined. Between 1991 and 2000 over 99% of defendants in Japanese courts were convicted, many as a result of confessions they’d given to police.

An aside here: one disturbing aspect of Death Note’s popularity has been the support, anecdotally, I’ve noticed from readers for Light’s actions. The ethical ‘dilemma’ of the series revolves almost entirely around Light’s decision, not around his knowledge: the idea that those who commit (or might be about to commit) crimes can so easily be classed into ‘villains’ and ‘others’ never seems to have excited much in the way of objection or comment.

But ‘confessions’ reveal as much about police corruption and the lack of democratic rights for Japanese citizens as they do about any individual’s guilt. Consider the case of Sugiya Toshikazu, convicted for murder in the early 1990s. In an extraordinary development, DNA evidence helped him have his conviction overturned few years ago; each detail of the case until then had been all too ordinary. Police held him for 13 hour interrogations, kicking at his shins, and shouting at him; a confession secured in these conditions carries great weight in a Japanese court. It’s impossible to know whether, had Sugiya received a death sentence, the new evidence would have been produced in time to save his life. In a recent corruption case police admitted forcing suspects they were interrogating to trample on names of their relatives – a way of ‘breaking’ suspects that can be traced back to anti-Christian torture from the Tokugawa period – and, although in this instance their actions were criticised, the practice seems widespread. Incompetent defence lawyers, an uninterested media, severely curtailed democratic rights: all this leads to a set-up where the kinds of protections social movements and workers’ struggles have won in other judiciaries are largely missing from Japanese legal reality. The sociology of the courts matters too: Japanese judges have very rarely served as lawyers, being appointed to the bench straight from law school, and both prosecutors and judges are drawn from, and sustain, a very narrow social world of class comfort and class rule.

There is an abolitionist movement in Japan, and its smallness and current marginality haven’t demoralised its activists: one Osaka group call themselves the “Snail Society” in recognition of their massive task, and slow progress, in the face of an entrenched, if unjustifiable, criminal practice. There are occasional protests and events, a few Buddhist ministers in recent years have allowed their own consciences to get the better of them.

Our side is yet to find its ‘bestseller’ moment, though, and the fears both produced and managed by a work like On Parole indicate the terrain the abolitionist battle is being fought around. The courage and perseverance of the Japanese abolitionists seems, then, all the more inspiring and essential.

Sources

There is plenty of useful information at the Japan and the Death Penalty Research Centre, and at Amnesty International. The Monsoon blog (in Japanese), associated with the Kakehashi newspaper, has some useful links.

Mark D West’s Lovesick Japan (Cornell 2011) is a fascinating study of Japanese judges and their social attitudes and formation.

原発いらない！

2011-09-20T23:56:00.009+12:00

Vicarious pleasures are still pleasurable. For hours last night I sat following twitter feeds coming out of Tokyo’s massive anti-nuclear demonstration, and getting the thrilled sense that this marked not just a new phase in this campaign, but an opening in changes in Japanese politics more broadly. It’s been a long time since a demonstration this large in Japan and, crucially, longer since one with this kind of spirit and resilience. Like the ANPO struggle of a generation ago, we may be witnessing the development of a campaign that goes on to question the wider priorities and problems of the social order.

The scale of the mobilization is worth marveling at: 60 000 people rallied - there are good reports from the Japan Times, and the Communist Party’s Red Flag newspaper, as well as from the Asahi - and contingents represented much of the country. Chie Matsumoto from LaborNet Japan reported big union groupings, representatives from Okinawa, international delegations, and youth groups.

There’ll be further reports and analysis in the following days no doubt, and the eye-witness accounts will be more useful than my summary from here. For now, though, two initial remarks.

For starters, the feeling matters: this looks like a social movement in the ascendant. I’ve written earlier about the ‘politicisation from below’ of the aftermath to the disaster. Add to this the conscious joyousness of the protestors yesterday and other times these last months; the presence of children on these demonstrations, the more ragged and sporadic chants, the colour and variety of banners and slogans. These might seem like trivial details but, against the sometimes stifling habits of traditional Japanese protest - which contain within themselves reminders of decades of defeat and setback, to say nothing of the disasters of the 1970s - this new look promises new energy and initiative.

(Part of that new energy was summarized for me in a beautiful tweet of Matsumoto-san’s when she mentioned that some demonstrators were chanting わっしょい! わっしょい! This is a phrase from the world of festivals and rowdy crowds; it signals the distance from tradition - and the exhuberance - of this new movement, and I like to think of it as the presence in this protest of the Anthems from Nowhere).

A new movement, crucially, means new activists: much less well publicized have been smaller demonstrations - some violently attacked by the police - in the week leading up to this monster rally. It’s commonplace to bemoan the apolitical, disenchanted, atomized sub-cultures of Japanese youth; the daring and drive for the anti-nuclear movement are coming from precisely those areas an older leftism has disdained or marginalized.

This sociology - or wider politics - of the movement is my second, and more provisional, point. David H Slater has edited a fascinating special issue of Cultural Anthropology. “New alliances are being built” he argues, and fear and anger, and possibility and hope, are the themes his contributors explore. Yoshitaka Mōri insists that official slogans of Japan’s unity in fact reveal social fractures - of class, of region, of access to resources - and, most importantly for yesterday’s demonstrations, Love Kindstrand links some of the developments in the movement to both new political formations, and to changes in Japanese capitalism:

Phrased in the precariat movement's insistence on exploitation, this critique is being carefully reconstituted as we speak, rekindling a bond between political engagement and everyday life, and instilling a sense of political agency in Japan's neglected youth that will be not easily dismissed.

This account feels convincing, and the aesthetics and flaboyance of the anti-nuclear movement - its music, its youth, to say nothing of some of its key activists - link to the ‘precariat’ unions and ‘New New Left’ that has emerged in the last decade.

David H Slater comments:

For those familiar with an older generation of protests, the differences are rather striking. First, the protests themselves employ a visual and auditory rhetoric, drawn from the European "precarity" movement--spontaneous, chaotic, playful, ironic, cultural and creative but also direct, uncompromising, and often in more vulgar language. Obviously, these events are more fun to be at than those deadly serious labor events many us attended in what seem like another Japan, the "robot marches" (in the words of one of my old lefty teachers) where we all were shouting "hantai" in unison and half-heartedly pumping our fist on command […] And just as the labor marches of earlier periods were a reflection of the institutionalized organization of labor then, so do these events reflect today's labor: flexible/fragmented, opportunistic, situational; young, diffuse and short-term.

New questions from a new movement will, as always, provoke reflection on some old question and old answers too. In their - understandable - response to their neglect by the established labour movement, how will these new, youthful formations reflect upon the questions of alliances with other union groupings? How will the question of politics come up in this movement? How, given the obvious bankruptcy of both the DPJ and LDP, and the complicity and corruption of TEPCO and the political class, will this movement talk about state power, capitalism, economics and ecology? What links are there between Japan’s long economic stagnation, its place in the US empire, and the worries of the anti-nuclear movement?

The exhilarating feeling now is that these are questions that can usefully be posed, and that a new generation will be able to answer. I’ve got friends who’ve been working tirelessly to build these rallies, and others who made it along as one of the first political acts they’ve ever done.

This is the mass movement Japan so desperately needs and, whatever the inevitable crises and assaults on it ahead, it’s a beautiful sight.

国際連帯の力でこの地上から原発をなくすぞー！

Sources

There are some good photographs in the Mainichi Shinbun’s site here. Read the other Cultural Anthropology pieces here. Thanks to David H Slater for some very useful links. LaborNet have some great photos up on their site too. There's a brief video clip on NHK - as astonishing for its presence as for any great coverage it offers - and you can see that here.

En route, as in a dream

2011-09-13T16:07:00.007+12:00

When was August? I had all sorts of plans and ambitions for writing here but got distracted by two other commitments - talking on Carl Shuker's Three Novellas for a Novel to my friends in the NZ Studies Society of Japan, and on Mulgan, Man Alone, and Marxism to the Stout Centre - and then, all of a sudden, the month was gone. I've hopes that those two talks will appear somewhere before too long and, by the end of this month, some of my half-formed blog post ideas might get written.

In the meantime, as something of a place-holder, I want to give you this nice anecdote from Rossana Rossanda's absorbing and elegant memoir The Comrade From Milan. Rossanda's contribution to life and letters on the Italian left is too vast to summarise easily: she's a gifted journalist, polemicist and theorist of culture, and was, for many years, a leading PCI militant and campaigner. Expelled from the party over her opposition to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, her memoir offers all sorts of a details from another world. It's extremely caustic in parts, and suitably lyrical when required.

There are moments of evasion, to be sure, for which the name Togliatti (and, behind him, the question of Stalinism) will do for now to point towards.

For the moment - and to encourage you to read the book - here's a memory of Adorno. The advice, if you're shy like me and have philosophers you're keen to learn from, is to sort out the shrubbery:

On that occasion, we invaded Stresa and I met Adorno, whose Minima Moralia has fascinated me – it was Marxism as something that was obvious, Marxism as something inevitable, Marxism without a Communist Party, 1930s Europe – except for Italy and Germany. And I found him charming, with his big nut-brown eyes like a child’s, lively as an elf, curious about everything and willing to talk, not to mention drawn like a magnet to young girls with aristocratic names, whom he repeatedly begged to take a walk with him by the lake. In Stresa, an extremely good-looking young man came up to me and said unpleasantly, ‘Your piece on Charles de Gaulle’ – I had just written about him in Rinascita – ‘is all wrong. What is Adorno talking to you about?’ It was Lucio Magri, with whom I would travel a long way. He was right about de Gaulle. ‘Come and have lunch with him tomorrow,’ I suggested. No chance. He was very shy, like a lot of stubborn people, and however suprising it might seem, he still is. We ended up agreeing that I would steer Adorno to a table near the oleander hedge and Lucio would hide in the bushes and listen. Adorno followed me docilely but on that occasion I was unable to distract him from talking about Bartok, on whom he was writing at the time. It was impossible. Magri rustled nervously a couple of times amongst the shrubs and then left. At that time I knew nothing about Walter Benjamin and I’m still kicking myself for failing to ask the genial, courteous Adorno about him – I still carry the correspondence between the happy Teddy Wiesengrund and the unhappy Walter Benjamin around with me.

Rossana Rossanda, The Comrade from Milan, trans. Romy Clark Giuliani (London: Verso, 2010), p. 180.

Manual of Fear

2011-08-02T21:48:00.012+12:00

Coverage of Norway’s terrorist atrocity has been an instructive reminder in how ideology circulates, and works. First the blether of uninformed experts analysing how the attacks fit the patterns of Al Qaeda and serve as a reminder of the need for and justification of the War on Terror. Then, once that particular line becomes unsustainable, a concerted depoliticising of the tragedy, figures of the “lone gunman” and “madman” replacing talk of terrorism, fascism and far-right fantasies. Worse again than this de-politicising has been the covert and not so covert victim-blaming and dog-whistling indulged in by media forces who, having spent much of the last few decades obscuring the fact that, in Gary Younge’s words, “The biggest threat to European democracy is not Islamic terrorism or multiculturalism” but fascism, work accounts of the bombing and shooting into a sickly familiar narrative. The BBC was particularly despicable, interviewing an English Defence League leader for his “insights”; the Jerusalem Post took the opportunity to editorialise about the “failures” of multiculturalism. John Key, meanwhile, always mindful of chances to parade his particular, well-nigh Bakhtinian parodic deconstruction of Prime Ministerial discourse, solved the problem by crushing both lines together, taking the opportunity to remind us that this was why New Zealand troops are in Afghanistan.

Taking the mass murder of political activists by a fascist as an opportunity to attack multiculturalism is grotesque and yet unsurprising. The history of anti-semitism is full of examples of accounts that, claiming to respond to bigotry, project it onto characters in the Jews instead of their persecutors, a pattern repeated in each new racism and prejudice.

A Coward Who Does Not Want to Admit His Cowardice To Himself

In the Tokyo summer of 2008 I had a brief, and hateful, job teaching business English to public servants out of a language school in Ginza. One evening, in the middle of an example from an article on the then-unfolding Great Financial Crisis, a student remarked casually that the problem was bound to favour the US over China in the end because, of course, with the Jews running everything they’d make sure it turned out that way. Unsure I’d understood him correctly, and in how far I could push the situation, I challenged him, but the conversation didn’t get far. It wasn’t racism, my student insisted, because he admired the Jews for what they’d achieved: as any patriotic Japanese could tell you, world domination wasn’t easy. The best thing you could say about Taro Aso, my student went on, was that he was what you’d call a real Jew. (Shades of Grammy Hall!)

I should have pushed harder, and been more assertive, and I still feel slightly grubby remembering that evening and the ease with which I backed away from a necessary confrontation with open, and zealous, bigotry. My excuses – the job, my situation, our mutual language barriers – sustained me for a while, if in an unsatisfying way, and, behind them, there was a more basic shock: how could the language of anti-semitism, the most European of prejudices, express itself in Japan?

Manual of Fear

In the autumn of the next year I took my mother and sister on holiday to Nikko, a serene, quiet, unusual part of Japan. We stayed in a village a few stops down the line from Nikko itself and, before tea, I went out to buy some beer. On the way back, unexpected in the darkness, I walked past one of those yellow, painted community service signs that are scattered all over the Japanese countryside. This one read:

Be vigiliant and demand the expulsion of Aum from the community.

Somewhere in the area followers of Aleph, the remnants of a broken and demoralised Aum, lived in one of their communities, perhaps with a bakery or other business attached. Murakami Haruki’s The Place That Was Promised profiles the after-lives of cult members post-1995, moving in groups from town to town, setting up lives and then finding the police and local politicians forcing them out.

It was a disconcerting, and, for me at any rate, disorienting and decontextualised sight. The horror of 1995 - thousands injured, many dead, terrifying disruption to a city at its most vulnerable - is remembered everywhere, if obliquely, in Japan, in generalised fears and anxities.

Protocols of the Elders of Zion

The late David G. Goodman wrote an important book on Jews in the Japanese mind, and an article of his tells the story of the Protocols and their history in Japan. Through the 1980s and 1990s – from the Bubble’s peak to its burst, in other words – dozens of books and articles appeared based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, selling millions of copies. Goodman writes:

Jews were described in these books and in the large, gaudy advertisements that appeared for them in mass circulation daily newspapers as a clandestine cabal plotting to destroy Japan and rule the world. The Jewish plot, the books charged, had already succeeded. The United States, Japan’s chief ally and most important trading partner, was controlled by Jews, who formed a “shadow government” and manipulated U.S. policies for their own perfidious ends. Certain ministries within the Japanese government had already been taken over by Jews, it was said, and Japan was doomed unless something could be done. The enemy was ruthless, and the response, it was implied, had to be equally so.

The history Goodman traces has particularly important implications for our thinking about racism more generally: there have never been large Jewish communities in Japan, and, indeed, the role of Japan in sheltering Jews in wartime Shanghai stands out. Japanese anti-semitism cannot, then, be apologised away as a response to contact; it is, rather, Goodman suggests, that that “antisemitic ideas and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion have played an identifiable and deleterious role in the history of modern Japan”, and that these ideas are linked to ideologies and social forces within the social formation. We can, following Sartre or Abram Leon, link this ideology in the Bubble era to particular anxieties in Japan’s middle class, and to projections of evil to outside forces that allow internal divisions to remain unexamined.

Aum, in January 1995, a few months before the sarin gas attacks, published a “manifesto of fear”, declaring war on the Jewish “world government” and its plans to “murder untold numbers of people and...brainwash and control the rest.” The gas attacks, Goodman contends, can be seen as a opening salvo in that war.

As with the attacks in Norway and Brevick’s “manifesto”, there was plenty of the wild and outlandish about Aum with which to depoliticise their portrayal. The Elephant masks; the heady mix of Nostradamus, the Book of Revelation and Buddhism; the dancing election campaigners: a narrative of “craziness” isn’t short on illustrative material. The story of the Cult doesn’t, though, capture the full power of the fear and terror their attack achieved, nor does it account for the unsettling parallels of banality and paranoia between Aum’s imaginative world and that of Japanese society more widely. For total fear, it’s hard to imagine a better target than the underground, functioning as they do for Tokyo as the unseen centre: passing through Kasumigaseki on my way to work in Ginza I’d often think of how terrifying the morning of the attack must have been, and how difficult, in the crush and unpleasantness of rush hour, it must have been to realise that this was a distinct, and dangerous, terror.

For banality, though, Aum, a religion where, one of Murakami’s interviewees reports, it helped to have been to Tokyo University, managed to match its host society. It’s striking, reading Murakami’s interviews, how many of the former members have abandoned particular details of the faith but kept the method of conspiracy: one former member reports her doubts about Asahara’s approach unless, she adds, the Freemasons were involved in invading Japan.

The logic of Aum’s apocalyptic vision – and it is important that we insist that there is a logic here, that these aren’t “ravings” and thus able to be expelled from the realm of analysis and discussion – fits a familiar pattern of Japanese right-wing storytelling, from the self-pitying accounts of betrayal, from within by the Left or without by Jews, “third country” figures and foreigners, to the promises of war and redemption through national salvation. How different is this from Happy Science, from Ishihara’s comments over several decades, from the frenzied revisionism surrounding Yasukuni Shrine?

My suggestion is not, if this needs stressing, that these other forces are identical to Aum or that they plan mass murder in the near future. It is, rather, that political violence of the kind Tokyo suffered in 1995 cannot be removed from the wider discursive context in which its justifications and strategies were produced. Isolating Aum from the realms of what counts as the political is itself a political act, and one aimed at preventing examination of the kinds of ideological cross-contamination at work within far-right thinking and imagining. The same process is at work today.

Mori Atsuya feels that society lacks the vocabulary to account for the damage of Aum’s actions:

Ten years later, do we know any more than we did back then?

Unfortunately, the answer is "no." The series of Aum Shinrikyo-related trials unveiled very few new facts. I don't think this is because former Aum executives are hiding what they know or feigning innocence.

Rather, they, too, seem to lack the vocabulary to explain what made them carry out the heinous crime.  

Meanwhile, society has stopped asking "why religions whose mission is to deliver salvation kill people," a fundamental question that kept nagging us immediately after the incident. Together with many other "whys," we put it behind us.  

Perhaps what we flinch from is the fact that Asahara’s visions fit a pattern and share themes with much more mainstream and respectable ultra-rightist lines. Take away the laser beams, world conspiracies and global conflicts, and the central message, delivered via the various Tokyo University graduate “Ministers” is eerily recognisable: most will be wiped out, the elite will survive. The social formation is basically sound.

Sartre, in Anti-Semite and Jew, called the anti-semite "a coward who does not want to admit his cowardice to himself." The cowardice and self-pity of the conspiracy theorist and terrorist can be read symptomatically, then, for what they reveal about other versions of their narratives, more common, politically acceptable iterations of their main points. If these deranged rantings – on the global cultural war, on the race bent on world domination, on the sinister links between outside figures and cultural defeatists – sound familiar then we’ve good reason to be worried, and good reason to consider political responses.

Goodman’s final point is important. When so many accounts of European fascism reveal themselves to be covert translations of the fascists’ creed (multiculturalism has failed, this is the response of the white working class to their disempowerment, people have “real” and “genuine” concerns and so on), it’s worth remembering the place of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Japanese political discourse, and of the ways Aum managed to mobilise its rhetoric.

This mobilisation tells us something important about the targets of racism, and thus for anti-racist activism:

“Jew” for the antisemite is a free-floating signifier to designate the object of his animosity. Even the emperor of Japan, as Aum showed, can be a “Jew.” Aum’s gassing of the Tokyo subway was, in this sense, not only the first large-scale act of urban terrorism, it was also the first act of 21st-century antisemitism. Today, anyone can be a “Jew,” and everyone, even the Japanese, are at risk.

Sources

I learnt from the H-Japan list last month that Goodman died. He was a very important scholar, and I learnt a great deal from his work on avant-garde Japanese theatre. You can read his survey of the place of the Protocols in Japanese political life here (PDF).

Murakami’s Underground has been translated into English. David Mitchell’s first novel, Ghostwritten, responds to the sarin attacks.

All the images of book titles I’ve taken from amazon.co.jp, indicating their place in the world of mainstream publishing. One is a title on the “5000 year secret” of “the Jews and money”, one is a self-help book of sorts (again on Jewish secrets and money), the other a variation on Protocols literature.

Fukushima: post-politics and after

2011-07-16T17:50:00.014+12:00

But the need to take into account all existing tendencies in every concrete situation by no means implies that all are of equal weight when decisions are taken. On the contrary, every situation contains a central problem the solution of which determines both the answer to the other questions raised simultaneously by it and the key to the further development of all social tendencies in the future.

