Is your daily paper transvaluing values?

[imomus]

As 2009 dawned, I found myself rearranging my newspaper bookmarks. The website of UK newspaper The Guardian has been my main -- almost exclusive -- newspaper site for years; I hit the front page several times a day. But this year, for various reasons, I've felt the need to see whether I can replace The Guardian with something else. I turned to two rather odd newspapers, The International Herald Tribune and the Japan Times.



These papers are odd because they're, in some way, parachuted into the cities they're based in, Paris and Tokyo. They're both English-language papers in non-English-speaking capitals, and there's a blurriness and precariousness in their identity which I find, actually, very valuable, and which matches something in my own. I also like a certain quietness and restraint in their manner. Until fairly recently, the culture section of the Japan Times, for instance, was dominated by a column on yakimono pottery.

The International Herald Tribune (the only newspaper I've ever heard David Bowie endorse, incidentally) may speak English, but its outlook is cosmopolitan. It's linked with Monocle magazine and The New York Times. But it also covers Paris rather well; there's an interesting video story today (very much in the style of the video reports on the Monocle site) about the progress of new Paris art centre Le CentQuatre. The lead story on the paper's front page this morning was a style story: In the lap of luxury, Paris squirms. The focus was on how the recession is impacting luxury fashion brands, but I liked the way writer Elaine Sciolino presented this: "The recession brings anxiety to France but also a welcomed values debate on the French way of life."

"Only in France is the recession lauded for posing a crisis in values," writes Sciolino. "There is... an underlying satisfaction here that an era of sometimes vulgar high living is over and that a more bedrock French way of life will emerge. Some French intellectuals want to go much further, calling for the death of the entire luxury industry as a sort of national ritual of purification. "Since the ancient Greeks, luxury goods have always been stamped with the seal of immorality," said Gilles Lipovetsky, a sociologist who has written several books about consumerism. "They represent waste, the superficial, the inequality of wealth. They have no need to exist."

This is a post-materialist message, and it's something I don't find much of in the Anglo papers, even The Guardian. On the front page of The Guardian today we had Dan Black, one of the paper's music tips for 2009 -- a somewhat annoying young man who sounds like an estate agent doing karaoke versions of Britney Spears numbers -- telling the paper that in ten years time "I'll either be swimming in a swimming pool full of champagne and diamonds or crying in a gutter trying to get ten pounds to buy a bag of skag." Black, like Britain, is still oriented to America, to consumerism as a selfish "guilty pleasure", to money-as-drugs, to bling. His vision of his future in Britain is a parody of a high Gini coefficient; he'll either be massively wealthy or homeless.

The cultural coverage in the Japan Times is much more to my taste. In the art section we have Donald Eubank on Brazilian artist Vik Muniz and his work with Brazil's catadores, people who recycle rubbish for a living: "An estimated 3,000-5,000 people live in the dump, 15,000 derive their income from activities related to it, and some that Muniz met in Jardim Gramacho come from families that had been working there for three generations. "These people are at the other end of consumer culture," he says. "I was expecting to see people who were beaten and broken, but they were survivors." His aim — besides the creative challenge — was to see... if the experience of creating art could change people".

There's a sense in both The International Herald Tribune and The Japan Times that the papers know what time it is; that they realise a "transvaluation of all values" (in Nietzsche's phrase) is necessary at this point. Even while it reports David Miliband's important public recognition that the War on Terror was a mistake, The Guardian doesn't seem to have taken this transvaluation thing on board. For instance, a story about a minister who said she saw "green shoots" in the UK economy basically takes for granted that green shoots mean economic growth, and that that's good, and its absence bad. There's no actual green perspective in the green shoots story -- it lacks the angle Sciolino wrote into her IHT story about how economic downturn is an opportunity to rethink priorities.

Another Japan Times story I love today is Antiforeigner discrimination is a right for Japanese people. Here, Gregory Clark plugs -- without mentioning him by name -- the ridiculous Debito Arudou (David Aldwinckle), who has plagued his host country with lawsuits alleging discrimination against foreigners (in, for instance, barring him from certain bathing houses frequented by troublesome Russian sailors). Clark boldly says something I've long believed too: "Japan girai — dislike of Japan — is an allergy that seems to afflict many Westerners here... It is time we admitted that at times the Japanese have the right to discriminate against some foreigners. If they do not, and Japan ends up like our padlocked, mutually suspicious Western societies, we will all be the losers."

