More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 10 - December 21, 2024
And at this early stage, of one thing I am convinced: if you go back far enough, everything is the fault of the Americans.
Above all, the Japanese learned that to be a modern nation, to be respected on the global stage, meant becoming an expansionist colonial power.
“Haven’t you heard of Perry?” he asked his American interrogators. “[Japan] took your country as its teacher and set about learning how to be aggressive.”
There is nothing like viewing a ship of war up close to give you the willies.
One giveaway is that two of the vans fly Rising Sun flags, the one with red rays radiating from a central sun on a white background. Once the symbol of Japanese military imperialism, these days the Kyokujitsu-ki is often flown by those with, let’s say, a misguided sense of patriotism, and it is especially provocative for the Koreans and the Chinese (the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force ships also fly it, which as you can imagine causes problems when they take part in joint events with the Korean navy).
It translates to “Make wind,” a reference not to flatulence but to the kamikaze, the mythological divine wind which supposedly twice saved Japan from invasion by the Mongols in the thirteenth century and was adopted as the name for their suicide pilots during World War II.
At one point I pass a large fiberglass Hello Kitty dressed in a panda suit—a touching symbol of Sino-Japanese accord, I tell myself.
“The Chinese found Japanese food difficult to eat, especially all the raw vegetables and raw fish, so they started their own restaurants. The Japanese were curious about Chinese food, particularly because they only really ate chicken, not beef and pork like the Chinese.”
Ramen, the most iconic of twentieth-century Japanese dishes, started off Chinese but morphed into something distinctly local with the addition of soy sauce and, later, dashi, the Japanese stock made primarily from dried seaweed.
After World War II, they led the Allied occupation until 1952 and flooded the Japanese market with cheap wheat, of which they had a surplus. As several recent histories of the dish have explained, this fueled the ramen boom, as ramen uses wheat-flour noodles.
“These people have found what they think is the truth online. For them, the media is the enemy. Whoever screams loudest and longest gets the people’s attention.”
This was briefly the capital of Japan in the eighth century and today is famous for its highly Instagrammable sika deer, which saunter like pampered concubines through the town center’s shrines, streets, and parks. The sika are a pretty hazelnut color with antlers and a scattering of lighter spots down their backs, like snowfall.
Theirs was a shame culture, as opposed to our Western guilt culture, with its clearer (to us) moral landscape of right and wrong, guilty and innocent. In shame cultures, one’s choices are driven by preservation of reputation rather than a moral code: getting caught is the crime.
Martin Jacques, writing in When China Rules the World, believes that in Asian societies it is “how one is regarded by others, rather than one’s own individual conscience, which is critical … A sense of guilt can be assuaged by an act of apology; shame, in contrast, is not nearly as easily assuaged.”
Abe Shinzo and others have used the Arlington National Cemetery defense: other countries pay their respects to their war dead, so why can’t Japan? It is true that there may well be people who could be considered war criminals buried in American armed forces cemeteries. There are certainly Confederate generals at Arlington; General Samuel Koster, infamous for his role in the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam in 1968, is buried at West Point Cemetery; and General Curtis LeMay is buried at the United States Air Force Academy Cemetery in Colorado. LeMay was the man responsible for the 1945 firebombing of
...more
Some serious whataboutism....
Often they are housed in flamboyant concrete buildings that reflect their theme—the horseshoe crab–shaped Horseshoe Crab Museum in Kasaoka is one of my favorites.
I leave the museum perplexed that a selective narrative like this could find a prominent place in what is generally considered Japan’s second city, but in recent years, this kind of historical revisionism, or flat-out denial of Japanese crimes, has moved into the mainstream, not just politically and in museums, but also in the magazine- and book-publishing worlds.
These days she is vehemently anti-Korea; indeed, she has written various offensive songs about the Korean comfort women and the colonial period. Though these are not obvious subjects for power ballads, Yoko makes her lyrics fit the form in much the same way a toddler wedges wrong shapes into wrong holes. For instance, her song about the colonial “benevolence” of Japan toward Korea talks about how the Japanese gave them “massive railways, clean streets, water, and sewer services,” also managing to shoehorn in references to “libraries, factories, including nitrogen fertilizer factories.” (I
...more
We continue like this for some time, me advocating experts, Yoko telling me the experts are in the pocket of the communists who want to divide Asia and America.
us”), I had assumed that Yoko was an Abe Shinzo voter. But this is not the case. She votes for the Nippon no Kokoro, an anti-immigration party originally founded by Ishihara Shintaro, the former governor of Tokyo, who in an interview with Playboy in 1990 claimed the Nanjing Massacre was a fabrication by the Chinese. He has also described the occupation of Korea as being justified, and once said that “old women who live after they have lost their reproductive function are useless and are committing a sin.”
Today, Seoul boasts the largest Christian congregation in the world, the Full Gospel Church, as well as a few wilder “spin-offs,” most famously the Unification Church, or the Moonies, founded in 1954 by the late Sun Myung Moon, noted tax felon/messiah.
Clearly not a front-runner, he has wisely chosen to set up his stage in a narrow shopping street where there isn’t much space for supporters, thus averting the risk of Trump Inauguration Syndrome.
One cultural variable that is very much related to happiness across nations is individualism, and the essence of individualism is you’re kind of trained mentally to live your life and not care too much about how other people evaluate your life.