Georg Lukacs, Lenin, A Study in the Unity of His Thought, chapter 6

Talk earlier this year of Egypt’s uprisings as Twitter or Facebook revolutions always had a slightly desperate, State-Department air, an attempt to link technological utopianism to liberal strategies of containment of more old-fashioned kinds transparent in its desperation. As the activists themselves have been quick to remind us, the popular upheavals of Egypt’s unfinished revolution reveal a recognizable social face to the democratic rebellion. If nothing else, the contours of the counter-revolution currently at work (mapped with precision and elegance here), ought now to remind us that, when they did come into play, the new social media mobilized older, and powerful forms of social action: strikes, demonstrations, rallies.

Exalting Twitter over the telephone or carrier pigeon is an example of what Jodi Dean, in her brilliant, delightfully provocative and stimulating Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, describes as the technological fetish:

The power of the technological fetish operates in a similar fashion. A condition of possibility for asserting the immediately progressively political character of something - web-radio or open-source software, say - is a prior exclusion of knowledge of their antagonistic conditions of emergence, their embeddedness within the brutalities of global capitalism, their dependence for existence on systemic violence and nationalized and racialized divisions. Advocating the extension of information and communication technologies accepts and denies these conditions at the same time. (41)

Spend a few moments on the internet and the hold of this fetish becomes apparent. It’s no slight to bloggers more serious and talented than me (and about whom print journalists still write as if web-based prose of quality were some sort of cause for surprise) to note that, as with the printing press or poster before us, communication isn’t what’s at stake, but power and exploitation, class relations. Against claims - from those Dean terms the “typing left” - for more communication, more of the reified processes of democracy, what we need is more contestation.

Japan’s example reminds us that the much-celebrated, de-centralised, rhizomatic, open-ended proliferations of Web 2.0 don’t of themselves serve progressive ends: what else is the success of the right-wing and populist 2-channel (larger currently than Mixi, Japan’s main social networking site) but an instance of older rightisms and new technologies fusing? 2-chan and blogging have re-invigorated channels of communication for Japan’s ultra-right, suffusing political life - via more mainstream publications downstream - with the racisms and hatreds essential for the ultra-right to have a chance of rehabilitating itself. War revisionism, particularly as it challenges the facts of the massacre at Nanking, serves a similar role to that, in Dean’s reading, of the “9-11 Truthers” in the United States. With their combination of certainty and skepticism - whereby the proliferation of theory and speculation via the internet allows one to doubt the evidence of Nanking as thoroughly as one then expresses a wish for murderous war against Chinese and Koreans - the revisionists act as “a clone” of university discourse, “a psychotic clone” (see Dean 151).

Against the energy and unscrupulousness of this right-wing paranoiac refashioning of university discourse, the Japanese left, caught to identity politics’ self-denying ordinance, was limited to ever more exhausted-sounding attempts to retain Article 9, conservative gestures sustaining a clearly undesirable present.

For Dean

“Depoliticised” thus well describes the contemporary left’s inability to raise particular claims to the level of the universal, to present issues or problems as standing for something beyond themselves. The academic and typing left prides itself on just this unwillingness, an unwillingness to say ‘we’ out of reluctance to speak for another as well as an unwillingness to signify or name a problem, to take it out of its immediate context and re-present it as universal. (16)

The significance of the last few months, then, and of the extraordinary public and political response to the disaster at Fukushima, points to directions out of this de-politicised condition, and offers grounds for hope.

A national disaster is, often, managed by the political elite to be an example of a non-political event - what is so inspiring, and astonishing in its success so far, is the intellectual and political courage of those forces in Japan who, in the face of this pressure, politicized the earthquake from the very beginning, and linked mourning and relief work to the question of the nuclear power, right at the moment when this was the most untimely, the most inappropriate, the most inopportune.

For Dean, this is the method of an older radicalism:

A specific crime, issue, or event comes to stand for something more than itself. Rather than a singular problem to be resolved, it indicates a series of problems confronting the system as a whole. It is the syptomal point of antagonism in a given constellation. For example, the civil rights movement in the United States was not about the difficulties facing this or that particular person. It was a movement to change basic social practices, institutions, and regimes of visibility so as to guarantee African Americans basic rights as equal citizens. (14 - 15)

Lukacs, in his study of Lenin, discusses moments being “brought into the open by history”:

the whole is always contained in each link of the chain; that the criterion of true Marxist politics always consists in extracting and concentrating the greatest energy upon those moments in the historical process which- at any given instance or phase – contain within them this relationship to the present whole and to the question of development central for the future – to the future in its practical and tangible totality. Therefore, this energetic seizure of the next decisive link of the chain by no means entails the extraction of its moment from the totality at the expense of the other moments in it. On the contrary, it means that, once related to this central problem, all other moments of the historical process can thereby be correctly understood and solved. The connection of all problems with one another is not loosened by this approach; it is strengthened and made more concrete.

Nuclear power has now become such a link in Japanese politics. The role of TEPCO as a company, the place of the state, the tragic history of nuclear power, bombs, and US occupation have fused in public discussion to create, for the first time in many decades, the chance for a movement to challenge the entire order. Kan has been forced to come out against nuclear power, realizing at the same time how powerless he is to act on the issue. Through every part of the debate, the role of the US presence in the country, and of the place of the atom bomb in Japan’s past and future links to the US imperial project, intensifies and politicizes what might otherwise be a more personal and local question of mourning and reconstruction. As Pierre Rousset observes:

The Japanese crisis is not “sectoral”; it does not concern “only” nuclear energy or “only” social issues. It is a crisis of confidence, a democratic crisis, a legitimacy crisis for the government, a national crisis. It will not be easy for the elites to overcome it. But it is also a crisis without a ready constituted alternative and it will not be easy for the rank and file to give form to a real political alternative.

For the first time in decades activists are able to get a hearing not only about nuclear power, but about the social power it is connected to; the discussions spread to the place of the big companies, the role of corruption in politics and profit-making, the shadow the US presence against all of this.

There was nothing automatic about this crisis, though, and it required conscious interventions to seize on this link. Ryota Sono, from the Precarious Workers General Union, told the Japan Revolutionary Communist League’s Kunitomi Kenji how

For first one week after I called protest action, the number of people who gathered with me in front of TEPCO building every evening were only about 10. But people began to understand more and more that TEPCO hid inconvenient facts for the company that really occurred in the Fukushima nuclear plants. People recognized clearly that they had been deceived by TEPCO. From two weeks after the disastrous earthquake, several hundreds of peoples joined our action and actively protest to TEPCO, shouting no to nuclear plants! They have believed that without people’s action demanding to stop the operation of nuclear plants, another tragic nuclear accident would happen because there are 54 nuclear reactors all around Japan, and many of them are located in seashore site which easily damaged by earthquake and tsunami.

Even as the demonstrations grew in size some of the most significant were relatively small - a few hundred in Tokyo one moment, some thousands weeks later. Ryota Sono’s comment reminds us of the audacity of political action in those first weeks: what was essential, for any sort of intellectual and political clarity to have a chance of developing, was for these interventions to be made ‘prematurely’, at the inappropriate moment, before the official period of ‘depoliticisation’ had come to an end. It is the seemingly indecent spectacle of these first protests that indicates their effectiveness: refusing the official boundaries of the seemly, the timely, the appropriate, conscious intervention played a decisive role. Other groups are now mobilizing in more or less new ways - as mums, as workers, as citizens - drawing on the example of those first union-led interventions. (An observation in passing on George Monbiot’s collapse after Fukushima: his was a response accepting the limits of post-politics at the very moment when political intervention was required).

Socialist Worker’s correspondent:

On May 7, some 5,000 turned out in Tokyo's Shibuya ward, and on June 11, about 20,000 took to the streets. Such mobilizations have already scored some victories--for example, the Hamaoka nuclear plant in Shizuoka was fully shut down May 15.

Choi Misun, in Tokyo from Korea to report for Left21, stresses the importance of the earliest rallies:

Assemblies of March 17 were especially meaningful because they took place despite the Japanese government call for "self-restraint of any demonstration" due to the national state of emergency. Some NGOs and unions canceled their mobilization to demonstrate their deference to the government.

An major natural disaster, and a serious and complex technological challenge, ought to be the ideal questions for post-politics to assert itself. Dean quotes (15) Zizek’s claim that post-politics operates

to prevent is precisely this metaphoric universalisation of particular demands: post-politics mobilizes the vast apparatus of experts, social workers and so on, to reduce the overall demand (complaint) of a particular demand to just this demand, with its particular content.

What have the last months been but the “universalisation of particular demands”? Against government bureaucrats, technological - and ‘apolitical’ - expertise, and the weight of recent history and culture, this new protest movement revives possibilities, and futures, long absent from the Japanese political scene.

All this has been achieved so far by a movement with lineaments, like those of Egypt’s, familiar to us from the marches, protests and strikes of earlier social revolts. I’m learning about all of this over the internet, to be sure, and am glad to have the chance to do so. The reign of “communicative capitalism” seems weaker than before. The problems - social and environmental - left behind after the earthquake aren’t going away and, if anything, seem to be getting worse. In breaking the rules of post-politics - politicizing what should stay national, emotional, part of the work of memory - now, though, activists like Ryota Sono are creating the chance to understand the true catastrophe - the metaphoric universalisation whereby the question of nuclear power becomes the question of the contemporary Japanese social formation - and, in that process, they’re changing it.

Source

Jodi Dean, Democracy and other Neo-Liberal Fantasies, Duke UP 2009.

You can see some wonderful photos of the anti-nuclear demonstrations here.

An Intermission

2011-06-23T15:24:00.002+12:00

I’ve got some demanding, but extremely welcome, new personal commitments at the moment which, combined with preparation for the second semester next month, mean I won’t be posting on here for a while.

It came as a surprise, preparing this, to realise I’ve been writing this blog for over a year now. The Tokyo autumn of those first posts seems a lifetime away, but the habit of writing – and thinking aloud – in public is one I’m only just getting comfortable with exploring properly. Thank you all for your comments and suggestions, both here and via email and elsewhere. Google Analytics tells me that most of you who read here regularly are family members, friends, and comrades; I’ve made some new friends along the way, too, and I value all of your input.

The pleasure, for me, is, in particular, to do with the blurring of roles blogging encourages. I’m writing as a conscious socialist and an activist, but also as someone within – and committed to – the humanities, hoping that the internet might give us ways to connect research in the humanities with interested readers and thinkers outside the university, and to share ideas and reading more widely. And, of course, as most of you will realise too, I’m a student still most of the time: these pieces are really records of other’s research, other’s thinking, other histories, and what I can learn from them. I hope you've been able to learn something to along the way. I know I have from you.

I hope to start posting again towards the end of next month.

皆様、大変ありがとうございました。つぎはもとがんばります。

A Poet's Welcome to his Love-Begotten Daughter: the First Instance that Entitled Him to the Venerable Appellation of Father

Thou's welcome, wean! Mishanter fa' me
If thoughts o' thee, or yet thy Mamie,
Shall ever daunton me or awe me,
My bonnie lady,
Or if I blush when thou shalt ca'me
Tyta, or Daddie!

Tho' now they ca' me fornicator,
And tease my name in kintra clatter,
The mair they talk, I'm kend the better;
E'en let them clash!
An auld wife's tongue's a feckless matter
To gie ane fash!

Welcome, my bonnie, sweet, wee dochter!
Tho' ye came here a wee unsought for.
And tho' your comin I hae fought for
Baith Kirk and Queir,
Yet by my faith, ye're no unwrought for,
That I shall swear.

Wee image o' my bonnie Betty,
As fatherly I kiss and daut thee,
As dear and near my heart I set thee,
Wi' as guide will
As a' the priests had seen me get thee
That's out o'Hell!

Sweet fruit o' mony a merry dint,
My funny toil is no a' tint;
Tho' ye come to the world askent,
Which fools may scoff at,
In my last plack your part's be in't,
The better half o't.

Tho I should be the waur bestead,
Thou's be as braw and bienly clad,
And thy young years as nicely bred
Wi' education,
As ony brat o' wedlock's bed,
In a' thy station.

Lord grant that thou may aye inherit
Thy mither's person, grace and merit,
An' thy poor worthless daddy's spirit
Without his failins,
'Twill please me mair to see thee inherit
Than stockit mailens.

For if thou be, what I would hae thee,
And tak the counsel I shall gie thee,
I'll never rue my trouble wi' thee,
The cost nor shame on't,
But be a loving Father to thee,
And brag the name o't!

An Actor's Revenge

2011-06-06T21:50:00.008+12:00

The frustration that thinking about adaptation induces is closely aligned to its temptations. Whatever the rigour of your training in literary or film studies it’s likely that, in unguarded moments, you’re to be found making comments on a film’s faithfulness or value compared to its ‘original’ and source. At the same time, though, without resurrecting some sort of full-blown structuralist model to account for the ‘deep structure’ of story-units behind this or that particular instance of narration (and, I know, none of you want that), it’s hard to get a sense of just how this faithfulness so-called might ever be practiced. The difficulty is compounded when you try on Dudley Andrew’s famous terms - adaptation as borrowing, intersecting or transforming - for conceptual sizing: even to find the terms with which one might distinguish the one from the other is a task which feels as difficult as it does hopeless. Adaptation is such a dominant practice in film production today that to ignore it - or consign the kind of questions viewers ask when traveling under the sign of fidelity to theoretical irrelevancy - seems self-defeating. What move to make next is far from obvious; if, though, like me, you’re drawn to these moments of translation and adaptation, there’s little choice but to let the worrying take hold.

Two stimulating bundles of thought suggest ways out of this dilemma. A recent piece by Dudley Andrew on the “economies of adaptation” offers an image of adaptation as energy, productivity:

Adaptation may be the humming motor of uncontrollable textual proliferation - the horizational spread of a title, an author, an idea from medium to medium, language to language - but it can also function as an antidote or alternative. For if the vertical line that anchors it to the bedrock of its source remains intact, a contemporary film can draw away from the system, submerging its audience in a different sensibility and set of values. That chain bears the troubled name ‘fidelity.’ (32)

Andre Bazin, over sixty years ago, offered a way to read film adaptation as “digest”, with far-reaching, and still underdeveloped theoretical consequences:

All things considered, it’s possible to imagine that we are moving toward a reign of the adaptation in which the notion of the unity of the work of art, if not the very notion of the author himself, will be destroyed. If the film that was made of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1940; dir. Lewis Milestone) had been successful (it could have been so, and far more easily than the adaptation of the same author’s Grapes of Wrath), the (literary?) critic of the year 2050 would find not a novel out of which a play and a film had been ‘made’, but rather a single work reflected through three art forms, an artistic pyramid with three sides, all equal in the eyes of the critic. The ‘work’ would then be only an ideal point at the top of this figure, which itself is an ideal construct. The chronological precedence of one part over another would not be an aesthetic criterion. (6)

Colin MacCabe - through whom I discovered Bazin’s article - develops this claim to argue for the idea that source text and film can from an “ideal construct” against which to read either of its manifestations as Bazin’s “fundamental insight.”

The notion of an “ideal construct” - shades of the implied author and reader of an older narratology! - fascinates me, and offers itself as a useful way to account for all those remakes and reworkings of perfectly decent older films that manage to mystify the Western viewer of NHK. The dozen or so Godzillas Toho dutifully churns out are good examples here; any one of those much-scorned Japanese historical dramas might as well be another.

Ichikawa Kon’s masterpiece An Actor’s Revenge (雪之丞変化 1963) manages to add extra - and delightful - complications into any conversation about adaptation and fidelity. I won’t reveal too much of the story in case you haven’t seen it (yet!); suffice it here to make clear that there’s enough in the way of vengeance, fighting, corruption and betrayal for a good evening’s reconfirmation of our total depravity.

What Ichikawa adapted is a more complicated question than it might at first seem: created to celebrate actor Hasegawa Kazuo’s 300th screen appearance, An Actor’s Revenge adapts the earlier Yukinojo the Phantom (1935), with Hasegawa playing an onnagata (female impersonator) kabuki actor seeking revenge in both films. Further complications: Hasegawa had built a stage reputation for himself as an onnagata before he moved into cinema, and the earlier film being adapted was itself an adaptation of a newspaper serial. Further re-workings have followed, both in opera and, in 2008, in another film version.

So far, so much in the tradition of complexity and borrowing adaptation brings along with itself; my interests in An Actor’s Revenge were provoked not so much by details or gestures to ‘fidelity’ at the level of story, but, rather, by more flagrant signs of their absence at the level of narrative discourse. Ichikawa plays up the filmic and cinematic by intense, dazzling experiments in colour. These stand as evidence, along with so much else, of what we’ve lost with the end of technicolor’s hegemony, and remind us that, for all the importance of kabuki and theatre at the level of story, the fact we’re watching a film, and the demands film makes in the narrative discourse, aren’t going to be self-effacingly minimized or obscured. Donald Richie’s Hundred Years of Japanese Film claims the clash of these two levels may in fact have been liberating:

The Yukinojo project also offered possibilities within the vast, uncharted realm of kitsch. Wada [who wrote the screenplay] found the original scenario so bad it was good, and kept almost everything. The resulting film is a tour de force of great virtuosity in which the director scrambled stage and screen, tried every colour experiment he could think of, and created one of the most visually entertaining films of the decade.

Is scrambling an altogether appropriate verb for indicating the sort of aesthetic work Ichikawa engaged in, though? The kabuki details are, to be sure, handled particularly neatly. Performances by Yukinojo (Hasegawa) act as narrative frames and stand as quite complex mise en abyme, while a certain stillness or stylized, ‘phrased’ acting reminds you of mornings spent in Kabuki theatres.

Those details, intensely pleasurable and intellectually provocative as they are in themselves, seem to me less important, though, than the frame breaking or well-nigh Formalist and estranging techniques Ichikawa deploys in bringing theatre and film into collision. There is, for starters, the matter of casting: Hasegawa plays both the onnagata Yukinojo and the Robin Hoodish Yamitaro the Thief, a doubling of a kind perfectly normal on the stage but disorienting in its matter of factness on screen. John Berra sees this as Ichikawa utilizing “every theatrical device at his disposal to enliven [the] narrative”, but isn’t the opposite energy at work? Don't the very theatricality of these devices point away from the theatre, towards the particular promise and energy of the world of film? Most striking, as evidence or example in that quarrel, is Hasegawa’s own body; revisiting a role he’d played close to 30 years previously, he’s a surprisingly plump, double-chinned, middle-aged and hairy figure to inspire, as he does, virtually suicidal love from Dobe’s beautiful daughter. Then there’s the camp sensibility (queer Japan yet again!) flaunting the conventions and laying bare the devices of theatre in front of the steady gaze of film. Namiji and Yukinojo’s chastely sexy love scenes, to my mind the best minutes in the whole film, even allowing for the audacity and glamour of the fighting, seem to send up both themselves, and their theatrical set of references.

What purpose behind these alienation devices? MacCabe reads high modernism as “in part a reaction to the new medium of film,” after which we see that “this new medium of film produces a new kind of adaptation.” Adaptation as reaction: we’re dealing with another case, perhaps, in which the relations of discourse are of the nature of warfare. An Actor’s Revenge has theatrical elements, naturally; these, though, against what some commentators may detect in them, serve an anti-theatrical purpose.

Fredric Jameson remarks of adaptation that

Only allegory can, I think, to justice to this unparalled historical situation, and I want to propose that individual works, either as external adaptations or as internal echo chambers of the various media, be grasped as allegories of their never-ending and unresolvable struggles for primacy. The novel, even when written for adaptation by film, necessarily wishes the latter’s eclipse and death, and seeks to demonstrate the debility of a medium that has to rely on a liteary ‘original.’ But at one and the same time film believe that its triumphant incorporation of the literary and linguistic hypotext into itself, in a generic cannibalism or anthropophagy, sufficiently enacts its primacy in the visual age (itself blissfully unaware of its stealthily approaching digital rivals). Such is the deeper allegorical sense of the encounters recorded here. (232)

An Actor’s Revenge could, finally, then, be read as a form of vengeance and historical triumphalism over the very form of acting and theatricality it seems so lovingly to represent and chronicle. Kabuki functions here in the same way as African artifacts displayed in a Victorian-era London study: they’re signs of film’s colonizing project, evidence of the claims film makes for its capacity to represent, mannerisms marking out the limits of a particular historical period.

Theatre in this film - both at the level of narrative discourse and, within the story, as detail, something for us to ponder whilst watching others watching - makes an anti-theatrical claim, standing as a rebuke to all those irritating moments in theatre criticism when we’re told in pious tones that theatre can’t be recreated out of its moment or context. Look, Ichikawa announces with all those flourishes of colour, and here it is again!