What I enjoy here is that an article by a foreigner in a foreign newspaper takes the side of Japanese against foreigners. That seems to express very well the complexity and ambivalence of these cuckoo newspapers, and the awareness, typical of sensitive foreigners, of one's own fragility and awkwardness. This guilt, for me, is at the root of consideration for others. It transcends selfishness, and to achieve it you have to be slightly decentred, as these odd expat papers are. I think their willingness to transvalue values is all tied up with these newspapers' transplanted, lateral, parallax positions in foreign cities.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, if you'd had multiple episodes of them shitting in the beds or something, I think you'd be entitled to. These Russian sailors go into the saunas drunk, and start fights, and splash people, and so on. But only a tiny minority of sentos have racial restriction -- I've been to dozens, and I've never seen any "No Foreigner" signs.

I would definitely put a "No Debito" sign outside any institution I started in Japan -- the man is a serial legal harrasser.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"Well, if you'd had multiple episodes of them shitting in the beds or something, I think you'd be entitled to."

So, I take it you're also in favor of stopping and searching black people to a higher degree than other races because statistically speaking they're responsible for a higher proportion of street crime?

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

I think the point is that there always seems to be a certain segment of the foreign population (I see the same thing in Korea) who are constantly railing about how racist the natives are toward them, and how everything is just horrid for foreigners, and blah blah blah, painting themselves as the "coloreds" of Japan (or Korea), when whatever they're experiencing is nowhere near the same magnitude or severity.

It's not that the dude is objectively wrong, it's that he's annoying and obnoxious, and seems to have this vision of himself as the grand martyr for all foreigners in Japan. But if his activities were to be compared to anything, I think it would be the legally-enforced integration of an all-female college, or something of that sort. It's petty.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"It's not that the dude is objectively wrong"

Then we agree.

"it's that he's annoying and obnoxious, and seems to have this vision of himself as the grand martyr for all foreigners in Japan."

The Guardian's infamous uber-liberal tree hugging George Monbiot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Monbiot) comes from a family of upper-middle class Tory toffs, his whole Shtick reaks of rebellion against Mummy and Daddy that's lasted long into adulthood, but that's neither here nor there -- we should be judging protesters purely on the legitimacy of their causes, not the annoyingness of their personas.

I don't see how anyone can have an issue with Debito objecting to discrimination in Japan. It's not just the racist actions of certain onsens he objects to but the offensive and utterly spurious public campaigns by the Japanese police warning the Japanese of "gaijin criminals". That issue to is not petty at all in my book, it breeds hatred and fear.

[eclectiktronik.livejournal.com]

and, although we must take as given that the 'right of admission is reserved' in any number of leisure places worldwide, comments like :

"Even so, the idea of them demanding freedom to walk into any onsen bathhouse of their choice, especially to a high-class onsen like Yunohana, is absurd."

....just sound like snobbery to me. Let's call it by its rightful name. Heavens above! keep the riff-raff out!

It's like those awful clubs in capital cities like London with fey, cute names like 'dime' or 'tramps', where, if you really were a tramp or only did have a dime, you wouldn't even be let thru the door. But I digress....

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, if it is snobbery, remember that it's a weird form of snobbery which excludes him too. Now, maybe, like Woody Allen, he doesn't want to be a member of any club that'll have him as a member. Maybe, in fact, that's a necessary component in the psyche of any longterm gaijin in Japan, because assimilation is not really an option. Japan does not operate by jus soli (citizenship by place of birth), but by jus sanguinis (citizenship by blood). To be defined as Japanese, you must have Japanese blood. It's not a multicultural society in the way the United States of America is. And in fact very few nations are -- America is something of an exception here, though to Americans, obviously, they're either a norm or a model to which every other nation should aspire. I'm afraid Debito's view is based on the idea that the Japanese and American legal systems will converge, in the direction of the American system. I don't think he's right. I think Japanese people look at the American crime stats and shudder. They also shudder when they see everybody suing their own families. There is no political capital in Japan in the idea of converging towards the American system of citizenship law. And in fact the general trend worldwide at the moment is away from jus soli. States are making the automatic conferring of citizenship based on place of birth more and more difficult, even if they allowed it in the first place.