My observation is the second part is definitely not true.
From an evolutionary perspective, happiness is just a tool, a sort of signal to direct you to seek resources which were essential for your survival. When do we feel happy? When we eat or have sex. That’s just a signal that you are a functioning human being.”
again, a lot to unpack here
I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but it’s like kimchi. We make out [that it’s] something special, but other cultures do have pickles, you know.”
Up to 80 percent of the comfort women are believed to have died from injuries incurred during their imprisonment, from diseases contracted from the soldiers or when, at the end of the war, some were forced to commit suicide or killed by their captors. Of those that survived, many were unable to have children and were shunned by their communities.
There is no smooth way to transition from the bleak inhumanity of the DMZ to a park full of giant penises, but it was at the Penis Park, a couple of hours’ drive back down south along the coast from the DMZ, that I finally fell in love with the Koreans.
Perhaps the main reason reunification seems unlikely is that many powerful forces would have much to lose. The military-industrial complex would suffer enormously, particularly in America—something that was evident in the dramatic drop in share prices of Lockheed Martin when President Moon meet Kim Jong-un in April 2018. Japan doesn’t want it to happen either, because it would make Korea more of an economic and potentially military threat. China would probably prefer the peninsula to remain divided too, all the better to threaten Seoul, hold Pyongyang to account, and keep America and Japan at
...more
I am in a box on the sea in my underwear with a strange man who thinks I am a piano-playing terrorist.
And plenty of countries hate one another without having 2,500 years of indoctrination by a strange-looking man raised by a tiger and an eagle upon whom to place the blame.
By this stage of their campaign, the Japanese soldiers seemed utterly desensitized to their victims. There were live burials, killing competitions, disembowelings, decapitations, and death by fire. Victims were ordered into freezing ponds; others were attacked by dogs.
The deniers include the self-appointed Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact, a Japanese right-wing group that has a conspiracy for just about every accusation leveled against the Imperial Army. In terms of Nanjing, they say the Chinese army were the barbarians: it was they who burned the city and committed atrocities, and anyone who disagrees is a Communist.
It was only when it became acceptable in the Japanese mainstream to deny history, when the right wing took over, then it became a problem.” The first Japanese history textbook denying the massacre (and terming the invasion an “advance” instead) was published in Japan in the early 1980s. The Chinese authorities began building the official Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall in 1984.
In Nanjing, the group included John Rabe, a German businessman and member of the Nazi Party, who personally harbored six hundred Chinese refugees at his home, earning him the sobriquet “living Buddha.”
In 1990 then mayor of Nagasaki Motoshima Hitoshi was shot in the chest for suggesting that Emperor Hirohito bore some responsibility for the war.
No race or culture has a monopoly on wartime cruelty,” she wrote. All societies are capable of the brutality of Nanjing. “Japan’s behavior during World War II was less a product of dangerous people than of a dangerous government, in a vulnerable culture, in dangerous times.”
The Beijing museum likened the British to “a swarm of bees, looting our treasures and killing our people. They forced China’s ruling Qing dynasty to sign a series of unequal treaties that granted them economic, political and cultural privileges and sank China gradually into a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society.” This is the version of history that the Chinese people learn in their schools, museums, movie theaters, and newspapers and via their televisions: that the British government conspired to deliberately destabilize China through the illegal sale of opium. It is not untrue.
In response, the British government claimed that the heads of executed British traders had been displayed at the gates of Canton. This was a lie, the nineteenth-century equivalent of fake news, but then foreign secretary Viscount Palmerston was successful in pitching the sending of warships to China as a moral crusade (and is hated to this day by the Chinese).
The British compounded their crimes by stealing twenty thousand tea seedlings, which were eventually used to create the Indian tea industry in Darjeeling, thus ending China’s tea monopoly forever.
With the 8th Earl of Elgin, son of the Parthenon marbles felon, overseeing proceedings, they looted countless treasures, including the empress’s dog. This was later given to Queen Victoria and renamed “Looty,” which sounds like a storyline from Blackadder but did actually happen. Items from the summer palace still occasionally pop up in auctions and museums in Europe, such as one of the fabled twelve zodiacal heads from one of the palace’s fountains, which was owned by Yves Saint Laurent and put up for auction after his death.
Their tactic was to divide and rule Taiwan’s numerous indigenous tribes. In the Wushe Incident of 1930, for instance, hundreds of Seediq tribesmen attacked a Japanese sporting event in protest of the loss of their land and the enslavement of members of their tribe. The Japanese retaliated by offering bounties to other tribes, who killed over two hundred Seediq in a two-month campaign. In one museum I see a grisly photograph of the bounty hunters, posing with a Japanese military official in front of a small field of heads.
In schools, children were taught to believe that it was Taiwan’s role to one day civilize China, like a flea convinced of its sovereignty over the dog to whose back it clings. I don’t think anyone these days believes that Taipei will ever rule China, or indeed would wish to, but China remains adamant that Taiwan is its twenty-third province.
She invited me to imagine Taiwan as a giant, unsinkable American aircraft carrier, permanently moored just off the coast of China.
Vegan aspiration is a straw to cling to, granted, but when one is in search of positive signs for future pan-Asian amity, one must grab them where one finds them.