Given the cultural and political values supporting them, there’s no wishing away the questions of adaptation, fidelity and ‘truth to the spirit’. This isn’t to suggest that they’re questions that can be answered, though, or, following Bazin’s insight, that they make all that much sense as questions in themselves. Ichikawa’s genius in An Actor’s Revenge lies in his realization that, with adaptation as with so much else, attack is often the best, if not the only defense: the film version can live, in this logic, only after consuming the life of its rival in theatre.

Sources

MacCabe, Jameson, and Andrews’ comments are all from their chapters in the splendid new collection Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray and Rick Warner (eds.), True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (Oxford University Press, 2011). I’ve also been reading Linda Hutcheon’s Theory of Adaptation (Routledge, 2006); after many years of relative silence on the question in the Anglophone world at least, adaptation is becoming a live topic once more.

I took some details of An Actor’s Revenge from John Berra’s essay “Vengeance is Mine: Authorship and Identity in Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge”, included with the MadMan DVD release of the film.

The Jargon of Authenticity

2011-05-27T16:31:00.008+12:00

David Burton is most likely New Zealand’s leading food critic; whatever that exact status, it’s certain that his books and wide-ranging writing on food – deeply informed, careful, grounded in decades of research and careful reflection – mark him as a major figure in contemporary food writing in English. His eminence and exemplary status, then, offer reasons to read his works following what the narratologists call a symptomatic interpretation, looking for the ideological and political codes they unwittingly blurt out.

Burton’s prose – with its arch mannerisms, its laboured wit, and the carefully feigned casualness with which it constructs our image of the curmudgeonly implied author – offers suggestive images and fragments, clues to the ideology which it serves. In the era of what Mark Davis calls “the decline of the literary paradigm” and the rise of the celebrity chef, careful attention to the writing of food writing may present political insights of the kinds we used to demand from critics reading literary novelists. If Jamie Oliver’s Mockney gushing over the dishes he prepared for Blair and Berlusconi stands now as a record of one strain of New Labour’s elitist vulgarity, Burton’s concerns follow longer-term shifts in consumption and class society.

Burton’s highest accolade is that he finds food “authentic.” I started, after returning to Wellington last year, keeping clippings from each time his columns used the word, but it soon became clear how pointless the task was; the weeks when ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic’ didn’t appear were rare enough to seem remarkable in themselves. “Authentic” food is sometimes followed by checks on the racial purity and authenticity or otherwise of restaurant owners or staff: a piece in Cuisine magazine last year on Japanese restaurants noted sniffily that most of the owners profiled weren’t Japanese but instead Korean. Would we make the same background checks on Ford car dealers to be sure they’re all from Detroit? The racism inherent in the gesture (and one very rarely applied to New Zealand chefs trying their hand at different European traditions) goes all but unnoticed.

It makes perfect sense, of course, for a food writer to care about the quality of food and the coherence and flavour of dishes, but isn’t authenticity a particularly ill-suited sign under which to travel? Doesn’t the history of food itself – a history Burton’s own books do a great deal to reveal – reveal the cross-cultural, migratory, productively contaminating and inventive energy which comes from human travel and social interaction? Most of the time ‘authenticity’ is used as a marker to keep others out, or to insist on traditions with dubious roots and stability: it’s no accident that many of the most of what one thinks of as ‘typical’ Japanese dishes – okonomiyaki, say, or teppanyaki – date, in the form we know them, from the post-war period. A survey in the Japan Times a few years back revealed kare raisu, the Japanese take on an Anglo-Indian interpretation, as most readers’ ‘typical’ comfort food.

This is to say nothing in defence of food fads or ‘fusion’, but merely to note that ideas and flavours respect few borders: my favourite food memories from my time in Tokyo are of those meals which were the least authentic, those wonderful Japanese takes on Italian food, mushrooms and fish eggs stirred through pasta and then dressed with nori. Who’s to police what, and where?

Most advocates of “authenticity”, however, would react indignantly to being classed as gate-keepers and racial purists. Aren’t our eating habits and all those ‘ethnic’ restaurants a sign, as the argument goes, of our enlightenment, of the multicultural sophistication of the contemporary liberalism? The racist term “ethnic restaurant” gives that particular game away, and matches the exclusions supporting contemporary liberal thought. Are Pakeha so at one with the Universal they’re able to dispense with talk of their own ethnicity? ‘Ethnicity’ is fine as additional glamour and as a consumable lifestyle component, but it will be kept in very particular places, and its excesses policed.

A seemingly apolitical obsession with culinary ‘authenticity’, then, works in parallel with the kinds of ‘authenticity’ political multiculturalism authorises: activities which promote separation, distance, and reified cultural practices – the Multicultural Festivals so beloved of city councils the developed world over – are promoted, while vehicles for cultural communication, contact, blurring and exchange – the trade union movement, centrally, joint political struggle, the kinds of interactions working-class social and industrial life imply –are denied or belittled.

Slavoj Zizek has described multiculturalism as “the cultural logic of multinational capitalism”, and his remarks illuminate Burton’s obsessions:

… the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people—as ‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studied and ‘respected’. That is to say, the relationship between traditional imperialist colonialism and global capitalist self-colonization is exactly the same as the relationship between Western cultural imperialism and multiculturalism: in the same way that global capitalism involves the paradox of colonization without the colonizing Nation-State metropole, multi-culturalism involves patronizing Eurocentrist distance and/or respect for local cultures without roots in one’s own particular culture. In other words, multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a ‘racism with a distance’—it ‘respects’ the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position. Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive content (the multiculturalist is not a direct racist, he doesn’t oppose to the Other the particular values of his own culture), but nonetheless retains this position as the privileged empty point of universality from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) properly other particular cultures—the multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority.

Authentic Class Relations

For all the talk of authenticity, certain constants from the cultural ‘centre’ remain, and woe betide the waitress with English as a second language or an ‘accent’ (a review from 2002 moaned about the ‘sah-poons’ Burton was offered at Sakura Restaurant) or a restaurant with parts of its menu untranslated (last week’s complaint). These gripes – alongside the usual reviewer’s complacent moaning about standards of service – serve a crucial class function, interpellating us as the subjects of middle-class consumption. Again, the assumed accent-less status of the writer goes unnoticed; if others have ‘accents’, what status then for our own speech? Concerns about “poor service” – a term here covering everything from signs of underpaid and overworked exhaustion through to insufficiently obsequious competence – act to insist on a distance between diner and waiter, a distance for fantasy class investments and egotism.

The historian Ralph Samuel, writing almost thirty years ago on the cultural transformations Thatcherism worked in Britain, observed that

The new middle class have a different emotional economy than that of their pre-war predecessors. They go in for instant rather than deferred gratification, making a positive virtue of their expenditure, and treating the self-indulgent as an ostentatious display of good taste. Sensual pleasures, so far from being outlawed, are the very field on which social claims are established and sexual identities confirmed. Food, in particular, a postwar bourgeois passion . . . has emerged as a crucial marker of class.

Little has changed these last decades, and Burton makes explicit the links between his own project and its social audience:

To explain all this [the culinary renaissance], we may cite the breaking down of trade barriers and the consequent freeing up of imports; the impact of global fashions; and the information age bringing television cooking shows, cookbooks and magazines to a greatly expanded middle class determined to acquire the trappings of culture

One of the by-products of neoliberalism’s success has been that its key ideological foundations have, for many years now, been able to pass themselves off as outside the realm of the political, as common-sense, as universal truths of economic and social life. The tag-team roles of the main parties in the 1980s and 1990s in introducing the neoliberal order helped this process. What I’ve tried here is to suggest some ways that, when the topic is seemingly non-political, symptoms of that ideological process speak themselves. Food reviewing, perhaps, offers itself as political commentary in a way other, more ‘relevant’ discourses, find themselves unable to do.

And what am I having for dinner? Something inauthentic, of course, prepared by a cultural interloper. Just like everybody else.

Sources

Burton’s quote I’ve taken from his Biography of a Local Palate (Wellington: Four Winds, 2003), pp. 53 – 54.

Samuels’ lines are quoted in Alex Callinicos, “The New Middle Class and Socialists”, International Socialism, 1983.

The illustrations for this post are from two food-themed manga: Oishinobo, the classic food-critic manga, and Yakitate!, an odd wee tale about the quest for "Ja-Pan", the truly Japanese bread.

Shinjuku Boys

2011-05-18T11:06:00.007+12:00

Yesterday was the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO). Friends and comrades of mine in Australia marked the day by taking part in speak-outs and rallies building the campaign for same-sex marriage. The Anglican Church in Sydney is trying to stop an important rally for LGBTI rights taking place this weekend, so this lead-up week must have a particular political and emotional force and charge. There were events in New Zealand too, and around the world.

One of the nice things about living in New Zealand again is being within a social formation where the movement has won a certain, enduring, space for lesbian and gay lives, and being able to enjoy the great benefits that brings to all of us. Particularly around where I live in Newtown, for reasons which aren’t clear to me (I fit here the cliche of the straight man for whom obvious social signals are a mystery), there are plenty of gay and lesbian couples living visible lives: as I walk to work each morning I pass a man kissing his boyfriend goodbye for the day, a gesture touching in its (I think calculated) combination of workaday normality and understated but significant physical bravery. This isn’t a tale of lives divorced from the working class, either, as one currently popular narrative in Labour Party circles would have it; these guys look like they’re on a budget, and their shoes show all the signs of regular use. There’s more to win – full marriage rights, for one – and nothing is permanent. Still, seeing two men kissing each morning is a nice, and educational, start to the day: plenty of heterosexual men (myself included) would struggle with that kind of relaxed emotional expressiveness, whatever the wider questions of sexuality. It hasn’t always been this way, of course, and it took a mass movement to win what freedoms there are. The activists in that movement took risks: as Bill Logan has written, “it was no rose garden, but it wasn’t a mistake.”

It’s the transphobia part of the international day I’ve been thinking about recently, though. I’ve learnt a lot, as I suspect plenty of others have too, from the issues that have been raised by the same-sex marriage rights campaigns in Australia and the United States, in particular around the struggles within these movements for the voices of trans people to be heard, and how their contribution to the struggle has strengthened its reach and energy. Sherry Wolf’s essay “To Riki, with respect” moved me, and set other thoughts in motion.

この道

I’ve written before about “this path”, the life of “this world” that is Queer Japan. Reading contributions around IDAHO yesterday, I remembered Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams’ excellent documentary Shinjuku Boys (1996).

Shinjuku Boys follows the lives of a group of onnabe working in The New Marilyn nightclub in Tokyo. The term Onnabe – the pun here plays on 女 – woman – and 鍋　– nabe, those lovely hot pots that make Japanese winters such fun and which demand a good deal of stirring and mixing – refers to women dressing and/or living as men and working in a “host” bar catering to women clients. Some are transitioning to new physical identities. The clientele are, in the main, heterosexual women, although many form ongoing emotionally and sexually intimate relationships with hosts they meet at the bar. The documentary, in allowing these people to speak openly and freely about their lives, is an intensely moving, educational, and inspirational work.

That last paragraph was difficult to write, and doesn’t communicate particularly well, because each of the terms I’ve looked to ends up proving as inadequate as the one it replaced. This difficulty mirrors the limitations in my political vision the film helped expose. First time around, with well-meaning bafflement, I spent most of my time trying to fix in place precisely what couldn’t, and shouldn’t, be fixed: who were the men? Who were the women? Were any – or all – of the people interviewed lesbians? Which people lived as women? Which wanted to be men?

This line of questioning, apart from being a particularly rude and unpleasant way of talking about other people, is politically unhelpful, and Shinjuku Boys helped me see why. That the labels of sexuality, gender, and, oftentimes, sex itself didn’t fit for many lives was, for the interviewees, a given: things became difficult when other people (and, through them, social forces) tried to make them fit, with sometimes tragic results. Some onnabe were happy, others unhappy, much like the rest of the world: what they shared in common, though, was a determination to live the kind of life they wanted to live. A good aim and, if the social fixations, expectations and clothing- and genital-attractions of each of the sexes didn’t fit so well, bad news for those expectations.

Shinjuku Boys, in giving its commentary over to the subjects of the documentary themselves, forced me to confront complexity. These people’s frankness about identity, sex and sexuality was also a reminder of the importance of respect and privacy, of the sorts of conditions necessary to make political conversation possible: you can’t learn about other people’s lives or needs by demanding easy affiliations from them. The power of unity in struggle is, among many other things, the power of being different. That’s difficult, and needs working at, but I’m sure it’s essential too.

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
And foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
And ev'n devotion!

The struggle continues: I was very pleased to see the first openly gay candidate win public office in Japan earlier this year. Socialist Ishikawa Taiga marches on May Day, campaigns for AIDS awareness, writes thoughtfully on gay life and has opinions on US bases. (The hint here, again following right-wing commentary on the state of the NZ labour movement: it’s possible to multi-task).

Here in Wellington next month we’re going to march to “Queer the Night”, a sign of LGBTI pride, and against homophobic violence and threats.

So, let's rock society!

Sources

Most of the best political and social websites coming out of the Japanese lesbian community start with pages asking men not to view or enter them. Fair enough. I’ve respected those requests and won’t read or link to them, but want to record their absence here. If you’re a woman reading this you might like to explore further.

In keeping with the international day being about action and education, I'd like to acknowledge the extraordinary education in sexual politics and LGBTI history and struggle through my time in Socialist Alternative when I lived in Melbourne.

Australia's Pacific War

2011-05-06T16:42:00.008+12:00

Part of the great ideological power of ANZAC Day now is the way it mobilises imagery stressing the pity and sorrow of war in order to strengthen militarism and Australia and New Zealand’s military role in the world. Few events grant the armed forces such opportunities for public display and social legitimacy; fewer still so successfully de-politicise the discussion of political questions. When Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds brought out their collection What’s Wrong With ANZAC : The Militarism of Australian History last year, they faced sustained hostile commentary from both the liberal and right-wing press. In New Zealand it’s taken a legal battle right through to the Supreme Court to establish that free-speech principles stand on April 25th.

The event’s power is recent, and remarkable: baby boomers I’ve spoken to marvel at the transformation of the unpopular, poorly attended and jingoistic events of their youth into the well-nigh universally marked dawn services of today. Part of this appeal is no doubt to do with the passing of the generation who fought in World War Two – I remember that as my own half-formed justification when, as a teenager, I turned out in Queen’s Gardens – but, whatever our individual and complex emotional feelings about loved ones and relatives, the political and social consequences of ANZAC Day’s revival are everywhere evident, and damaging.

This ANZAC Day I was flying home from the Marxism conference in Melbourne, an event where I’d been lucky enough to be able to attend the launch of Tom O’Lincoln’s new book Australia’s Pacific War: Challenging a National Myth. This book is an excellent, and sorely needed, corrective to the nationalist and pro-war mythology bolstering Australian military and imperial ambitions, and informing the cultural work on ANZAC Day – Australia’s Pacific War is an anti-war counterblast, a critical account of how Australia and its allies fought in the Pacific theatre of World War Two.

The Pacific War has a particular significance in the mythology of contemporary Australian imperialism: for all the drunken revelry of backpapers taking time out from their OEs to worship at Gallipoli each year, World War One offers slim pickings for today’s apologists for war. Widely accepted as an exercise in bloody futility, distant, confused; the First World War serves too easily in the anti-war narrative for the right ever to have bothered much with its reclamation. (The grubby role of Australian and New Zealand troops propping up British colonialism doesn’t help here either: characters in Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy use the term “Australian” as a catch-phrase for abusers, pillagers and thugs). Against this, Australia’s actions in the Pacific can be connected to myths of the Second World War as the “good war”, for Australian independence against Japanese aggression, for freedom and democracy, for liberty against empire. It’s a myth which has suited many an imperial venture since.

“What I mean by the Pacific War myth,” O’Lincoln explains, “is a mass phenomenon, in which an elaborate belief system sustains social mobilisation…Instead of a fantasy of inevitable victory, we find a fantasy affirming the inherent validity of national war mobilisation – a national myth that underpins war-making today.” (viii). Replacing older, cruder myths of “inevitable victory” is in part what gives ANZAC Day its ideological force: mourning and recognising the dead, now, provides unwitting support for the set-up that ensured their death.

Australia’s Pacific War sets out an historical record very different to that the myth of the “good war” encourages us to imagine. Australia was never under threat from a Japanese invasion, and its rulers knew this. The fear of that invasion, though, was cleverly developed and exploited by the Labor government of the time to justify and extend war policies abroad and industrial exploitation at home. (Labour’s vile role suppressing civil liberties in both Australia and New Zealand deserves more attention: see, for NZ, Russell Campbell’s documentary Sedition).

Drawing on racist campaigns against the Japanese of long standing, Australia’s media and political forces used the war to whip up popular loathing and a de-humanising of the enemy. Where anti-Nazi propaganda focused on Germany’s leaders, anti-Japanese material was generalising, and deeply racist. O’Lincoln quotes from an article on “The Japanese as a Fighter” in the Melbourne Argus :

He was a mass of contradictions – he fought grimly, enduring terrible wounds, until he was destroyed; or he ran in screaming fear; or he blew himself to pieces with a grenade clutched to his chest or stomach. He was cruel and dirty and bestial. He killed his wounded rather than have them fall into our hands. He plundered and raped the natives. The Australians and Americans came to loathe him as one loathes something that is dirty and ratlike.

And this appeared after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki! Politicians exploit this set of associations still; O’Lincoln quotes Alexander Downer in the early days of the “war on terror” referring to “monsters such as Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo.” Even George Bush himself wasn’t as capacious in his genealogies of the Axis of Evil.

Australia’s Pacific War details the Australian army’s role in sustaining British – and Australian – colonial domination in the Asia-Pacific region; Australia’s invasion of East Timor; racism in the occupation of the Japan and repression of the Japanese labour movement; and the impact of the war on democratic liberties and class struggle at home. Life for people in colonised countries under Japanese rule could be very unpleasant: in this, it differed little from life under any of the other competing colonial forces in the region. O’Lincoln quotes from a diary of an Australian soldier:

The private local war [in East Timor], Portuguese versus native, still goes on in its bloodthirsty way, and provides some humour for sub units. One of our patrols near Mape, out hunting the Jap, encountered a Portuguese patrol out hunting some natives, they exchanged compliments and went their various ways.

This all makes for grim, but important, reading, but Australia’s Pacific War isn’t just a chronicle of war’s horrors. O’Lincoln includes chapters on unrest on the homefront – industrial unrest, certainly, but also changing attitudes to gender and sexuality – and considers some of the experience of ordinary soldiers in Japan, and how these human encounters changed their attitudes and actions. There’s plenty on the ongoing resistance of indigenous people – in Australia and in colonies abroad – to the treatment they received from occupying forces.

Australia’s Pacific War is written to “challenge conventional views of the war.” I hope it does.

Sources

Tom O’Lincoln’s website has some excerpts from the book, as well as supplementary material on questions it raises – on the (compromised and occasionally horrifying) position of Communists in Australia towards the war, on labour in the war, and more.

ANZAC Day has been a site of social conflict and contestation as well as forced unity: read Kyla Cassell’s very good article here (PDF) on class conflict at ANZCAC Day celebrations between the wars.

In the Gap

2011-04-18T16:06:00.007+12:00

I’m able to place, with quite some precision, where my first voyage around Kendrick Smithyman collapsed. Somewhere between “Flying to Palmerston” and “Research Project”, I gave up: my copy of Peter Simpson’s Selected Poems has a spine all broken and detached up to this point and then, beyond, is untouched and elegantly new. Smithyman, in my first encounter, was too difficult, too obscure, too demanding to count as what I considered real poetry. (In those stupid judgements I wasn’t alone; my copy is marked, as almost all my teenage purchases are, with the tell-tale vivid of the remainders sale upstairs at Dunedin’s UBS). The further Smithyman travelled from his early ‘contaminations’ – Auden, of course, Dylan Thomas, alas – the less his work fitted into my own sense of what poetry should be and what it should do. These weren’t, in other words, poems which shouted at me things I already believed, the demand, it seems to me now, of most latter-day Romanticism.

Re-discovering Smithyman some years later as a gauche and homesick student at the Baillieu Library in Melbourne, all those supposed vices had transformed themselves into virtues. Smithyman was worth the wait. Here was a poet at once intellectually absorbing and emotionally engaging, lyrically deft and formally inventive, and, above all, demanding, and with a fine ear and sense for what demands were needed.

We were/are all of us
Alienated. That’s how we belong.
He was deaf, deafened by such a distance –

out there, if you took a firm line
You’d fetch no landfall until
Chile. Think of that now! after
An afternoon at an old German pub downriver,
Pub and museum of a folk.

This was their cargo’s way,
crooked as a founder’s motives.
The distance which you swallow at a gulp –
it was their distance.