[(Anonymous)]

Again, why is an electric guitar ‘retro necro’ and 'jus sanguinis', for example, not? Why move on past Jurassic emotions to replace them with Jurassic institutions? Why is 'backward-looking' bad but 'inward-looking' good? They are both comparable. I shudder at non-multicultural societies in the same way you shudder at Oasis (then, hey, the Gallaghers were big in Japan).

[(Anonymous)]

Ultimatey 'inward-looking' is a lack of faith in humanity. Those 'types' we want to exclude are, somehow, irredeemable. "The less a man has the more he clings on to it" translates to cultures. The more people it bars the more we realise that it secretly wants to die.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You're free to call jus sanguinis Retro Necro if you like. But if you think folk soul is the opposite of multiculturalism, you're labouring under a delusion (http://imomus.livejournal.com/308507.html). By rejecting cultural particularity -- and the exclusion and inclusion mechanisms by which it operates -- you are rejecting the multiculturalism too.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Let me put it this way, do you think there should be just as many aid agencies on the ground in Israel as there are in Gaza? Is it "racial profiling" not to give everybody the same amount of aid money, if Africans need it more?

A world without discrimination is a world without justice. I've always thought it was a particularly cruel irony that Justice is so often depicted with a blindfold. More than anyone else, that beeyatch needs to see.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

Well, I think discrimination is generally pernicious, but at the same time, I think we would do well to differentiate between levels of seriousness/severity.

This Abadou guy argues, for example, that "gaijin" is equivalent to "nigger," which is just the absolute height of absurdity. There is absolutely no equivalent historical basis for that kind of comparison.

The sad thing is, I think he has a pretty concrete point, being that he's now a Japanese citizen. But he acts as though he has to go about it in an American Civil Rights Movement style, as though his protest is built on hundreds of years of brutal oppression. It's as though he doesn't care to present his complaint in a way that will stand the best chance of garnering support. He assumes that a brutal pushback will occur, and hits first with his hardest blow. As though Japanese people are just supposed to be conditioned to an American sense of multiculturalism because a few foreigners live there.

In the meantime, it's not as though Abadou is being kept in an internment camp (as the Japanese were in America, one might add) or forced to use separate bathrooms and water fountains. Or worse yet, killed for consorting with Japanese women. Yet for all his outrage, you'd assume that such things were happening routinely to foreigners there.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"Let me put it this way"

Please don't when a much more straight-forward analogy was put to you which you didn't answer. You're being intellectually dishonest.

If you support the right of a Japanese onsen to reject foreigners because they've had a few rowdy russian sailors who've caused problems, then you have to support the hotel who doesn't want to take in blacks because they've had bad experiences with a few black people in the past.

Debito can be annoying, I admit that, and perhaps there are better things to protest against than one wrinkly old japanese women who wont let you use her bath-house, but that doesnt take away from the moral legitimacy of most of his crusades.

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

"If you support the right of a Japanese onsen to reject foreigners because they've had a few rowdy russian sailors who've caused problems, then you have to support the hotel who doesn't want to take in blacks because they've had bad experiences with a few black people in the past."

No you don't. It's pretty obvious that the ethical repercussions of the two things would be different due to recent history. Funny how people oscillate between shouting "the law is a blunt instrument" when the manifest failings of any hard and fast rule become apparent, and trying to turn every collection of nuanced scenarios sharing a common feature of necessity into a rule. Generalise; particularise; generalise; particularise ...

All the analogies deployed in this argument to this point are questionable. I can see the Momus view on this issue, and I think it's because (with only a tourist's experience of Tokyo) I imagine the onsen being discussed are rather like clubs, and straddle the boundary of public and private. Similar to the long-running issues about whether men's clubs (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24858166-601,00.html) should start to accept female members. Personally I'm not a fan of groups like the Athenaeum, but I can see how as a member of a men's club you might feel that admitting women would be beside the point.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

Precisely. "Integrating" an onsen is like "integrating" men into an all-women's college. Just as there are tons of other colleges to choose from that are not all-women, there are tons of other onsen to choose from that are not all-Japanese. Because such a glut of alternatives exists, there can be no reason for this "integration" other than an obnoxious, spiteful nitpickiness. Kumakouji's attempt to compare it to a black person being turned away from a hotel in America is silly because it doesn't address the fact that the histories and demographics of the two countries are entirely different. In a way, the all-women's colleges are actually worse because there are so many more men to "discriminate" against than there are foreigners in Japan.

