Pen/Insular_Notes

A rather moving and shockingly detailed article is up at Japan Focus this week on the struggle of Japan’s ethnic minority communities against a recently published book espousing extremely racist views in full glossy technicolour. The ‘mook’ (magazine book) is entitled simply enough, ‘The Underground Files of Foreigner Crime’. If you have a moment, please do have a look at this - it is quite mind-boggling. But the best part is that a campaign by ‘newcomer’ bloggers in Japan actually won the day and succeeded in getting the book withdrawn by the publishers, despite the fact that it did not become a major issue in broader Japanese society and was not taken up by any of the Japanese newspapers. The first European paper to cover the story was the Guardian.

A link in Arudou Debito’s article that caught my eye led me to this article giving detailed figures on who commits crime in modern Japan. It shows that in terms of having a high crime rate ‘native’ Japanese are only beaten by people of Chinese origin and those coming from Brazil, most of whom are in fact Nikkei (ie Japanese diaspora returnees). Even more interestingly, considering that Koreans resident in Japan have long been the victims of racism, Koreans come near the bottom with a crime rate more than ten times lower than that of Japanese. Of course there are likely to be many social and structural reasons for this difference and I am certainly not drawing any conclusions about ‘innate’ or even ‘cultural’ differences between Koreans and Japanese. What it does seem to indicate though, is that regardless of how they are treated by the Japanese, Korean-Japanese (Zainichi) and other Koreans living in Japan make up something of a ‘model minority’, outdone in their aversion to crime only by the workers from the US and UK, who are by and large well off and working in business, finance or education.

As a footnote to this, it’s worth adding that I’ve seen a number of newspaper articles of the ‘Foreigner crime on the increase’ sort in the mainstream South Korean press (ie Cho-Joong-Dong) in the past. So don’t let it be said that Koreans don’t learn anything from the Japanese.

This has no relevance to East Asia at all, but having just read Mike Davis’ fascinating analysis of the US mid-term elections of last November, I was struck by the American liking for mammalian metaphors in political life (the two parties have a donkey and an elephant as their symbols for god’s sake). Thus the rabidly rightwing faction of the Democrats are the ‘blue dogs‘ while the Washington lobbyists become ‘winged monkeys‘ (a reference to The Wizard of Oz).

Actually, I sometimes think Mike Davis would be worth reading solely for his colourful way with words. Some choice phrases: Kissinger is the “chief mummy”; John Kerry is the “Brahmin Rambo”; while the “winged monkeys are reputedly rejoicing at their recent liberation from DeLay, the wicked witch of Texas”.

For readers in the UK, BBC4 will be showing the new film from verymuchso productions - ‘Crossing the Line‘ which looks at the story of James Dresnok, a soldier stationed in South Korea who fled the US army and crossed into the DPRK in 1962. Details: BBC4, Thursday 22 March, 9.00 - 10.30pm. The film ‘Abduction’ about Megumi Yokota, the Japanese woman abducted by North Korean agents, will be shown after.

There’s a BBC article on the film here.

I’ve already completely ignored my new year’s resolution to post often and briefly and this post will continue the tradition of posting irregularly and verbosely. Anyway, back to the post. This is something that I wrote mainly for Lenin’s Tomb, but I thought I’d cross post it here for good measure.

Korea’s favourite Neo-Keynesian economist/Cambridge professor Ha-joon Chang spoke at SOAS a couple of days ago and while I had problems with a lot of what he said, I must admit that he is a very entertaining speaker. The subject of his talk was ‘Lazy Japanese and thieving Germans - does culture matter for economic development?’, and was apparently based on a chapter in his forthcoming book, the title of which I can’t remember. Actually, the first part of his talk was the best - he put up on the OHP a battery of quotations from British travel writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries going on about how terribly lazy, untrustworthy, unproductive, irrational, emotional and bad at timekeeping the Germans and Japanese were. His point was to (quite rightly) rubbish the currently resurgent ideas in mainstream economics about the importance of ‘culture’ to development. He didn’t deny the possible importance of ‘culture’ but tried to show that the ideas that cultures were fixed or that certain cultures were inferior to others were wrong. He made rather a good, lighthearted comparison of Confucianism and Islam to show, conclusively, that Islam provided a far better culture for development, in fact, quite definitely the best culture possible for capitalist development (I think his argument rested largely on the fact that the Prophet was a merchant).
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Just a note to say that I’ve updated the links on the righthand side a bit. Like spring cleaning some cobwebs are gone, some new things have arrived in their place. Have a rummage around if you feel like it.