(“Movements for Coastal Voices”)

The detailed carefulness of “[t]hat’s how we belong” sticks with me, as does Smithyman’s commitment to a poetics capable of wit and mischievous humour while all the while recognising the complexity and difficulty of material produced in the New Zealand social formation. As he argued in Poetry Yearbook (1954):

Society is complex in its activities and its relationships, and the members of a community are complex. A section of the poetry of and advanced and intricated community must inevitably be complex, and because complex, obscure – which is not to say that most of the obscurity cannot eventually be understood in the major part. …

We have to reckon in short that the mirror which art holds to nature may be a dark glass reflecting a paddock where undoubtedly dark horses are capering.

It’s fitting, given the first gaps in my Smithyman experiences, that I’ve had to live through another, shorter, one on my way to encountering Scott Hamilton’s exciting selection of unpublished Smithyman poems, Private Bestiary. The first print run of this selection sold out very quickly – unusual, surely, for a poetry collection – and it was some months between my order and the book actually arriving here in Wellington. It’s worth the wait again.

Surely there is
a moral in those sandhills
if I had wit enough to tell it.

These “first steps into a private bestiary” (there are supposedly hundreds of uncollected Smithyman poems and drafts in his archives) is enormous fun: the poems themselves are beautiful – and often strikingly surprising – and the introduction and notes helpful and provocative. (Those who know the Reading the Maps blog will recognise the house style: erudite, engaging and engaged, witty, occasionally rambling).

Private Bestiary builds the case, already present in Peter Simpson’s selection, for reading Smithyman not as a self-consciously ‘difficult’ poet aiming for obscurity, but instead as another example of the Wordsworthian model of “a man speaking to men”, communicating about issues and themes of great difficulty, to be sure, but never in a needlessly off-putting or sterile manner. The great theme Private Bestiary selects and presents is the recognition that “there is / a rabid violence / in the earliest stories,” the violence of colonial settlement and expropriation.

This recognition is accompanied by an essential counter-tradition, the only way it can be given useful life: Smithyman’s poems – and it took the introduction and notes to bring this fully alive for me – are packed with the details of working-class Pakeha and Maori rebellion, the Red Feds, rebel unionism, unofficial history. There’s little pleasure here for liberal guilt or piousness; plenty of material to provoke the ‘rumour of another history.’

***

“Form fascinates when one no longer has the force to understand force from within itself. That is to create.”

There is difficulty in these poems, though, but it’s worth learning to seek in that difficulty the source of their pleasure. Smithyman’s formal experiments; his densely allusive world of private reference and location; his word-plays and asides building to a sense of menacing over-reading and excessive signification: all of these, I recognise now, are part of a pattern and artful design in the work – the source of the stimulation – instead of a flaws in pieces which could be perfected by a little lyrical smoothing out and simplifying. The broken, improvisational associations and asides of the poems in Private Bestiary point somewhere.

The strain here, and its symptom, an occasional obscurity, is History itself:

But whatever portion of this faculty we may suppose even the greatest Poet to possess, there cannot be a doubt that the language which it will suggest to him, must often, in liveliness and truth, fall short of that which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual pressure of those passions, certain shadows of which the Poet thus produces, or feels to be produced, in himself.

That language of real life, in the poems selected here, stresses both the dishonesty of Pakeha myths of origin, the anxious elimination of colonial history from our minds (“We are a myth of our making”) and its insistent presence, coupled sometimes with other social orders about, in this piece from 1965, to erupt:

A view of our circumstance is
narrowed: this side, unreal safety.
Down in the valley men console
in a thoroughly public bar.

*****

The other, compelling, case made in Private Bestiary is for Smithyman as regionalist. The Northland Smithyman loved so much may as well be a foreign country to me, so different are its signals in botanical detail, historical reference and climate from my own stock of South Island memories and affiliations.

That sense of regional detail and particularity is useful, though: there’s nothing like an alienation effect or two to force the re-thinking of important issues.

There’s a politics to this aesthetics, too:

This is a political parable,
a harbour at low tide. Almost dark,
we’re only visitors, we don’t know twists and turns,
ins and outs of waterways or limits.
Like everyone else who doesn’t belong, we’ve heard
about disputed grounds, land claimed (and handed) back,
bad feelings, tensions, even death threats.

Yesterday afternoon, having made some of these notes earlier in the morning, I went to the premiere of Operation 8, a very important documentary about the “anti-terror raids” from 2007. I won’t write here about the politics of that particular – and ongoing – event, except to make the minimal observation that it represents a particularly shocking and disturbing injustice and assault on civil and political rights.

What struck me, amidst all the horrifying details of police maliciousness and media and Labour government connivance and complicity, was the ignorance so essential to the whole story’s success. There are the telling details of throw-away ignorance, to be sure – notably here the inability of most journalists covering the case to learn Tame Iti’s name – but a deeper, structural racism and ignorance (what might be glossed, following Smithyman, as provincialism against regionalism) sustained the entire media and police fantasy of a terrorist plot in New Zealand.

Time and again in the documentary people from Ngai Tuhoe being interviewed made reference to earlier land seizures, to sovereignty never ceded, to confiscation, struggle and resistance. They had a coherent, and detailed, narrative, reaching back to Rua Kenana, the 1860s East Cape wars, and further still. Each of them articulated demands for self-determination, and placed their own (extremely trying) current situation in an historical context of racism and oppression. Against this, the wildness and extremity of the Dominion Post’s coverage – and of the vocabulary from Bush’s “war on terror” translated into the New Zealand context – sounded maliciously fanciful and bizarre. The narrative those Tuhoe campaigners took for granted, though, was one which, I imagine, many viewers would have struggled to recognise, still less comprehend. National stories submerge the recalcitrant details of resistance.

The Ureweras are the site of plenty of Pakeha projection and fear, and those caught up in the October raids are the latest victims of that paranoia and its historical background. There’s important and detailed historical work – Judith Binney’s massive history, most obviously – which counters this, but something of the distortions of a nationally-minded pose remain.

Smithyman’s work reminds us of the ideological fictions which make up the imagined community “New Zealand”, of the regional specificity of so many of our struggles and campaigns, of the patchy – and often inconclusive – process of colonisation, of the presence of historical injustice pressing upon the present:

One thing for sure, Turuki isn’t going
to ride through here again; he’s been dead
a while since, somewhere over behind Ohiwa.
Things aren’t better than they were?
No way. No way at all.

("Moutain Stop")

I don’t find the familiar in this collection, then. No way. No way at all. And, for that very reason, it’s a New Zealand voice of a kind I’m finding more useful than ever.

Sources

You can – and should – buy a copy of Private Bestiary from Titus Books here.

Rebel Press have put out an oral history of the so-called “terror” raids, The Day the Raids Came. You can buy that here.

The line on form’s fascinations I’ve taken from p. 3 of Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (1981).

Zainichi as Bare Life

2011-04-01T16:22:00.009+13:00

Everyone knows it yet
It’s not on the map
It’s not on the map so
It’s not Japan
It’s not Japan so
It might as well vanish
It doesn’t matter so
We do as we please

(Kim Si-Jong, “Ikaino Poems”, 1975)

Translation opens us to other worlds, certainly, but it can also perpetuate exclusions. The first time I read Yu Miri’s Goldrush its Zainichi context was lost on me, neither surname nor Pachinko-parlour setting, at that time, setting off any of the appropriate cultural cues amidst my own ignorance and confusion. It’s hard to image what Stephen Synder in his (excellent) translation could have done to make this context more apparent, without resorting to those cumbersome notes and appendages which signpost what’s supposed to work unsigned, and, besides, the blithely arrogant under-reading of that initial experience (“aren’t I multicultural, one of those rare folk who consume literary fiction in translation!”) may well mirror broader patterns of Zainichi invisibility and exclusion.

Yu herself, anyway, refuses the label of “Zainichi writer” just as assertively as her Korean surname reminds Japanese-language readers of her own inescapable insertion into social ways of inscribing ethnicity and attendant racial oppression, and her darkly humorous, exacting stories can be read for their unsettling and probing observations on heterosexuality and sexual oppression or the nuclear family and violence as much as for any insight into Korean experience. Yu’s achievement, Lisa Yoneyama argues of Fullhouse, is to “probe for clues with which to disturb” the “problematic arrangements” of the modern family. Far from denying the importance of the Korean struggle, though, for Yoneyama – and I think she’s right – writing of this kind “can be disconcerting and threatening to those who desire to maintain the stabilized boundaries of family, ethnic community, and national polity and history, for they reveal and criticize the mutual imbrications of racism and bourgeois family values.”

It’s been quite a few years since I spent time being productively disconcerted by Yu’s writing, but I’ve gone back to her these last weeks after engaging with the scholarship of Sonia Ryang. A displaced intellectual and powerful writer, Ryang is an engagingly precise and provocative guide to the complexities of the situation for Koreans in Japan, and her scholarship – a model of lucidity, engagement and sheer intellectual excitement – stirs up all manner of questions official politics would prefer left unanswered.

Zainichi, in the usual liberal phrase, are described as “second class citizens” in the Japanese system: Ryang polemicises against the complacency behind this common-place. Zainichi are, of course, not citizens of any kind, second-class or otherwise, and part of their oppression stems from their systematic exclusion from all parts of Japanese political and social life. To be Zainichi is, Ryang suggests, to be reduced the quality Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”, invisible, outside the rules and governing possibilities of the political world.

Besides, what is it to be Zainichi? We’re so used to talking about Chongryon-affiliated people as “North Koreans in Japan” that it takes the shock of Ryang stating the obvious to re-focus discussion: there are no North Koreans in Japan; Japan does not recognise the DPRK, and there are no official channels for DPRK citizenship, outside of diplomatic circles, to be maintained abroad.

DPRK-affiliated Zainichi are, then, doubly invisible. Mainstream anthropology, as Ryang points out, in framing most of its studies of Zainichi as studies of ‘outsiders’ in Japan, perpetuates this disenfranchisement. When considered from within, as a diaspora without homeland, the political priority and possibilities for Zainichi seem rather different.

There’s very little attention given, in media reports and elsewhere, to the historical complexity of the situation which led to their being ‘North Koreans’ in Japan: in insisting on this complexity, Ryang turns it to usefully activist and anti-racist ends. If most studies of diaspora look at the outsiders, what about turning attention to the host societies?

A society such as Japan that firmly stands on the belief in its monoethnicity might be unfit to be a host society for modern diasporas. I state this with a certain urgency: it is public knowledge that since 9/17, North Korea has been roundly demonised and Chongryun-affiliated Koreans marginalised and isolated. The current situation creates constraints not just on the diasporic community but on Japanese society as well (Ryang, “Visible and Vulnerable: the Predicament of Koreans in Japan”, 79)

***

The Zainichi struggle is, though, as anyone who knows the grubby history of Chongryon will be aware, not just a matter of exposing the lies and racism of the ruling order: it’s also a question of questioning, and opposing, stifling nationalisms and orthodoxies within the community itself.

Ryang takes the question of naming – the honmyo (true, Korean, name) and tsumei (‘passing’, Japanese, name) – and subjects this site of so much well-meaning, or not so well-meaning, dogmatism to useful interrogation:

It is all very well to condemn passing names as the legacy of colonialism. But as long as there exists strong discrimination against Koreans in Japan – whose mark is most clearly discerned by name rather than skin colour or accent, for example – the use of a name is no simple matter. When a subject prefers a particular name – no matter how compromising such a deployment may be in the eyes of the nationalist orthodoxy – how can others (ethnic community leaders, teachers, parents, or even the nation-state or history) force them to use another name? Whether a Korean name is honmyo for an individual is not a given, since otherwise it would be tantamount to assuming that one’s alien registration name has to be one’s real name. After all, who decides which name is true to the person? The law? The community? Parents? Teachers? Or the person herself? Rather than assuming that the “true self” exists in “true Korean names”, we should withhold conclusions about the authenticity of names. (Ryang, “Introduction, 14).

It’s not just the insistence on complexity which is inspiring; Ryang insists on individual agency and the capacity to struggle.

The very ambiguity of the question of names for Zainichi points to some of the political possibilities of the position they inhabit. Issuing ‘anthems from nowhere’, residents of the imaginary country which, in the words of footballer Jong Tae Sae, is “another country in Japan”, Zainichi, in their very in-between status, defy the nationalisms which disfigure the region:

More recently, as the association with either North or South has waned, the term zainichi, meaning “existing in Japan”, has become common currency for representing Koreans in Japan. This name does not come without problems, in my view. To begin with, the term is parodic; it inverts the reality of the treatment of Koreans by the Japanese state. In this system, Koreans are treated as outsiders and their exclusion is justified on the basis of that they do not have Japanese nationality. By calling them zainichi, as if they merely “exist” in Japan, the name obscures their clear disenfranchisement. Although calling oneself zainichi chosenjin or zainichi kankokujin no longer denotes exclusive association with either the northern or the southern regime, the contours of zainichi life are becoming more complex and volatile. The parody name zainichi condenses this complexity: in spite of the diversity of names for Koreans in Japan, not one captures them properly. (Ryang, “Introduction”, 11).

This condensed complexity inspires anti-racist organising and activism, from Zainichi groups in the United States to Tokyo.

There’s plenty in Ryang’s thought I disagree with: her writing consistently down-plays the importance of the struggle aspect of class struggle, and accedes too easily, perhaps, at times, to claims of Zainichi invisibility which in turn erase their obvious contribution, and importance, in Japanese working-class politics. (For an example of this, see her brilliantly argued but, to my mind, one-sided piece “The De-Nationalised Have No Class” in Japan Focus.)

It’s unusual, though, to encounter academic writing which combines accessibility and political urgency and intensity with carefulness and rigour. Now, while the humanities are under such sustained attack, her work stands out as an example of the sort of practice I want to take up and defend.

Sources

I’ve quoted from two collections here:

Sonia Ryang and John Lie (eds.), Diaspora Without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan (Berkley: University of California Press, 2009).

Sonia Ryang (ed.) Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin (London: Routledge, 2000).

Lisa Yoneyama’s essay is in Koreans in Japan. The Kim Si-jong quote is taken from Melissa Wender’s article in the same volume. Ryang has also published a number of other very useful books; one I’ve found particularly helpful is North Koreans in Japan : language, ideology, and identity (Boulder, Colo. : Westview Press, 1997).

With thanks to Shomi, who introduced me to Yu Miri's writing, and whose 2005 conference presentation started me thinking about translation in the Zainichi context.

地震

2011-03-14T14:25:00.006+13:00

Fukushima, for me, still brings associations of calm and tranquillity, and red leaves. We holidayed up there in Autumn 2008, staying in what the Japanese call a pension, a wee B&B in the country. The red leaf viewing season was just starting up. It was extremely still, ordered, and quiet.

*

All sorts of images and stories cluster together in my mind when I think of Christchurch’s last earthquake. Most are to do with people I know and love, or with areas where particular memories have attached themselves. Others are more general , like those faces attached to media reports and newspaper headers.

Some of those stories now get re-processed into a new narrative and a ghastly sort of retrospection.

*

A week after Christchurch’s last earthquake this comment appeared on 2-channeru, the unmoderated sewer of the Japanese internet.

Under the discussion “Earthquake-hit New Zealand rejects Korean rescue team due to a concern with foot and mouth disease” on e of 2-chan 's users wrote

Koreans will behave disgustingly to get praise, which only lead to their bad reputation. If accepted help from Korean, NZ will forever demanded to thank Korea. New Zealand knew this and that’s why they rejected Korean team.

Korean monkeys have vanity, but not sincerity, modesty, respect towards others.

Even though half of Korean population are Christians, their Christianity has produced evil Christians who are totally different from Christianity.

There are no other shameful people like this.

The discussion continued for some time

*

If you can love a city, I love Tokyo.

It took me a while to work out why William Gibson had put that on his twitter feed and then, as the flow of comments, panicked questions and re-tweets of civil defence instructions built up to a rush, it all became frighteningly clear.

Loving Tokyo has always, in more of less macabre ways, involved feigning indifference or excitement about natural disasters and the dangers of living on earthquake-prone, unstable islands. Inhabitants of Edo used to boast of their city’s devastating fires, and Edward Seidensticker’s Low City, High City reports, with quite some high conservative-aesthete pride, that, after one of early Tokyo’s many massive fires, Ginza stores re-opened with parts of their property still burning.

Isn’t some of the attraction of Neo-Tokyo, from Akira to today, in this sense that we – those who know how to love Japan – are already in that future, already living in a post-apocalyptic landscape? It takes real devastation, and the hurt of real loss’ humdrum details and complications, to dislodge that self-indulgence.

*

Junichro Tanizaki, initially at least, exhulted in the Great Kanto Earthquake:

When the earthquake struck I knew that I had survived, and I feared for my wife and daughter, left behind in Yokohama. Almost simultaneously I felt a surge of happiness which I could not keep down. “Tokyo will be better for this!” I said to myself […] Tokyo too would be rebuilt in ten years, into a solid expanse of splendid buildings like the Marunouchi Building and the Marine Insurance Building. I imagined the grandeur of the new metropolis, and all the changes that would come in customs and manners as well. An orderly pattern of streets, their bright new pavements gleaming. A flood of automobiles.

Retrospection, again: we’ve all now, after this weekend, seen a flood of automobiles.

*

関東大震災

150 000 people died in Kanto Dai-shinsai, the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1923. Thousands died during the quake; half of Tokyo was destroyed, and Yokohama was almost completely ruined. After Kanto Dai-shinsai, around 1.5 million people – over half Tokyo’s population – were left homeless. Many more people died in the fires which followed the earthquake:

It was not long before the place turned into a veritable sea of fire, and one of the most horrible and shocking events ever recorded in the annals of human tragedy followed; hell was indeed let loose on earth.

That’s the official government narrative, from the Home Office 1923 publication The Great Earthquake.

A different kind of hell was let loose after this. Rumours spread that Korean day-labourers and migrants had started the fires, and were poisoning water supplies. Gangs of thugs carried out pogroms in Korean areas, beating and killing perhaps as many as several thousand.

Eventually, to avoid international attention, the army was used to restore order. But the massacre served a valuable role for the Japanese state and, amidst the chaos, the secret police took the opportunity to abduct and murder scores of communists, trade unionists and Korean activists.

Shintaro Ishihara's name for Koreans today? Sangokujin, outsiders who, as he stated in 1999, might be a danger in the case of natural emergencies. This is the man who runs Tokyo.

*

On the Establishment of Righteousness and the Safety of the Country

Earthquakes and tsunami in 1257 came close to destroying Kamakura. Plague, famine and riots followed. Kamakura’s Buddha is a major tourist attraction now; it’s also all that stands from the historic city after the earthquakes of 1257, 1369 and 1494.

It was out of the upheaval around the 1257 quake Nichiren’s Lotus Sect of Buddhism developed and, after its initial period of persecution, shaped Japanese culture and society.

*

人間の国

Government bungling, bureaucratic ineptitude and shonky practice led the novelist Oda Makoto, after the Great Hanshin Earthquake, to ask “Is this a human country?” Ten years on, critic Uchihashi Katsuto echoed this question.

Japan is an enormously wealthy country, and yet official responses to the Great Hanshin Earthquake were unable to deliver simple necessities like shelter, food, and emergency supplies. Survivors stayed, trapped, while rescue workers were kept waiting.

All this occurred in a city dotted with unsafe buildings and structures made in a social world characterised by yakuza influence, corruption and profiteering. The sins of the building industry stand as a symbol of the underside of the ‘boom’ imagery of the Showa era.

1995 was, of course, the same year that Aum released Sarin gas in the Tokyo Subway system. It’s unsurprising, then, that imaginations in the early years of the Heisei era turned towards the apocalyptic.

*

Another image from the Great Hanshin Earthquake. Speaking to the Kobe Shimbun in November 1995, a 59-year-old Korean man linked surviving the earthquake to developments in an anti-racist consciousness:

Since the tragedy and disaster was a common, shared experience, we have come to enjoy mutual safety and conversation when we meet on the street. Those people who used to adopt a certain attitude have stopped assuming it.

The newspaper itself took the opportunity to editorialise for foreigners’ voting rights, by no means an easy political position to assume:

Without mixing with people from other cultures and experiencing their cultures, we cannot find uniqueness and strength in cities like Kobe and Osaka […] the uniqueness of this international consciousness is a significant factor necessary to rebuild the areas. We can even go so far as to say that without the cooperation of foreign residents, it would be impossible to rebuild Kobe and Osaka. In order to reconstruct our cities, we need to build a new society of coexistence and choose a path of reconstruction together with our foreign residents.

*

H. Porter Abbott, in his Introduction to Narrative, uses the term “narrative jamming” to describe “this experience of indeterminacy, of wanting to know and not being able to know…itself a kind of pain.” Those experiences which most steadily resist narrativizing – I mean here of course death above all – are the ones on which we bring the most insistent narrativizing impulses to bear.

Perhaps this is why most reports on disasters, when they strain towards profundity, are so often empty, so often pompously bare. It is, certainly, why I’ve offered you these fragments of earthquake anecdotes, and feel the need to write something on earthquakes while, at the same time, realising there’s nothing of value I can add now.

It’s also why, I think, what moved me most in the weeks following the disaster in Christchurch were reports on everyday experience more than poems or services or silences produced to mark our distress. The day the quake struck I was following a discussion at Giovanni’s blog on twitter and speed and communication; what followed matched the post as a sort of horrible hidden polemic, as each of us re-posted requests for confirmations of loved ones. In later weeks, I’ve been moved by friends’ accounts of makeshift toilet arrangements, dog anxieties, silt build-up.

An anxious night on Friday, then, as the phone lines jammed and Skype gave out and not everyone was on Facebook or Twitter or email. All our immediate friends and family are safe and accounted for, and I’m very grateful for that. There are comrades from groups we worked with when we lived in Tokyo – in the unions, in the socialist press – still missing, though, and I think of them and their families. We all worry about what’s next, about the reactor, about Fukushima and beyond.

As places for donations and workers’ aid become available, I’ll post their details here.

*

If you can love a city, I love Tokyo.

The Rev. Jan Cheong-Woon from the Asia Pacific Workers’ Solidarity Corea sent a message to his Japanese colleagues over the weekend. It ended with an old slogan, and a good one for these days:

We have had a terrible reminder of the destructive power of nature.

Long live international solidarity

Sources

I’ve taken the Tanizaki quote from Seidensticker’s Low City, High City. The official statement on the Great Kanto Earthquake is from de Boer and Sanders, Earthquakes in Human History (Princeton University Press, 2005). The Kobe Shimbun quotes are from Yasuko Takezawa, “The Great Hanshin Earthquake and Town-Making Towards Multiculturalism” in Graburn, Ertl and Tierney (eds.), Multiculturalism in the New Japan (Berghahn, 2008).

The 2-chan quotes are taken from Rumi Sakamoto’s very helpful “Koreans, Go Home! Internet Nationalism in Contemporary Japan as a Digitally Mediated Subculture”, published at Japan Focus. I’m not linking to 2-channeru itself for obvious reasons of political hygiene.

To the North, to the North

2011-02-25T19:08:00.004+13:00

January’s Artforum has an interesting short essay by Joan Kee (not, unfortunately, available online). She subjects Ryu Hwan-gi’s 2002 painting Soldiers Longing for Return to the kind of close reading socialist realist works rarely receive, and comes up with some valuable reflections along the way. Prune the inevitable prose tics of Pyongyangology (Kim Jong-il as the “diabolically shrewd heir”, “one of the world’s most secretive countries…”) and there’s writing with real insight and use.

Ryu Hwan-gi is one of the DPRK’s foremost artists, and Kee reads this work against the resistance of its generic conventions to interpretation:

Socialist-realist works have an uncanny way of plunging their viewers into a narrative and then leaving them there without hope of an exit. This tends to close down interpretation so the work can be read only within the bounds of allegory.

Soldiers Longing for Return slips this particular allegorising knot, Kee suggests, by way of its size, depicting this scene on what is, for a socialist-realist work, a relatively modest, small-scale representation. That, and its stray details from domestic life, make “a case for an alternative domesticity cast squarely within the frame of the martial.”

I won’t rehearse any more of Kee’s argument here; it’s worth you looking up the essay to follow her thoughts there.

Instead, I’d like to leave a stray detail of my own, one which came up through this reading of a reading. Do we need finer distinctions within the groups of work we call socialist realist? Kee’s right that it’s worth registering the fact that “so many paintings produced outside the neo-liberal metropoles remain firmly wedded to socialist realism”, although I don’t find her political account of that continuity convincing. More important, perhaps, are distinctions which touch both problems of representation and of ideology.

Debates about Socialist Realism (the boy meets tractor school of film, as the joke goes) have lost most of their intensity on the left in recent decades because the Stalinist state capitalisms which were the approach’s patrons and producers are mostly gone. The line that the two qualities socialist realism had was that it wasn’t socialist and wasn’t realist fits that era, but repeating it again now won’t take us further.

More precise, maybe, to read this image with the Juche idea as the masterplot we’ve got in mind, instead of the Russian and Zhdanovite narrative the term Socialist Realism carries along inside itself. If Socialist Realism of the ‘classic’ kind carried out the ideological work of romanticising and celebrating a non-existent freedom (murals of happy workers decorating factories where bureaucratic exploitation flourished), North Korean art more often contributes to reinforcing a sense of history at a standstill, representing the present as endless re-runs of the first years of the Korean War. The repetition of martial themes in North Korean art is one thing; their exaggerated grotesquery of war’s dangers and destructiveness is quite another.

It’s a Sea of Blood, as the title of the famous film and opera goes. Labelling something propaganda is a first step; specifying the aims and influences of that propaganda, as any good advertising student knows, requires more detail still.

Against that context Ryu’s image and its turning of “the very private space of the bedroom into a public space.” What we’re being hailed as here, though, I don’t fully know.

Links

There’s an in-depth Al Jazeera documentary on the DPRK’s film industry you can see here.

And meanwhile the struggle to think about what Courbet called “real realism” continues: Gene Ray’s essay on "Dialectical Realism and Radical Commitments: Brecht and Adorno on Representing Capitalism" in the last Historical Materialism is very fine, and a good antidote if you’ve started at too many monumental lies for too long.

Stood Loyal Right Through

2011-02-11T16:26:00.010+13:00

For a hundred and fifty-one days a lockout
The kids and Mum get a knockout!
The union funds pay, then run out
Hey, when will men have liberty
To stand together in unity?
A thousand votes but the company:
Lockouts! Knockouts!
Watch out, they’ll get the cops out!

This weekend is the start of a series of sixtieth anniversaries, all part of the complex story of how in 1951 Waterside Workers’ Union members were locked out of their job for 151 days. The lock-out and its supporting strikes – massive struggles in their own right – were part of one of those shameful episodes which give the lie to the idea that New Zealand history is a story of peaceful negotiation and social consensus. Lives were lost, democratic rights abolished, and people persecuted, all in the effort to smash the threat that the WWU’s confidence, militancy and idealism posed to the Cold War order.

So, it’s sixty years this Sunday since WWU members started to refuse overtime; sixty years Monday week since Holland’s National government declared a State of Emergency, suspending the most basic of democratic rights, and criminalising aid and publicity for the wharfies.

The heroism, dedication and courage of the men and women who fought that battle deserves celebration whatever its wider significance or consequence – reading reminiscences and accounts of the Lock-Out is an education in the power of ideas when combined with organisation, and a reminder of the astounding moral and intellectual resources workers’ organisations can summon in their defence. It’s a reminder, too, of the ruthlessness of those with power when their power and authority is threatened: Holland’s government made it an offense to provide food for locked-out workers’ families, and outlawed and censored any reporting or advocacy of the WWU’s side of the story (the vast bulk of journalism, liberal and otherwise, was perfectly happy to self-censor anyhow).

There is wider significance to this story, though. It’s one of those terrible defeats which contained within it the lineaments of a victory: if the watersiders hadn’t fought, what then for workers’ organisation and rights in the years following 1951? If National hadn’t faced 151 days of militant union activity, what confidence might they have had then, proceeding unchallenged? More than these mitigating factors, the WWU’s battle kept alive an ideal and example of self-activity and a vision of workers’ control in a Cold War-world determined to obliterate any trace of that tradition. Rosa Luxemburg, just before her own death, wrote about this peculiar kind of defeat:

What does the entire history of socialism and of all modern revolutions show us? The first spark of class struggle in Europe, the revolt of the silk weavers in Lyon in 1831, ended with a heavy defeat; the Chartist movement in Britain ended in defeat; the uprising of the Parisian proletariat in the June days of 1848 ended with a crushing defeat; and the Paris commune ended with a terrible defeat. The whole road of socialism – so far as revolutionary struggles are concerned – is paved with nothing but thunderous defeats. Yet, at the same time, history marches inexorably, step by step, toward final victory! Where would we be today without those “defeats,” from which we draw historical experience, understanding, power and idealism? Today, as we advance into the final battle of the proletarian class war, we stand on the foundation of those very defeats; and we can do without any of them, because each one contributes to our strength and understanding.

An important reason to celebrate, then, is to keep alive the memory of those men and women from whom we draw “historical experience, understanding, power and idealism.” The ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ has been more than usually condescending with this story; more often than not it’s been positively slanderous. Some years ago reviewer Don Aimer tried to wrap his contempt for the watersiders and their example in feminist garb:

It was all very well for the males to write up the dispute as a sort of industrial charge of the Light Brigade, an act of courageous defiance against intolerable odds in the face of fascist oppressors, but it caused a great deal of family disruption (interesting to contemplate were the values which required young people to give up their studies to earn money so that their fathers could remain staunch), marriage splits and hardship which continued in years for some cases.

Some concern, this, which erases the record of women’s involvement in the struggle as organisers, agitators, and leaders. Women were central to the lock-out, in both more traditional domestic roles and supporters, and as they developed or learnt new roles as fighters and campaigners. Women organised rallies, confronted police violence, spoke for the watersiders’ cause: they were, in other words, activists and active subjects in their own history, not the objects for our pity and pious ‘concern.’ Rona Bailey, who took great personal risk supporting the WWU, remembered: “People have asked me since whether I regretted being involved in all this because of the strain and stress. My reply was always ‘Never!’ It was a privilege to be involved in the struggle, and a phenomenal learning experience as well.” The distinguished feminist playwright Renee, whose play Pass It On pays tribute to the women fighters of 1951, recorded “today I think of all the women who stood loyal right throughout those 151 days and after. And I say to you, those women were not just marvellous, they were walking bloody miracles! Pass it on.”

Walking down Cuba Street in the weekend I imagine the scene sixty years ago, when unionists were attacked by police for holding a peaceful march, and batoned and beaten for trying to express their views.

*

For a hundred and fifty-one days, they shut up.
The secretary’s put in the lock-up
The country is told there’s a muck-up
They lock us out, then call it a strike.
The union is wrong unless it moves right
And working men must never unite
Or they’ll lock out, knock out,
Watch out, they’ve got the cops out.

Who did defeat the watersiders, then? One way celebrating and commemorating this great struggle can contribute to “our strength and understanding” is if it prompts us to reflect on these questions.

The standard liberal answer to this, usually, is that the watersiders were out of touch with the values of the mainstream of their society and, mislead by a waywardly militant leadership, they found themselves fighting an impossible struggle. Even the poet Bill Sewell, in his beautiful collection The Ballad of Fifty-One, echoes this line:

The men in the sitting-room
In shirtsleeves and braces,
a smoko getting out of hand,
and Jock full of headstrong phrases,
his head, his head, in the sand.

This misses the context and dynamics which led to the lock-out, though. One vital lesson for us from the ’51 is that we don’t pick whether to fight or not: the other side will do that for us. The question is always how that struggle is pursued. Having identified a union not prepared to go along with the Cold War consensus, New Zealand’s employers and the government were determined to provoke a fight with the watersiders in order to see them defeated. Sid Holland, in his own words, set out a challenge which had to be read as a provocation:

And I issued them what would be interpreted as being an ultimatum. And said that the government would be loath to take any extreme action, but we felt that, if conditions of emergency did exist, that we would require the powers of such a proclamation to deal with the situation.

Contrary to the liberal view, it’s a fantasy to imagine that a workers’ movement committed to democratic organising and political independence could have avoided a show-down.

The WWU’s leader Jock Barnes summed this up well, in his introduction to Dick Scott’s history, 151 Days:

"As surely as night follows day, an offensive by the Holland Government against the workers of New Zealand was inevitable. And years of inspired press propaganda had made it clear that the New Zealand Waterside Workers Union would be objective number one. Its record of progressive thought and militant policy, not only for its own members but for the working class as a whole, had made that certain ... The intended blitzkrieg developed into a long and costly offensive. While thousands of workers, their wives and children, suffered dearly, money power took some mighty blows. It is still licking its wounds. The boss is always the worker’s greatest organiser, and he educated tens of thousands of workers in the fundamentals of capitalist economy... The working class can thank those who fought for the conditions they still enjoy. Every day suffered by a miner’s wife and children, every further day that a freezing worker, watersider or seaman stood and fought back, reduced the chances of a general offensive."

More uncomfortable reflections follow this. Reading around the history of the lock-out, it’s soon clear that the National government would never have been able to sustain its attacks had it not faced a divided union movement, a supine parliamentary Labour opposition (Nash was “neither for the watersiders nor against them”, a position as baffling then as it is now), and a mainstream union leadership – in particular around Fintan Patrick Walsh – more concerned with neutralising the political challenge they saw in the WWU than with facing the threat the government’s offensive posed to all workers.

All this suggests, then, that most of the lessons we’ve learnt from 1951 are wrong. One of those lessons, for decades now, has been that unions can’t win in head-on confrontations with the government. Reflecting on the divisions within our own side – and the politics which hampered effective solidarity being sustained in that struggle – throw up questions of relevance for today. Tom Bramble, who edited Jock Barnes’ memoirs Never A White Flag, draws out the political conclusions from these questions:

Can it seriously be proposed that the New Zealand union movement has benefited from this cautious strategy? Union membership continues to fall, workplace union organisation is in disarray if not collapsed in many former strongholds, and cynicism about unionism is widespread. Over the long term, passivity is far more damaging to the union movement than defeated upsurges, for it saps the very life from the unions and lends no lessons to union activists other than frustration and resignation.

This 60th anniversary year is one in which we face new anti-union legislation, a Tory government, and uncertain economic times. I pay tribute to the bravery of the women and men of the ’51 and, in their examples, activity, and legacy, I think we can all look for lessons in our own time.

Sources

The images I’ve scanned from my copy of Dick Scott’s classic 151 Days: History of the Great Waterfront Lockout and Supporting Strikes (Wellington: New Zealand Waterside Workers’ Union, Deregistered, 1952).

The quotes from Bailey and Renee are taken from pp. 44, 48 of David Grant (ed.), The Big Blue Snapshots of the 1951 Waterfront Lockout (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2004), as are the lines of the anonymous poem “151 Days” (p. 21), although I first learnt these from Tony Simpson’s older Road to Erewhon.

Don Aimer’s lines are from New Zealand Books March 2005, p. 19, and are chosen only because I have them easily to hand: there are worse sentiments expressed by others elsewhere.

Tom Bramble’s questions are from p. 26 of his excellent introduction to Jock Barnes, Never a White Flag (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1998).

Bill Sewell's The Ballad of Fifty-One was brought out by HeadWorx in 2003, just before his tragically premature death. The quote I've taken is from p. 69.

Tokyo Compression

2011-01-29T16:34:00.012+13:00

Alienation is one obvious masterplot in which to fix Tokyo Compression, Michael Wolf’s unsettling, voyeuristic images from the Odakyu line.

This certainly is how I first read these photographs, and how at first I framed them for others.

...in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind...the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another…the worker’s activity [is] not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self... (Marx, 1844 Manuscripts)

There’s no doubt Tokyo Compression provide us with a shock of recognition. Here’s one part of Tokyo’s “deep acidic loneliness…the city full of lonely people”, an unsettlingly specific catalogue of one part of everyday life which, to work, requires a sort of generalized lack of specificity, as commuters avoid eye contact or acknowledgement of physical presence in order to make it all bearable.

Rail networks link and connect, too; they’re prime sites for thinking through movements of people and goods, the working of a city and “the coordination of existential data (the empirical position of the subject) with unlived, abstract conceptions of the geographic totality.” These are images from a basic unit of Tokyo experience.

But masterplots lay traps. I sent these images on to a friend in Tokyo and got an angry response in return. She rejected the pity and disgust these photos worked to programme, the way they framed her as an outsider peering in on others, trapped like animals in a zoo display, presented without any agency or chance for choice or activity of their own.

I’d missed one obvious way of reading, mislaid by my own masterplot into a naïve, and patronising, underreading.

There is, to be sure, an ethical discomfort we should feel as viewers here: these are photos of people who clearly were uncomfortable being photographed (something Wolf has acknowledged and attempted to think through), and photos which place us in a very specific – externalised, cooly distanced – relation to what we’re gazing in at.

Remember, though: Glotzen ist nicht sehen.

I’d missed another point.

The city is a construction in space, but one of vast scale, a thing perceived only in the course of long spans of time…Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequence of events leading up to it, the memory of past experience. (Lynch)

These are images at pains to stress their own framing and devised nature – beautiful, certainly, in their use of stray detail and compression to ‘hold’ a moment – and that very self-consciousness sets off other questions.

Where’s the movement? Trains contain commuters, but they also carry them: they transport, they connect. A nicely practical aesthetic question, then: what does it mean to look at still shots like this, to see a rail network as it stops? What might be missing?

That becomes another way of asking, as I think more on it, about the possibilities of seeing alienation on its own, or whether we need to reach for the wider, dynamic totality of which it’s a part. That’s one way of saying there’s more to cities:

To be modern…is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. (Marshall Berman)

Like everyone else I have felt the also the chaos of the metro and the traffic jam; the monotony of the ranks of houses; the aching press of strange crowds. But this is not an experience at all, not an adult experience, until it has come to include also the dynamic movement, in these centres of settled and often magnificant achievement. (Raymond Williams)

Is that, finally, then, again a question of politics?

The reactionary nature of any realist aesthetics today is inseperable from this commodity character. Tending to reinforce, affirmatively, the phenomenal surface of society, realism dismisses any attempt to penetrate that surface as a romantic endeavour…Film is faced with the dilemma of finding a procedure which neither lapses into arts-and-crafts nor slips into a mere documentary mode. (Adorno)

The rail unions in Japan are about to start their annual Spring Offensive. That points towards another masterplot, of course, and one I wouldn’t know how to narrate off these images. I’ve left them hanging here, with counter-quotations which came to mind as I bothered over my friend’s reply, and the shallowness of my own first way of seeing, as a way of trying to keep the questions which came up at work. They’re hard questions, but old ones.

Sources

Thanks for Michael Wolf for permission to reproduce these images, and to David McNeill, who drew my attention to them in the first place. You can buy Tokyo Compresion here.

The line on Tokyo as the "city full of lonely people" is from Carl Shuker’s masterpiece The Method Actors, p. 126.

The Adorno quote is from “Transperencies on Film”, in J M Berstein (ed), The Culture Industry (Routledge, 2001), p. 182.

Marshall Berman, All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity (Penguin, 1982), p. 345.

Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (MIT Press, 1960), p. 1

Williams, The Country and the City (Paladin, 1975), pp. 14 – 15.

The Rent Due for a Skull

2011-01-08T19:44:00.014+13:00

This is a political parable,
a harbour at low tide.

Like most self-absorbed bookish people, I was a particularly narcissitic and introverted youngster. Who am I? is, naturally, every teenager’s favourite question, and one with a particular charge for those of us located in social formations shaped by white settler colonialism.

This painting helped with that query, and it still does.

Dunedin Public Library bought McCahon’s Otago Peninsula in 1947, shortly after it was first shown at Modern Books, and it’s been with them ever since. In the late 1990s and early 200s I worked at the library and, each day, made sure I’d look at this painting. It moved me intensely then, and still does, as much for what it represents as for its own artistic achievement.

What it represents is where, more or less, I’m from, and is the part of the world I feel the greatest attachment to, but McCahon’s appeal as a tool for teenaged myth-making suggests other, more symptomatic, affiliations for me now.

Most obviously, there are no people. That’s self-absorption again, sure (“people seemed rather profane”), but also it indicates a choice in political fantasies: South Island myth instead of “natural occupancy”. The fit between personal story and wider ideology seems so neat now, the gestures of affiliation so dishonest, I’m struck by how strongly they’re still felt.

Because, of course, this isn’t a landscape without people at all. The road out along the peninsula was built by convict labour and those convicts were prisoners of a one-sided war, victims of the government’s attack on the settlement at Parihaka in Taranaki. Prophets Te Whiti O Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi led resistance to land confiscations and the assaults of the Crown on their people’s land.

The response, as today’s Ministry for Culture and Heritage gloss it:

In 1879 the government began to survey 16,000 acres of the confiscated Waimate Plain without setting aside Maori reserves. In response, Maori, led by Te Whiti and Tohu, began ploughing land occupied by settlers. Arrests followed, but the pace of protest continued to grow. Parihaka became a symbol for many Maori, and its people received food and other supplies from many tribes throughout the country – including those as far away as the Chatham Islands.

On 5 November 5 1881 a force of almost 1,600 Armed Constabulary and volunteers, led by Native Minister John Bryce, invaded Parihaka. The Maori inhabitants, numbering about 2,000, put up no resistance. Instead they greeted Bryce and his men with bread and song. They were dispersed and Te Whiti and Tohu were arrested. The soldiers then systematically wrecked the settlement, and Maori tradition speaks of brutality and rape.

We visisted the memorial to the fallen on our way out to Taiaroa Head.

Their followers were scattered in convict gangs around the country. In Otago they were kept, in what must have been awful - and awfully cold and dark - conditions, and many of them died building the road out to Portobello.

You can still see the secure doors into the hillside, reminders of this act of confiscation and war.

I’m shocked, and chastened, to think how often I’ve been driven unthinking past these signs of colonialism’s recent - and unresolved - foundational acts of violence.

In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part.

Colonial violence manages to be both pervasive and invisible. Here is the memorial to the dead and their unmarked graves, in the Northern Cemetery not far from my parents’ house, and on the way to my old high school.

Recognising that, and reflecting on its implications for what comes next, is essential. Most of the sneering done against white liberal guilt is part of a rear-guard action opposing not guilt but recognition of historical wrong (cf local variations on what Paul Gilroy calls postcolonial melancholia). You can’t feel for this part of the world and not learn to see it historically; I can’t think back on my earlier veneration for McCahon’s Otago Peninsula without seeing now some unconscious evasion.

But this isn’t enough, is it? Guilt paralyses, disabling more productive political responses (to say nothing of ‘white’ or ‘liberal’, two other terms I’d reject for reasons I’ll leave for another day). And I still love that painting, and for some of the reasons I first loved it too. Recognition of historical wrong-doing is essential, as is reparation from those responsible and, within our movement, support for the struggle which continues. Remembering all the variations on “the stain of blood that writes an island story” is one task but isn’t, on its own, enough.

Another peninsula memory suggests itself. This season last year, just back from Tokyo, in Dunedin for a friend’s wedding, we stayed overnight at a crib (holiday house) at Ōtākou. It was a marvelous night: swimming in early evening sunlight, enjoying a barbeque, drinking and talking with friends under the stars. It’s hard to think of many other situations where people of the kind I know could afford a beach-front holiday house. That party and that largely Pākehā gathering’s relaxed sociability was possible, though, because we were on Maori land. I mean this quite literally: it's Ngāi Tahu land. Te Runaka o Ōtākou administer the land on which the cribs are leased, and it is their conditions - no fences, no expensive developments, accessibility - which makes the area so affordable and friendly, a centre with a rich history of working-class holidaying and recreation (my own grandparents in the 1960s had something similar). Ōtākou is a centre for Kai Tahu, of course, and, from it, they’ve created quite special possibilities for Pākehā.

That particular hospitality is not an experience from which I want to generalize too glibly but, given the status of the foreshore in current New Zealand politics, it feels like one which matters.

So that, readers, is how I spent my summer.

A Note on the South Island Myth

Since it’s deployed in the more-or-less orthodox fashion above, I’m putting a wee note here to indicate it’s more complicated than all that (all that being, among other things, Stephen Turner’s line from Quicksands we all seem forever to be quoting about how “the will to forget the trauma of dislocation and unsettlement has taken the form of a psychic structure”). There’s much more at work. See Richard Reeve’s very thoughtful piece on the myth and contemporary poetry.

I should also make it clear here, if the text above isn’t, that what I’m criticizing is my own initial imaginative investments in McCahon, not McCahon’s own relationship with Te Ao Maori, some of the tragic complexity of which Ian Wedde has explored elsewhere.

Showing Three Inches of Steel

2010-12-13T22:02:00.008+13:00

[Donate to the EMPU Pike River Miners Families Support Trust here]

The Japanese are, we’re all supposed to agree, a people much given to inscrutability, indirection, politeness and platitudes. Consider, then, this excerpt from a speech from miners’ union activist Minami Sukematsu, delivered to a meeting immediately before the Ashio riots in 1907. The speech - to set the tone for the evening - had the nicely inflammatory title “Showing Three Inches of Steel to Minami Teizō”:

“If the cruel and arrogant Director Minami does not reconsider his actions now, I shall show him three inches of steel and suggest that he commit seppuku. If that does not make him see the error of his ways, then we shall not refrain from resorting to extraordinary measures.” (136-7)

Not the sort of language my union taught me at delegate training! If showing three inches of steel doesn’t count as an extraordinary measure, the mine bosses at Ashio were soon to find out what did. Another speaker at the meeting, Nagaoka Tsuruzō, outlined the kind of figures the union was dealing with:

“The director is an unfeeling, cold-blooded man. Once when he was crossing the Hoso-o pass in a litter, he ordered the bearers to hurry, and they had to run at top speed all the way without being given a single rest to get their breath! When the world gets such a glimpse of the man, it’s not difficult to see the cruel and harsh manner in which he treats Ashio workers!” (136)

Working people don't have enough to eat!

That cruel and harsh manner detonated, in the days following this meeting, an intensive period of rioting, street fighting, arson and rebellion, which transformed the copper mining town of Ashio, and working-class politics in Japan more generally.

I’ve taken these quotes from Nimura Kazuo’s The Ashio Riot of 1907: A Social History of Mining in Japan, an immensely rich document of historical reconstruction, sociological analysis and political inspiration. Nimura - part of that extraordinary group of scholars grouped around the Ohara Institute for Social Research at Hosei University - has dedicated many decades of work to rescuing the miners of Ashio from the “enormous condescension of posterity.” His research restores to us a sense of the miners as historical agents, and places the riot within the context of labour choices, and labour strategy.

Nimura’s work is an extended polemic against what was, before his own pioneering studies, the dominant historiographical view of the riots: that they were a spontaneous event borne out of frustration and atomization. On the contrary, Nimura shows, the “leading participants in the riot belonged to brotherhoods, labour organizations akin to craft guilds, which had traditions going back to Tokugawa times. Totally unorganized workers would not have had the strength to start a riot.” (139) The fighting around Ashio reflected the difficulties the activists faced winning changes in the mines, and the intransigence of the mine bosses: their strategy of escalation, then, was one based on political calculation, not thoughtless despair.

The Ashio riot offers plenty of detail to deepen our understanding of combined and uneven development, too. Nimura criticizes historians who have looked at early labour unions in Asia only to measure them against “organizational forms that were standard in the West”, claiming that “they were not looking to examine concretely their actual function, but rather to hanging dismissive labels on them such as ‘feudalistic’ and ‘premodern.’” (138).

Events at Ashio, however, showed how the highly advanced and the premodern existed together, and shaped one another. Mine union groups grew out of older Tokugawa-era secret brotherhoods and wanderers’ groups, using these traditions in conversation with socialism and Christianity coming in from Tokyo-based intellectuals and activists, while the bosses maintained older guild and lodge systems alongside these. Of the lodge system in particular, Nimura observes, “the premodern character of the labour force continue to exist within the capitalist structure, as long as it enabled capitalist managers to exploit their workers effectively, and it was used by management only as long as it did not contradict that purpose.” (174). Just as Ashio was the most advanced mine in Japan yet had an unresolved and ancient problem at its centre - how to actually extract ore - so too the workers’ organizations combined far-sighted political consciousness and radicalism with older rituals, symbols and patterns.

Reading about Ashio produces one of those strange senses of distance and proximity I often feel reading labour history. With so many of the details, it’s hard to imagine a social world further from my own than the Ashio of the middle of the Meiji era. And yet, across that distance, just listing the issues the miners’ leaders thought to strategise over reveals a world uncannily similar to our own: casualisation, migrant labour patterns, authoritarianism in the workplace, management bullying, wage rates, stability, conditions.

There’s a final insight the Ashio miners have to give our movement now. Capitalism is well established by 1907 but, at this stage in the Meiji era, it isn’t yet within a class society adept at pretending not to be one. Tokugawa-era attitudes persist, and not just among the elite. The miners’ case is reported in two major journals, one, Shakaishugi, named for an idea (socialism), another, Shūkan heimin shinbun, a group: it’s the “commoners’ weekly.” That combination of idealism and insight served the miners well, and their self-identification with the “commoners” (rise with your class, not out of it!) still makes more sense than contemporary third-way blether about the aspirational.

I’ll end with the best and the worst of the story in the miners’ words themselves.

The worst, of course, was what they had to endure before their riots:

To be able to get any white rice or miso paste from the company store, you have to go down the mine, and you can’t make ends meet. When you go into debt because rice and miso paste cost more than you earn, you get money from your reserve fund…before you know it you’re in debt to the boss. If you can’t raise the output, the only thing you can do is get out. When you’re sick, no matter what the size of your family, you’re never given more than five days’ supply of rice…so in the end you starve.

The best was what the struggle made of the men and women who opposed this set-up. Here’s Nagaoka Tsuruzō again:

I went on to Innai silver mine in Akita prefecture in the winter…worked hard until the summer of the following year and made a lot of money, but lost it at gambling as usual and was dirt poor. I couldn’t stand it, so partly out of despair and partly because I liked a good fight, my greatest pleasure was in getting into scrapes with any number of other fellows. Once - I was reading The Seven Spears of Shizugatake at the time - a fight broke out amongst a bunch of miners. Fancying myself as the hero of the book, Katō Kiyomasa, and with only three others on my side, I waded in to a group of about twenty. We were so strong that they all lost heart, and we won the fight. In those days I used to love throwing others around in a fight and generally making a nuisance of myself, but now I prefer to suffer for others; I like working, spilling my blood, and enduring poverty to help improve their lives. This is what gives me pleasure now. (242)

Sources

I’ve taken these images from the website of the Ohara Institute for Social Research, Hosei University, a wonderful resource for anyone interested in the history of the workers’ movement in Japan.

Nimura Kazuo has made a number of his writings available in English here. You can buy his book The Ashio Riot of 1907: A Social History of Mining in Japan, ed. Andrew Gordon, trans. Terry Boardman and Andrew Gordon (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997) here.

Dead Man's Ember

2010-12-05T11:26:00.004+13:00

Silence here this last month, not for want of things to say - if only! - but due to all sorts of time pressures and deadlines and, ahem, life changes, personal and professional, all of which managed to organize themselves to fall together all at once.

One fun pressure, though, was organising with Liam McIlvanney a symposium down in Dunedin for St Andrews day, on poetic relations between James K Baxter and Robert Burns.

I had such a good time down there, and the symposium was as good an event as I could have imagined it being. Important details first: the day was free and open to the public, thanks to the generosity and democratic ideals of the folk running the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies. That makes for a tough, well-read and exacting audience, all the more so given Dunedin's historical connections with both figures. It’s also, it seems to me, like free and open publishing online, one of the material pre-requisites enabling the kind of work - and audience - we need in the humanities.

All the speakers were stimulating and left me with plenty of pondering to be getting on with. There was so much research and reflection supporting all the presentations, and they fed into one another in useful ways. I’m grateful to them all for the obvious work they’d put in, and the effort of engagement that went in to the day and the conversations surrounding it. There were writerly reflections; on national bards and poetic form from Ian Wedde (about whom I’ve enthused over earlier); on debt and influence from Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, on Burns and animals from Keri Hulme. We had careful scholarship from critics John Dennison (whose JNZL piece on cross-cultural poetics you should read if you haven’t yet), Paul Millar, Lawrence Jones and Geoff Miles, and historical work from John Stenhouse and Penny Griffith.

Oh, and on Burns: do look up the latest International Journal of Scottish Literature, a special issue on Burns at 250. It’s another free and open venture, in keeping with today’s theme. All the articles are worthwhile; I want to draw your attention in particular to Liam McIlvanney’s editorial, which rehearses a few of the points he made during the symposium, and Jeffrey Skoblow’s two talks on Burns, the first of which is a particularly fine and free-wheeling set of reflections on song and the nation.

Zen Flesh, Zen Bones

2010-10-31T21:12:00.004+13:00

Amidst all the Islamophobia and shrill ‘new atheism’ thrown up by the war on terror, it makes for a striking contrast to consider the reputation of Buddhism in the West. From the Beats to the Beastie Boys, Buddhism’s kept its reputation in the West as the progressive’s choice in faiths, the peaceful and tolerant religion, glossed by Damien Keown in his Very Short Introduction like this:

Buddhism also seems in harmony with the other dominant contemporary Western ideology, namely secular liberalism. Buddhism is undogmatic, even to the extent of instructing its followers not to accept its teachings uncritically, but always to test them in the light of their own experience…Buddhsm is more concerned with the development of understanding than the acceptance of creedal formulas (OUP, 2000)

A nice reminder then, via Jerryson and Jurgensmeyer’s Buddhist Warfare, of the fact that, like all religious traditions, Buddhism’s been shaped by - and has in turn shaped - the history it has developed within. That’s a history of class society, so a history of war.

Here’s Takuan Soho (沢庵宗彭) from the Rinzai School of Zen, on the philosophical uses of war, and the Buddhist values of violence:

The uplifted sword has no will of its own, it is all of emptiness. It is like a flash of lightning. The man who is about to be struck down is also of emptiness, and so is the one who wields the sword. None of them are possessed of a mind that has any substantiality. As each of them is of emptiness and has no ‘mind’, the striking man is not a man, the sword in his hand is not a sword a sword and the ‘I’ who is about to be struck down is like the splitting of the spring breeze in a flash of lightning.

I’m not knocking the bloke, naturally; he’s had a delicious side dish named after him, and stars in the manga バガボンド, so there’s a legacy there I need to acknowledge.

But historicising’s important, yes? Anyone who’s read their D T Suzuki with any attentiveness shouldn’t be surprised here. Religious discourse and organization are a part of the totality of their social world - from Hong Xiuquan’s Heavenly Kingdom to Korean Christianity in the democracy movement of the 80s to Falung Gong today - and their contradictions and insights are inseperable. We can’t pick and choose what aspects of traditions we want to acknowledge and, more importantly, a pseudo-progressive mystical Orientalism is still an Orientalism.

So watch out for the uplifted sword!

Cold Racism versus Memory

2010-10-13T21:03:00.008+13:00

It feels so long since those few months when, just a year ago, Hatoyama’s election brought with it the feeling there were new opportunities for Zainichi. Hatoyama made a great play of his appeal to voters as “citizens” and not “members of the nation,” and planned extending some voting rights to some non-citizens (although, of course, DPRK citizens were excluded from all this with the scorn and conceit to which we’re all accustomed). The autumn of 2009 was alive, in the Zainichi activist circles I moved in, with a sense of possibility: whatever the (massive) cynicism of Ozawa and Hatoyama, their commitment to electoral reform was of long standing, and the introduction of these topics into official discourse above opened spaces for contributions from more radical voices below.

Times change, yes? Obama humbled Hatoyama over Okinawa; Ozawa’s had, shall we say, problems; the question of relations with China, and half-heartedness at best amongst big sections of the DPJ itself, have eclipsed Koreans’ democratic rights as the political questions of the day.

Meanwhile, all the crap of ages continues. Jamie has written about the offensive and violent antics of the creeps in 'Zaitokukai' (在日特権を許さない市民の会), all that stalking of school-children and picketing of playgrounds no doubt an expression of innately Japanese dignity and somehow showing 和 at work. It’s important to stress, as Jamie does, that this weirdness isn’t an aberration from standard conservative norms but is, instead, their expression, the end-product of what Ranciere has described as ‘cold racism’:

The racism that we have in today's case is a cold racism, an intellectual construction. It is primarily a creation of the state. We have discussed the relationship between the state of law and the police state. But it is the very nature of the state that it is a police state, an institution that fixes and controls identities, spaces, and movements, an institution in permanent struggle against any surplus over its account of identities, that is to say it also struggles against that excess to the logic of identity that constitutes the action of political subjects.

Jamie’s post draws an important connection between this ‘cold racism’, the passion from above, the antics of the far right, and the crisis of historical memory in Japan, the product of the decades-long project of revisionism and state-sponsored denial.

So much of this struggle seems to be over the status of victimhood, who gets to claim it, and how, hence, among other things, the popularity of Kobayashi Yoshinori’s conservative manga, with their reassuring message that a sorting out of the facts will reveal the (implied) reader to have been among the victims all along.

One, important, way to counter this framing of victimhood as a rightist political mobilizing category is to insist on the historical record and honest accounting. That’s necessary but, I suspect, insufficient: a complementary approach, drawing on those moments when memory has played a central, and transformative, role in Japanese politics, has insisted on contesting the right’s ownership of the category of victim itself. Records of the horrors and the impact of the Pacific War and, sometimes, of the shock of the realization of war guilt and complicity, have been used by artists to create a sense of commonality between ordinary Japanese victims of the war and people in the colonized nations. Against “cold racism” from above – and its noxious by-products – the project of historical memory has held out the chance for the oppressed in Japan to re-imagine their relations to the forces above them.

John Dower’s Embracing Defeat reproduces a waka from a village poetry magazine from 1947:

The crimes of Japanese soldiers
who committed unspeakable atrocities
in Nanking and Manila
must be atoned for.

Another reads

Vividly, the traces
of the Japanese Army’s atrocities are shown.
Suddenly, a sharp gasp.

One of Saeki Jinzaburo’s poem on atrocities in China was censored by the occupying forces for mentioning regret at losing the war:

So full of grief is this day
that it made me forget
the vexation of the day
we lost the war.

The next great moment of historical memory was the 1960s and 70s, spurred by the radicalism of the student movement. It’s the readership of this era’s war works I find the most interesting to think about, with so many settled into middle age and with decades’ of coping and managing of memory behind them. Most well known internationally is Nakazawa’s はだしのゲン (about which now see the autobiography of Barefoot Gen): so often consumed as an account of the bomb and of war’s depravations, the tale is also an insertion into ‘official’ memory of the story of anti-war and leftist families, victims with an awareness of the victimizing occurring across Asia.

Shizuko Go waited thirty years to write レクイエム (Requiem), her account of the bombing and destruction of Yokohama. Its primary purpose, decent and vital, is to serve as another ‘report on experience’:

People walked abruptly out of one another’s lives. A friend who’d waved goodbye on Kawasaki Station platform died the same night in a firebomb attack; a kindly factory hand who’d given the girls a share when the workers had received a ration of frozen mandarins received his draft papers and wasn’t at his bench one morning. As each day began, the exchange of greetings was full of the joy of having met again, while eyes meeting in farewell each evening held the sorrow of knowing this might be the last time (90).

In representing this in the 1970s, though, Go was also intervening in that political moment, stressing the “ugliness” (98) of the truth of Japan’s war record, the “free-for-all” (98) of Nanking, the “vile acts” (99):

That beautiful something to believe in was not to be found. Not in the turmoil of Yokohama Station, nor in the emptiness of the silent factory; there was no consolation, no answer to her prayer. The divine wind that should have saved the nation from peril had failed to blow…all the things she had believed had disappeared without trace and only the elderly teacher’s tears, with her plea for forgiveness, had poured into the hollow of her heart. (100)

In today’s constricted political spaces, and in the face of a concerted, and largely successful, right-wing offensive, honourable if embattled artists continue in the tradition of Nakazawa and Go. The far right use the category of victim as a ploy and as a tool with which to victimize others. We can look to political strategy to combat this victimization. At the same time, thinking about the experience of victimization, and of the challenge of reconstructing and representing difficult historical memory, offers inspiration and example. The shrillness and theatricality of today’s far right point, I think, to the brittleness of the political categories they’re trying to mobilize with and around. There’s more than one way to be a victim, and more than one way to remember or contest a history.

Sources

I’ve taken quotes from Geraldine Harcourt’s translation of Requiem (The Women’s Press, 1985). The poems are from Dower, Embracing Defeat (New Press, 2000), pp 507 – 508.

You're Writing What You Know

2010-10-03T21:03:00.004+13:00

Elif Batuman’s polemic on Creative Writing courses in the last LRB was good fun, especially the sketch she attempts of the ideology at work in the talk around ‘programme fiction.’

I’m not so interested in that seemingly endless debate about whether the programmes are for the good or not (see the sensible responses from several interested parties, and try finding similarities in Carl Shuker and Tusiata Avia the next time someone tells you writing courses produce a homogenized literary voice). The programmes, and the expansion of higher education more generally, are part of new post-war social-institutional formations, like the salon or the coffee shop in centuries past, so – no surprises here, either – historicizing is in order. What’s the general ideology and authorial ideology within this literary mode of production? Batuman’s much too elegant a critic to use terms of that sort, but an aside of hers points in those directions:

Many of the problems in the programme may be viewed as the inevitable outcome of technique take as telos. The raw material hardly seems to matter anymore: for hysterical realism, everything; for minimalism, nothing much. The fetishisation of technique simultaneously assuages and aggravates the anxiety that literature might not be real work. McGurl writes of the programme as a manifestation of ‘the American dream of perfect self-expression.’ Taken as an end in itself, self-expression is surely sensed, even by those who pursue it, as a somehow suspect project, demanding shame and discipline.

This way of talking about talking about literature and literature in higher education – historicizing all that vital chatter and self-publicising as well as the self-consciously ‘critical’ statements – presents an opportunity to consider the relations between schools, book markets and ideologies of writing, a more interesting matter, if nothing more, than forever pondering whether writing can be taught or not (after all, as Robert Crawford’s The Modern Poet demonstrates, there’s been anxiety on these scores since the 1750s).

It’s not just the question of writing, either, but of reading too. Batuman, in an aside after quoting a writer’s description of their material, notes that "literature is best suited for qualitative description, not quantitative accumulation. It isn’t an unhappiness contest, or an unhappiness-entitlement contest.” That the well-to-do have always loved exotic tales of others’ misery is part of the point here, to be sure; another ought to be that diversifying the range of experiences fed into the contemporary novel, perhaps a useful step, leaves only part of the process explored or expanded. The other question is who’s reading, and how. Now, none of that feels so far away from Brecht’s questions, or some of his answers.

Number Two Home

2010-09-27T21:47:00.003+13:00

Reading Nobuko Adachi’s recent essay on “Japanese and Nikkei at Home and Abroad” over at Japan Focus prompted me to dig out my copy of Noreen Jones’ Number Two Home: The Story of Japanese Pioneers in Australia.

I found Number Two Home at the second-hand book fair during the Marxism conference in Melbourne last Easter – for $1, no less! - and got caught up in its story during the flight home. Plenty of Victorian and wild, almost Dickensian detail to this history – the first Japanese to visit Australia were acrobats; pearl diving was the main trade the community built around in Western Australia in its early years – and plenty of reminders of the grubbiness of the colonial settler state’s racist history, those petty and mean little details that sustained White Australia.

Jones reproduces documents from stories that range from the tragic (families separated and imprisoned through the war, businesses seized). the frustrating and vexatious (Murakami Yasuichi denied a driver's license to use his car as a taxi in 1912, for reasons which seemed to be all about the council's meanness).

I love local detail like this, and I hope I learn from it. Whatever the fantasies of White Australia, the continent's working class has never been 'racially' homogenous. The only constant, it seems, has been the hypocrisy of its enemies:

The Japanese who traveled or ventured inland tended to work in itinerant occupations, for example as cooks or labourers, whilst those who stayed in the smaller towns either operated or worked in small businesses such as market gardens or laundries. They were often mistakenly thought to be Chinese by the European population. There were indeed also many Chinese in those occupations. For example, at Marble Bar there were both Chinese and Japanese market gardeners. When the Anglo-Australians in the district met around 1893 to discuss the removal of Asians from the settlement, the proposal excluded those employed as gardeners and domestic servants. The white population objected to the Asiatic presence, but did not want to be deprived of their fresh vegetables, cooks, and laundrymen.

Noreen Jones, Number Two Home: the Story of Japanese Pioneers in Australia (Freemantle Arts Centre Press, 2002), p. 37.

Satoshi Kon [1963 - 2010]

2010-09-13T22:05:00.007+12:00

I have very clear memories of the first time I saw Satoshi Kon’s work, and of that sense of elation and excitement that comes when you feel like you’ve made a personal discovery and come into contact with an artist who will mean things in your own life for a long time to come. The self-conscious brilliance and exuberant madness of Paprika’s opening sections help secure that memory, as does having seen it at Canberra’s National Film and Sound Archive, a movie theatre which seems to appear out of bush-covered nowhere, thus adding to the dislocation and otherworldliness of it all.

Tributes have pointed out the massive intellectual dexterity of his films, all the off-the-cuff references and quotations and philosophical and literary sophistication. These films are useful ammunition if you ever get stuck in that tedious argument about anime not being a serious form: the way Kon managed to range from David Lynch and Philip K Dick to John Wayne and Ozu puts paid to all that.

His themes and obsessions – with the de-centred subject, with mediated memory, with images, copies, and originals, with anxiety about ‘true’ representation in a digital era – are so obviously our moment’s themes and obsessions that it seems clear to me we’ll be talking about these films for some time yet.

If that critical discussion is to have value, though, there will have to be a clear-sighted acknowledgement of the feelings energizing what I think we have to call Kon’s moral critique. Each of his works – most obviously the series Paranoia Agent and Perfect Blue – has at its core a persistent moralizing stance, a need to document and condemn what is presented as the sickness and degeneracy of modern, media-saturated society. Kon’s films are full of stray details stressing the connection between contemporary representation, technology, and falsity, miscommunication and lies. Think of his use of noise, background buzzes of malicious gossip or lies blending with the ‘buzz’ of technology and representational devices – Paranoia Agent and Paprika both make good use of this – and all those close-ups of pursed or slackly sneering mouths and made-up eyes, signifiers of an im-mediate communication lost, community habits gone sour.

Misogyny is the imaginative energy for this moral critique draws on and works within. I’m introducing the term not to give Kon a posthumous telling-off (although the aestheticisation of sexual violence in Perfect Blue, whatever its wider intentions, is appalling and should produce unease). Rather, it seems to me that the only way to get a useful reckoning of Kon’s aims and achievements is to make his misogyny central to the discussion, not as a lamentable detail incidental to the work but as its motivating and unifying structure of feeling. Women in Kon’s films stand in for the false, deceptive and untrue – think of the way prostitution as a topic and symbol appears in so many of the works, of those coldly sexual flourishes which appear so unexpectedly through Paprika, or of the way female voices and mouths figure so prominently in scenes of panic or chaos. Millennium Actress, Perfect Blue, Paprika and the Harumi Chono sub-plot in Paranoia Agent all revolve around the policing of femininity, the social and political work that goes into the creation of ‘woman’; this is their great interest, but its also the area where the heaviest moralizing work gets done, and where a symptomatic reading can be helpful. (It’s telling also that the least misogynist of Kon’s works – Tokyo Godfathers – is also the slightest). Kon recognized the importance of women for his own creative activity, even if the ideological work being done there remained obscure to him, telling an interviewer:

It's because female characters are easier to write. With a male character I can only see the bad aspects. Because I am a man I know very well what a male character is thinking. Even if he is supposed to be very cool, I can see this bad side of him. That makes it very difficult to create a male character. On the other hand, if you write a female protagonist, because it's the opposite sex and I don't know them the way I know a male, I can project my obsession onto the characters and expand the aspects I want to describe. However, my next film doesn't have one central female protagonist and until I made Perfect Blue I didn't describe female characters that much, especially in manga. Once I did, I found out it was easy to write them.

Susan J Napier is quoted in Kon’s NY Times obituary as placing Kon is a tradition of “humanist” directors and writers. This seems to me the opposite direction to the one criticism needs to be facing. (A comparison could be made with D.H. Lawrence criticism, most of which, until recently at least, if it wanted to rehabilitate Lawrence did so by trying to find a way to assemble a liberalism out of his work, without acknowledging that Lawrence stands or falls alongside his radicalism. Lawrence is at his most interesting and artistically successful when he’s at his most radically reactionary and illiberal. There's nothing to be gained from working our way around all that waywardness. Satoshi Kon feels the same.)

The anti-humanist power of these works is what I keep coming back to, the severity and relentless intelligence with which they take apart our myths of the centred subject, stable identity, coherent personal narratives. That there’s a gendered logic to all this matters. Elaborating how that logic works, and relating that logic to Kon’s wider project, might tell us about more than his own films.

Shakespeare's Seminal Economics

2010-08-28T18:33:00.010+12:00

We must find means by Trade, to vent our superfluities
[Thomas Mun, A Discourse of Trade (1621)]

All sexuality is a matter of economy
[Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus]

For some years now David Bennett has been working on a history of the connections between sexuality and economics, tracing how “the discourses of money and sex became inseparable at a certain historical moment (and quite possibly remain so)” (Bennett 1999: 288). It’s an intriguing project and, going by the rehearsals of the argument presented so far, will make a rewarding book.

The “certain historical moment”, on Bennett’s reading, occurs early in the eighteenth century. It’s from 1700 or so that discourses around masturbation change their tenor and target. But, at a 2007 seminar of Bennett’s on metaphors of “sexual spending,” his discussion started me thinking about a piece of writing from a century earlier, Shakespeare’s fourth sonnet:

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?
Nature’s bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free.
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largesse given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thyself alone
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive;
Then how when Nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Which, used, lives th’executor to be.

Is this image of the young man “spending[ing] upon” himself his “beauty’s legacy” a description of masturbatory ejaculation? As part of the early sequence of sonnets arguing for the young man to reproduce, it’s certainly surrounded by sexual imagery. Booth’s edition of the Sonnets glosses “having traffic with thyself alone” as having a sexual meaning (and echoing earlier sexual content in “all the treasure of thy lusty days” in sonnet two). The Bate and Rasmussen RSC Complete Works (surely the dirtiest-minded Complete Shakespeare to date) glosses “spend” as playing “on the sexual sense of ejaculate” (2436), and Patridge’s Shakespeare’s Bawdy offers a similar definition of spending (his quotation from All’s Well that Ends Well doesn’t bear thinking about, though). Kerrigan’s Penguin Sonnets offers no comment on spending, but does concede, rather snootily, that “some readers find in traffic with thyself a hint of masturbation; but the innuendo can be nothing more” (177).

Reader, I find that hint. What to make of it? I’m not a Renaissance literature specialist but, consulting some reasonably recent works from scholars alive to the resonances of economics and sexuality in early modern England, it’s clear that there is fascinating research being done. Shakespeare’s economic metaphors for sexual activity draw his sonnets into reflections on two of the major intellectual controversies of his time; the status of money and trade in creating value, and the proper place and movement of bodily fluids.

“Hippocrates had argued,” Jonathan Gil Harris summarises in his stimulating book Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England, “that semen, like the froth of the sea, was a foam concocted from blood. Aristotle regarded sperma as refined blood, as did Galen. If Hippocrates and Aristotle saw semen as the end point in a process of sanguineous refinement that led to generation, though, Galen saw the semen as the origin of the male body’s perfection. The loss of semen, therefore, entailed a crippling or effeminization of the male body” (146).

Where later ideologies of gender extol sexual “spending” as evidence of masculine fullness and power, Renaissance figures are much more concerned about the imbalance an ‘excess’ of sexual spending may cause. Like pre-capitalist visions of money, part of the worry is that there just won’t be enough to go around.

There’s a 1597 translation of Aristotle, for instance, maintaining that moderate sexual activity is good:

bicause it doth expell the fume of the seed from the braine…the seed a man retained above a due time, is converted into some infectious humour (The Problems of Artistotle, cited in Smith, 87).

But then Marlowe’s Mortimer will say to Edward that “the idle triumphs, masques, lascivious shows / And prodigal gifts bestowed on Gaveston / Have drawn thy treasure dry and made thee weak” (2:2:156-8). We’re in the presence of a tension.

An added fascination is that much the same debate was going on at the same time about the status of money and trade. Did it create extra value, or were mercantilism and usury responsible for sucking wealth out of the kingdom? Bacon in his essay ‘On Usury’ summarises two arguments against lending at interest that “it is against nature for money to beget money” and that “were it not for this lazy trade usury, money would not lie still, but would in great part be employed in merchandising.” Money itself, and what finance means, is about to undergo a profound change through the English Revolution. That revolutionary process will also, in more complicated and unclear ways, transform how sexuality and the body itself is viewed.

Part of the reason for Shakespeare mixing economic and sexual metaphors, David Hawkes suggests, is that the sonnets are “guided in their reflections on homoerotic love by the conviction that sodomy and usury are homologous violations of natural teleology” (7). Hawkes argues that the sonnets “consistently deploy the imagery and logic of the usury debate in a sustained meditation on the ethical status of homoerotic desire” (97) and positions Shakespeare - the son of a money-lender and no fool himself financially - as a writer feeling the tensions of the shift in the debate on both terms.

In the same way that Bacon ends his essay by suggesting that it is “better to mitigate usury by declaration than to suffer it to rage by connivance”, Shakespeare’s economic metaphors in this sonnet seem to attempt a resolution via imagery of a contradiction that cannot be resolved at the level of ideology: nature’s “free lending” contrasts a profitable sexual ‘spending’ at interest (ie reproductive sexual activity, sperm which impregnates) with the “profitless usurer” whose spending, like Onan’s, spills upon the ground.

There has been plenty of writing produced on Shakespeare and same-sex desire and Shakespeare and economics already, but what I found so exciting about the research of Halpern, Hawkes, Gil Harris, and Smith is the way that these scholars bring both topics into conversation. For all the work on Renaissance sexuality, there’s much less on literature and Renaissance sex; the products of sexual activity, how its mechanics were viewed. These twin anxieties - about the proper place for the male body and its productions and potential productiveness, for the management of desire and about the ‘natural’ status and power of money - come together in curious ways. (Gil Harris cites several examples from early modern economic and dramatic texts where “purse”, “stones” and “jewels” are used as slang terms for scrotum and testicles).

I’ve found an awful lot of value in each of these books, and recommend them. The density of thought and allusion which can be unpacked and pondered over in a single image from one of the sonnets is another example of their power, and an interesting aside for those of us trained to think the Renaissance period in terms of the Marxist account of a social world about to come undone.

WORKS CITED

Richard Halpern, Shakespeare’s Perfumes: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylania Press, 2002.

Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economics: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare’s England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature 1580 - 1680. NY: Palgrave, 2001.

Bruce R Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England. University of Chicago Press, 1991.

This World, This Path

2010-08-15T12:09:00.007+12:00

この世界

Buoyed by good news this morning from the campaign in Australia for equal rights for same-sex couples, I want to share a detail from a detailed and rewarding book I’ve discovered. Mark McLelland’s Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age is a rich layer-cake of analysis, history and examples from “this world” (この世界), the diverse communities of queer Japan.

McLelland’s two main scholarly-political points have relevance beyond Japanese studies. Sexuality doesn’t work to a timetable, whereby countries like Japan can be chided for being niggardly in ‘catching up’ with the West and its putative Enlightenment (something of this is used, with greater or lesser degrees of shame-facedness, in the liberal defense of murder justifying the war on terror). Instead,

Japan was never a passive recipient of western influence. The Meiji period did not see the sidelining of original or authentic Japanese sexualities by new notions imported wholesale from the west. Rather, sexuality was constituted through a highly complex and contested process in which traditional terminologies were continually being overwritten by new meanings and in which foreign loanwords and ways of knowing were strategically redeployed to serve local uses. (221)

Secondly, the proliferation of discussions about and explorations of sexual minorities, identities and subjectivities in the ‘perverse press’ of the post-war period in many ways anticipates queer theory’s emphasis on social construction, fluidity, and sexual stories over fixed identities.

この道

Walking ‘this path’ (この道), then, is not so much about catching up with a solid Western identity as it is about negotiating – and struggling over – how sexualities are forged within a given social formation. “Globalization,” McLelland argues, “results in creative indigenization and cultural admixture much more than it does in any unilateral imposition of western sexual identities.” (221)

Intriguing here are the relations between the fixing of names – a vexed enough process anywhere – and the act of translation. McLelland maps out the genealogies and differences between homo, homosekushuaru, gei, okama, bian, rezubian and rezu, each identity position shaped by and shaping a particular historical and social moment.

The history of “gay” as a term in Japan is particularly interesting. Now used much in the same way as it is in English-speaking countries, gay as a loan word fed into older Japanese discourses of sexuality. The katakana loanword ゲイ is a homophone of the kanji 芸 – arts or artistic accomplishment, used as in geisha – and so the term gei boi from the post-war period had connotations of both the “gay boy” and Tokugawa-era sexualities and patterns of same-sex desire. “Gei boi (homosexual)”, McLelland points out, “elides into geisha boi (entertainer), such that the stress is not on sexual orientation so much as artistic performance.” (110).

[But don't you know that we've changed so much since then / Oh yeah / We've grown]

Impatience with these definitional complications can have damaging effects on people’s lives, as McLelland’s chapter on transgender identities makes clear: to see oneself as a nyuuhaafu or transgendered is quite a different matter from accepting a diagnosis of “gender identity disorder” (sei douitsusei shougai) and the rigid definitions and stigmatisation that label brings. The limits to our ability to self-create and self-define and negotiate our sexual identities are the limits of our homophobic and heteronormative social formations: whatever the inability of the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ or 男 and 女 to encompass the range of human gender identities and bodies, the patriarchal power of the family register and the law’s definitions shape us in ways we’re unable to fully resist or avoid.

So, as always, there’s work still to be done. Walking this path is about discovery, and it’s also about struggle.

Further Reading

McLelland edited a special issue of Intersections on Queer Japan in 2006 which is full of fascinating articles. An earlier article of his on Orientalism and coming out narratives is also well worth your time. You can order a copy of Queer Japan here.

Sōseki's Books

2010-07-18T21:59:00.017+12:00

The Chase is a fairly unremarkable middle-class street off a fairly unremarkable stretch of parkland on Clapham Common, and all that unremarkable clean drabness suited my purposes perfectly last week. I was visiting the Sōseki Museum, an intriguing site of non- or anti-experience.

The Museum is a weirdly precise reminder of the impossibility of the immediate, literary tourism turned into its opposite, quantity into quality, a recreation of Sōseki’s London showing no such thing exists, a monument to anti-travel. I mean none of these terms to disrespect Tsumematsu Ikuo, the Museum’s founder and funder; his love and effort are apparent in each detail and item, and the staff member at work when we visited was friendly and helpful. But it’s this sense of missed experience that’s stuck with me from the visit, an uncanny play between the objects and the world they recreate. Doublings, traces: the mediated memory of Sōseki’s London produced by the Museum finds fascinating – for me, anyway – echoes in his own work.

For starters, this is a shrine to Sōseki that acknowledges its own artifice and construction. It’s the Sōseki House but not the Sōseki House, which is across the road. The books are Sōseki’s but again not his, being identical editions bought reconstructing reading lists the author kept. A Sōseki shrine in London is ironic in obvious ways, too, when we remember how much he hated the city: “I lead a most miserable life amongst the English and felt like a dog thrown into the company of wolves.” We come to Sōseki’s London through his writing, where one of his most memorable stories considers the Carlyle House, now host to a disproportionate number of Japanese visitors, “lured by Sōseki’s mystical depiction” [Flanagan, 160].

Sōseki’s London tales are some of the greatest works of metropolitan Modernism, detailing the bewildering and destabilizing effects of anonymity and mass urban life, the dislocation of the subject amongst pictures wearying out the eye and “unmanageable sights”, but of course – as Damian Flanagan points out – these dislocations for us now provoke images of Tokyo far more than the sleepy affluence of Clapham. The Museum guide offered me large-scale reproductions of Booth’s famous social maps to add to this sense of dislocation (Franco Moretti on Booth: “it is the confusion evoked with fear and wonder by most London visitors; confusion, in cities is always a problem”).

The confusion here, though, is in traveling to last century’s London in order to imagine today’s Shinjuku:

Last night, throughout the night, I heard a pattering echo above me pillow. This is thanks to having the great station of Clapham Junction in the neighbourhood. In the course of a single day, over a thousand trains crowd into this junction. If one tries minutely dividing that, it means that about one train comes and goes here every minute. In times of deep fog, each train signals that it is on the brink of entering the station by contriving to rise a firecracker-like noise. [Fog]

The Museum’s recreation of Sōseki’s lodgings, its doubling of across the road, recreates something of the sense of anonymity and urban loss the prose worries around:

As I walk along, I recall the houses I have just left. The strange street, with the same four storeys and the same colour everywhere, seems somehow distant. I feel like I would have no idea where I should turn and which way I should walk to get home. Even if I did get back I probably would not be able to pick out my own house. Last night the house had stood in the midst of utter darkness. [Impression]

I felt a silly excitement handling these books: how great that Sōseki liked books I like!

Or, if not books I like, then books folk I like liked, such as Burns’ favourite Man of Feeling.

A more uncomfortable and unwelcome personal echo, though, when I learn from Flanagan that social nervousness made Sōseki convince himself that buying and reading books was a better use of his time than socializing or getting to know Londoners (“Over a two-year period he appears to have spent a third of his entire salary on books and bought as many as five to six hundred volumes, all crammed on to the shelves, table and floor of his boarding-house room until he could ship them safely back to Japan with him” Flanagan, 13).

Stranger doublings and echoes again in these examples of Japonisme.

Within them Sōseki may well have read examples of the clichés and Orientalist tropes which would come to dominate the Western imagination’s approach to Japan.

Sent to England in order to engage in intensive study of English Literature, Sōseki returns with all sorts of items bearing with them the mark of those first contacts in the Meiji Era.

This journal, which Sōseki subscribed to up until his death, was particularly beautiful.

There’s a fascinating article by Chris Gosden at Material World, which argues that “museum objects to some degree conceal the mass of relations that lie behind them, ranging from the people who originally made and used the objects, to all parties to their trade and transfer and ending, for now at least, with the curators, conservators and visitors who make up the museum community in the present” and which makes the case for a new kind of relationship and Museum.

The Sōseki Museum attempts none of that; these are items for the fiction of a preserved moment. What makes it uncanny, then, is the way these relations are submerged so deeply that, like the man digging his way to China, they somehow appear out on the other side: a writer on London’s past sets you thinking about Tokyo’s present, a shrine to immediacy sets off thoughts about mediated memory, a writer whose work ironises journeys to the House of a great writer finds his own hated lodgings turned into a site for similar tourism.

And some other things never change:

Sources

All quotes are from Damian Flanagan’s translated collection The Tower of London (Tokyo: Tuttle, 2005). Flanagan’s long introduction is an excellent, and detailed, contextualisation of Sōseki’s London work. He’s a neat proselytizer too (Sōseki’s “a finer writer than Tolstoy, Proust, or Joyce”).

The Moretti quote is from p. 78 of Atlas of the European Novel 1800 – 1900 (London: Verso, 1998).

Anthems for Nowhere

2010-06-21T22:58:00.009+12:00

i.m. 29.5.37 – 24.6.89

Like the stream, time, gently, little by little, goes by

Two funerals from twenty-one years ago, both consumed then and now as quintessentially ‘Japanese’ moments. The Shōwa Emperor and Misora Hibari, high culture and low populism, national essence and national sentiment, both representing tradition and unique qualities, matching one another as sites of national memory and mourning.

The tragedy of Misora’s early death – she was only 52, and still a powerful performer – and her life story of poverty and struggle make this mode of consumption all the stronger. Hard times – and the upbeat attitude and determination of the ‘Tokyo Kid’ – were one of the truths of the Shōwa era, and, amidst the desolation and frenzied transformation of the post-war Japan, it’s easy to see how the perfectly pitched nostalgia of Misora’s music created its audience.

Still, something’s missing. There’s more work with memory to be done, more effort needed.

To live is to journey, searching for the dream world

Love, and awe at such beauty, were my initial responses, and they remain my main feelings about her music. That quavering, almost failing sound the best enka singers battle with Misora manages to push further than others, and to add to it a roughness, a strength and precision of sound I find, more and more, moving. She does wonderful things with what Barthes calls ‘the grain of the voice’ and, instead of working on the stage expressiveness of the pheno-song and its ‘meanings’, Misora’s art is of the geno-song,

the volume of the singing and speaking voice, the language where significations germinate ‘from within language and in its very materiality’; it forms a signifying play having nothing to do with communication, representation (of feelings), expression; it is that apex (or that depth) of production where melody really works at the language – not at what it says, but at the voluptuousness of its sound-signifiers, of its letter – where melody explores how the language works and identifies with that work.

I hear Misora when reading Barthes’ lines on the erotics of ‘the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the mucus membranes, the nose,’ the jouissance of the grain of the voice. (This, incidentally, is why Kim Yon Jya, whom I usually admire, is so unwise to issue recordings of 川の流れのように: her emotionality and attempts to ‘communicate’ the material, so often effective, have here to compete with the listener’s aural memories of Misora; the effects are damaging).

With these feelings I’m hardly alone: sometime during the 1990s ten million people voted 川の流れのように the great Japanese song of all time.

I find myself to have been leading a life  without even a map for guidance. 

It’s that status as the great ‘Japanese song’ which suggests productive – and political - comparisons between the cultural events of the passing of the Shōwa emperor and Misora’s death. We consume the imagery and spirit of both figures – and the cultural logic of what they’ve been used to found, solidify, set in motion – in particular and determinate ways, ways that point to how the post-war settlement sustained itself.

In a short-hand version: it’s important, and far from accidental, that the greatest Japanese performer of all time was Korean.

Takayuki Tatsumi argues, in Full Metal Apache, that the Shōwa Emperor was “the ultimate cyborg, [who] constituted the essence of postwar Japanese body politics.” His transformation into from religious officiator to gentleman general to dapper chap through to virtual salary-man matched the shifting positions of Japanese capitalism and its self-presentations and, if the famous photo with McArthur represents one moment of national humiliation, each further photo imaged and staged how national rebuilding and repositioning was to look. After the initial post-war years of social upheaval and chaos – mass rallies on May Day, a Communist Party ascendant, riots and street battles in Ueno – the Shōwa Emperor is ‘reprogrammed’ into a new mediated, cyborg body politic formed by US and ruling-class Japanese interests: ‘pure’, stable, national, ordered, timelessly Japanese. His image tracks a political project of exclusion.

Isn’t Misora the presence shadowing this process, its Other somehow hiding in plain sight? Isn’t her Zainichi status – like Rikidozan’s when he redeemed Japan in the pro-wrestling boom - the obscene supplement, her music excess to the Shōwa Emperor’s superego?

It’s not just that she was Zainichi, a Korean, even though that does matter and is enough to enrage many a Japanese nationalist and xenophobe (cf here the appallingly racist ‘debates’ on her ethnicity at her Wikipedia entry). That biographical detail matters, naturally, and its erasure from public commemoration and celebration is an indictment of official Japanese racism. What’s more intriguing is how, like the Shōwa Emperor’s ‘cyborg’ transformation, Misora’s Zainichi, outsider status was precisely what enabled her to take part in the creation of the ‘typical’ Japan for which she is now remembered. As John Lie argues

She became the prototype of all idols (aidoru) in postwar Japanese culture. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Misora personified what was ‘authentically Japanese’

Personification: again, like the Shōwa Emperor, there’s something about the ideology and mystique of bodily representation at work here. Misora’s life as an actual human being fits very uncomfortably with the mediated memory of her as the image of Japanese ‘Misora Hibari’: the racism and poverty her Zainichi family experienced would make her childhood unrecognizable to many, and her persecution by NHK for her brother’s alleged gang connections kept her for many years from taking part in the Red and White Song Battle, surely the marker of a singer’s status and presence. There’s bad faith, naturally, in her current veneration. (That bad faith, incidentally, isn’t without its own unitended ironies: the last time I was in Nagasaki I saw a Misora Hibari-themed pachinko game, nicely eliding a Zainichi image mainstream Japan can’t acknowledge as Zainichi with a vice of its own it can’t stop from associating with Koreans).

Her role in the creation of a unique Japan goes deeper still; as Lie argues, Enka, which reached its peak of popularity as Misora reached hers, so often presented as the ‘quintessential’ Japanese musical form – with Misora as its quintessentially Japanese practitioner – draws on and relies upon elements of Korean traditional music and European light music, to say nothing of the many Korean and Zainichi Enka stars who populate its top ranks.

Without knowing it I have been walking  along a long and narrow path

A number of historians – Sakai Naoki and John Dower among them – have produced work in recent years arguing that our image of Japan as a monocultural society is a product of the post-war period, and that the reality of human interaction and culture on the archipelago is a much messier one than this image allows.

What’s striking, though, from a view to the history of culture, is how important outside elements have been to this monocultural self-presentation. From Rikidozan to Misora, the cultural monuments of Shōwa Japan are ‘Korean’ as much as they are ‘Japanese.’ There’s an anxiety to the nationalism and xenophobia of the Shōwa era, an excess to its exclusions that demonstrate their futility and falsity. It’s wholly appropriate that Misora Hibari provides the soundtrack to those gestures at the same time as she undoes them.

Looking over my shoulder toward my home village far away

Those scare quotes a paragraph ago aren’t, I think, an academic affectation: part of what’s useful in remembering Misora’s story now is the chance she offers us to unpack national certainties. There’s nothing to be gained if we replace Japanese ‘ownership’ of this great singer with Korean ‘ownership’, as in the DPRK biography of Rikidozan entitled I am a Korean!, an anxiously insecure move if ever there was one. South Korean nationalisms have been as unjust towards Zainichi experience as Japanese ones through the years and, under the Park dictatorship, some forms of traditional Korean music sounding like enka were banned for their suspect debts to Japan.

Lie is closer to what I think is important when he writes that “national purity cannot be found in music, sound does not respect musical borders.” The grain of that voice makes a first, distancing or clarifying, appeal.

Misora remembered this way might also re-position her in our thoughts for the future. It’s not that Misora doesn’t ‘belong’ to her Japanese fans anymore, or that her unacknowledged Zainichi heritage changes its place in Japanese culture, memory and nostalgia. The hope, rather, is that we might highlight how that Zainichi place has always been there, and how it might offer a position from which to move beyond the sterile (and US driven) nationalisms of the region. This is partly, to be sure, a question of acknowledging multiplicity and reality, partly also a chance to imagine new political positions and loosened loyalties.

The most insightful comments on that possibility I’ve read so far come not from a philosopher or a singer, but from a footballer, DPRK striker Jong Tae Se:

"My homeland is not Japan. There's another country in Japan, called Zainichi, [and] none of these countries - South Korea, North Korea and Japan - can be my home country, because I'm a zainichi and therefore Zainichi is my native land."

That ‘native land’ is nowhere, and the richer for it. What’s so moving about Misora Hibari’s art, the precision in the grain of her voice, is the way it inhabits that impossible land.

Sources

Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’ in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977).

John Lie, Multicultural Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

Takayuki Tatsumi, Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

Ghost in the Shell

2010-06-15T23:24:00.006+12:00

Matthew Stoddard’s essay on Ghost in the Shell, cognitive mapping and the ‘desire for communism’ is well worth reading. It’s very clever and thoughtful and good fun, and nicely complements Amy Shirong Lu’s insightful “dialectic reading” of Oshii’s work as containing both an old ghost and a new shell: the ‘new shell’ all our favourite option, the posthuman future and its political potential (“I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”), its ‘old ghost’ those stereotypes of maternal function and nurturing which follow images of the female.

Stoddard’s essay reminded me of two questions that stuck in my mind after first seeing Ghost in the Shell (and I’m referring only to the 1995 film here; the manga and Innocence have their own relative autonomy and, for reasons which will become obvious through the post, I won’t watch the misguided CG folly of Ghost in the Shell 2.0).

Firstly, when did Tokyo stop being the future? There’s a politics to the associations of dystopia and China here, of course, but I don’t think it’s enough (or the main politico-aesthetic question, as I’ve argued before about Code Geass) to point in that direction. There’s a post-Bubble aesthetic sorting itself out here; worth wondering what follows on.

Secondly, how does the video imagery of Ghost in the Shell fit with Stoddard’s comments on memory? The connections between the film’s philosophical and posthuman or postmemory ambitions and its strategic use of perspective, surveillance and recording are obvious, sure, but it’s the video part of all that which is so striking. It’s not so much that these devices are dated now, but that they do the work of being troubled by the idea of mediated memory and mediated identity and subjectivity in very different ways to how digital recording and technology does when given similar chances in more recent anime. In one sense, naturally, Ghost in the Shell’s work here – messing with our longing to separate those long mystical moments against the puppet master plot and the fashioning of the robots – is familiar. As Giovanni Tiso argues:

“The seemingly opposite and equally apocalyptic visions of amnesia and hypermnesia, of a crisis of memory and of total recall, endlessly projected by consumer culture, stand in a complex relation which is reciprocal and inclusive as opposed to antithetical and exclusive.”

It’s the damage of transmission in video – the introduction of new material and ‘distortions’ which render an original impossible and a copy new – that seem to carry so much weight in Ghost in the Shell, and to be used to prompt reflection. Kinks, bends, flickers: all these features serve to draw our attention to memory’s mediation, and to point at the plot line covering memory’s crisis and reproduction.

From this distance, though, don’t they look much more like memory’s calling cards, its material traces? Used as we are to forms that stop before they ‘age’ (the DVD left in the cupboard that then stops playing; the memory stick which doesn’t function after coming out the wrong side of the wash cycle; the file corrupted between computers), these earlier images of memory’s vulnerability and malleability come over to us as something like memory’s resistance. When considering aesthetic devices and explorations I think Ghost in the Shell’s effort at mimesis of imperfect recording and flawed or ‘damaged’ perception marks it out as important to consider in any treatment of the development of narratives of the crisis of memory. Quite what that importance is I’m not able to tell you – sorry if you read this far in the hope of a momen’t wisdom – but Stoddard reinforces my sense I’m right to feel it’s there.

Defiance

2010-06-07T22:21:00.004+12:00

You may fasten my chains
Deprive me of my books and tobacco
You may fill my mouth with earth
Poetry will feed my heart, like blood
It is salt to the bread
And liquid to the eye
I will write it with nails,
eye sockets and daggers,
I will recite it in my prison cell -
in the bathroom -
in the stable -
Under the whip -
Under the chains -
In spite of my handcuffs
I have a million nightingales
On the branches of my heart
Singing the song of liberation.

from Defiance, by Mahmoud Darwish.

[Translation taken from Our Roots Are Still Alive: the Story of the Palestinian People (New York: Institute for Independent Social Journalism, 1981), p. 137.]

Thanks to friends in Kakehashi / JRCL (日本革命的共産主義者同盟) for the photo.

North Wind in the West

2010-05-31T22:28:00.007+12:00

I sometimes think it’d make a great board game, a sort of extended Scrabble for politicos. Everyone gets a tray of words, say:

Enigmatic, isolated, madman, mystery, nuclear threat, provocation, pygmy, reclusive dictator, reclusive, regime, state terror, unprovoked

The first player to produce an accurate copy of a recent news article on the Korean peninsula would then be announced winner. This game – as well as testing your wits with combinations – would save you the bother of having to read whatever article is was you’d managed to copy that round.

Either way, you’d be unlikely to come out any more ignorant of the situation than you were when you went in. Recent events remind us yet again how uninformed most commentary on Korea is, how warped and distorted by the needs and viewpoint of the US, hardly a neutral player in the region, and by its interests.

That’s an old gripe, though, and one for which there’s no easy remedy. Amidst all the tough talk from Clinton, Obama and Hatoyama, it’s easy for small facts to get missed: the sinking of the Cheonan led to more pointless and tragic loss of life as a result of the division of the peninsula. This isn’t mysterious loss, though; it’s connected to the history of that division, and the US and its imperial interests’ role in that division. History is a submerged and denied zone in almost all commentary on Korea. As Bruce Cummings comments:

And this particular incident is just ripped out of context, the context of a continuing war that has never ended. Just an armistice holds the peace. But in the case of this particular incident, which happened very close to the North Korean border, we’ve had incidents like this, somewhat different ones, but with large loss of life, going back more than ten years. In 1999, a North Korean ship went down with thirty sailors lost and maybe seventy wounded. That’s a larger total of casualties than this one. And last November, a North Korean ship went down in flames.

I often hear journalists refer to the two Koreas as ‘technically’ still at war, as if this were a mere detail standing in the way of real life’s realities. But it’s hard to see technicalities in divided families, lost lives, and occupying forces.

So far, so familiar, though, yes? The mainstream media occludes history and narratives of power; one can always look elsewhere. What this latest episode in Korea’s long unhappiness illuminates, though, are more widespread blockages to thought. Reports from the surface and analyses of the depths throw certainties back and forth between each other, and these certainties stop more difficult questions getting asked.

Heart of Darkness on the Taedong…

Mention the term imperialism in some well-educated quarters and – even given the events of the last decade and the revival of anti-imperialist scholarship provoked by them – you’re likely to encounter rolled eyes and polite silences. What the term names, for all that, is an attempt at understanding the dynamics of this current system, its needs, where they came from, what their trajectory might be. Attending to that reality involves grappling with complexity, and real historical difficulty; substitutes for that difficulty are alternate reductionisms in the search for a regime’s ‘essence’ or the political theology of totalitarianism.

Guy Delisle’s acclaimed graphic novel Pyongyang sets itself the task of studying “one of the most secretive and mysterious nations in the world today.” Delisle spent some time in Pyongyang working for a French animation company and Pyongyang is a memoir of that time. The personal narrative is illuminating in its way, but Delisle provides his study of “the surreal showcase city” with an interpretive frame that offers pre-prepared answers to his questions:

He arrives with a copy of Orwell’s 1984 – excerpts from which provide commentary through the novel – and, in doing so, inserts his own work into that longer story of Cold War readings and (mis)uses of Orwell’s text for political purposes quite foreign to its author’s own anti-imperialist vision. Pyongyang’s North Korea, then, isn’t investigation but illustration: the ‘totalitarian’ thesis provides a ready-made vessel in which to contain the text’s narrative. The wider question – whether the story of one personal and atypical experience can take the strain of the peninsula’s historical and political complexity – is never asked, so confident is the text in its assumption (signaled by Orwell’s arrival on only the second page) that the white, Western subject’s putatively non-ideological ‘experience’ will convey the truth with which it arrived pre-prepared.

Mads Brügger’s Red Chapel, a documentary in the tradition of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat, uses a similar ‘totalitarian’ frame. For Brügger the DPRK was one example among many of the species dictatorship, and his film would demonstrate its typicality. “I knew that I had to offer them comedy, because dictatorships are really bad at handling comedy,” he told an interviewer. “All dictators are basically laughable, especially Kim-Jong Il.” Not only is its leader “laughable”, its people aren’t fully human: “it’s very difficult for them to handle human emotions.” Perry Anderson’s comment that “self-satisfaction is scarcely unfamiliar in Europe” has rarely felt more pertinent.
Brügger laces his film with inanities and commonplaces (this is “the most evil regime on earth”, the “heart of darkness”) and strange historical assertion: the heart of the regime’s lie, he informs at one point, is that it claims the US started the Korean war when in fact it was itself responsible.

The audience I saw The Red Chapel with during Wellington’s International Film Festival loved it. They laughed uproariously at all the moments of absurdity, and film and audience matched each other in a perfect fit of call and response. Look for a laughable country and you’re bound to find one.

It was that laughter that’s stuck in my mind in the months since seeing Brügger’s film, and a sense that it is the connection between Delisle and Brügger’s work and the superficial mainstream media accounts they claim to go beyond. What’s remarkable about both works is that, for all their claims to unique and privileged access to Truth (“one of the few Westerners to witness…”), they both show us what is already on display. The Red Chapel’s ‘exposure’ of the Juche idea recounts what anyone who reads the North Korean press or other publications can find for themselves. And are these sights – mass rallies, eerily empty streets, propaganda posters and pollution – really able to stand in as revelations of the place’s essence? Rather, it seems to me, these are the stock images of the North, produced as much by mainstream media as, from time to time, by the DPRK itself. Without some attempt to consider how the area got into the situation it is in now – without, in other words, a project to make sense of his material – Brügger’s ‘answer’ that things are laughable can offer no more than empty gestures and shrill moralism. Besides, if that surreality is so often on display, it might be worth pondering something that never occurs to Brügger, whether there’s a logic to the material before us, reasons which might demand reflection. Against Brügger’s claim to have found the ‘laughable’ heart of the regime, consider Slavoj Zizek’s comments on the Marx Brothers’ masterpiece Duck Soup. Against readings of Duck Soup that inscribe it as ridiculing totalitarian state rituals, exposing their fear of laughter, Zizek contends:

The powerful effect of Duck Soup does not reside in its mockery of the totalitarian state’s machinery and parephenalia, but in openly displaying the madness, the ‘fun’, the cruel irony, which are already present in the totalitarian state. The Marx brothers’ ‘carnival’ is the carnival of totalitarianism itself.

The ‘secret’ or hidden story of the DPRK The Red Chapel brings back, in this logic, is the state’s very self-presentation, images anyone can find if they turn their attention that way.

History is what hurts…

None of this is to meant to lead to my own substitute single- or simple answer (there’s not one; it isn’t). Nor am I engaging in apologetics for Pyongyang. Why Brügger and Delisle’s works are missed opportunities – and, I suggest, representative missed opportunities – is because they refuse history, the historical development and context that has led to the situation of today. Hidden truths found through so-called ‘direct’ experience are a false promise, because we’re all always already interpreting that experience through our own ideological perspectives, backgrounds and political frames.

Some urgent realities are being missed, both by mainstream journalism and by artists and thinkers looking in on this world. This latest ‘incident’ did not occur outside of a context. The Korean War has not ended. US troops, bases, and machinery of occupation and militarization still structure the lived reality of the Korean peninsula. Regional interests, power struggles and rivalries still, as so often before, shape the conflicts of the area.

Colonialism, occupation, war, division, Cold War: these are ‘live’ terms. What seems bizarre or surreal from the outside is certainly unusual – often awful, often tragic – but it is never without reasons, without causes.

Learning to talk about Korea means learning to ask hard questions, and to expect harder answers. Pre-prepared answers and imagery of totalitarianism and laughable evil without context don’t help us there.

Sources

The Zizek quote is from In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), p. 342.