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

I think I pretty much agree, and the other points you raise about availability and historical / social context tend to confirm that thought.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"No you don't. It's pretty obvious that the ethical repercussions of the two things would be different due to recent history. "

Be more specific, saying "it's different." without a valid reason isnt an argument, although can guess where youre going with this -- blacks were enslaved by whites, etc.

"I imagine the onsen being discussed are rather like clubs, and straddle the boundary of public and private"

All businesses operate within the frame-work of a society and wouldn't be able to function if that society wasnt in place. Therefore, that business should have to abide by the laws of the land, which state that discrimination on the grounds of race is unacceptable.

These laws are the result of mob-rule based on subjective preferences on how the majority want their society to run. I happen to agree with this rule that most modern democracies strive to follow. and I think it's completely bogus that you think we shouldn't discriminate against blacks because for example, my great great grand father was a dick to their great great grand father and we're "making up for it", but because the japanese have been isolated for so long and werent caught up in any significantly contentious racial tensions with whites they should be allowed to discriminate.

you're trying to do moral gymnastics over an issue thats very straight forward IMHO. Do you want a society that allows us to negatively discriminate against minorities based purely on the colour of their skin? It's that simple.

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

Since you could guess where I was headed with my rejection of your analogy, I think I was probably specific enough :-)

Look, I think you have a point. The rule of law and basic principles are important, and it's not super-cool to allow elites to make their own laws for their own circumstances. I'm not going to type out a rabid disagreement to what you've stated above.

But. This reminds me of that old chestnut, "human rights". People are keen on them, but they contradict each other so often that they don't provide a useful framework for real law. Real law itself has to leave huge gulfs of undecided territory to the discretion of judges and officials, because it too can only crudely predict the right course of action in any situation.

This -- the Russians banned from onsen thing -- is a more intimate sort of issue, more akin to when you have a feeling that someone's "screwing up the neighbourhood". The "no foreigners" rule discussed in Clark's article was introduced by an onsen operator who was allegedly near bankrupt as a consequence of his business's problems with drunken Russians. One operator, looking for an ad hoc measure that would actually work -- note the article suggests quite persuasively why various other types of bans would have been ineffective.

Note the rather evident lack of a system of apartheid or a slave class.

"I think it's completely bogus that you think we shouldn't discriminate against blacks because for example, my great great grand father was a dick to their great great grand father and we're "making up for it", but because the japanese have been isolated for so long and werent caught up in any significantly contentious racial tensions with whites they should be allowed to discriminate."

Well, I think it's bogus that you think locking drunken buffoons out of a bathhouse in Japan because they're ruining the atmosphere and driving away the custom is the same as barring blacks from a diner in the Deep South because you think their great-grandparents should never have been freed. It's a stupid argument to be having: you're not even close to apples and apples, you've picked a dumb fucking analogy because it's a much stronger platform from which to argue your point than, you know, the real situation we're discussing. So, I'd appreciate it if you'd leave it alone.

Society, as well as being built on the rule of explicit law as you mention above, rests even more firmly on a fragile and nuanced web of implicit relations and concordant expectations. Instead of wanting to be the white guy who gatecrashes the onsen drunk and not knowing the protocols, how about working a little so that someone Japanese actually wants to invite you in? Staying at a Japanese ryokan or minshuku for the first time you don't have the faintest idea of appropriate behaviour, but it's certainly fascinating to learn about.

"you're trying to do moral gymnastics over an issue thats very straight forward IMHO. Do you want a society that allows us to negatively discriminate against minorities based purely on the colour of their skin? It's that simple."

I like to think of it as more like yoga -- you know, with an emphasis on flexibility. But "a society" -- what society are you talking about here? How does what I want have anything to do with it? I'm not in Otaru! I can tell you one thing though, if you arrived at my doorstep with your top-down-imposition-of-the-roughest-possible-societal-blueprint and demanded entrance to my living room I might say no :-)

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

This is perfectly stated. We're looking at an ad hoc, enforceable response to a clear problem. I guess perhaps the most fair thing the owner could have done was force white foreigners to provide proof that they were not Russians employed as navy or merchant mariners, but enforcing that would have been terribly difficult.

I think the real question we have, and which the broad strokes of "equality" don't really allow to be asked, is to what extent justice is done if we kick down the doors to this onsen with the iron fist of law.

If the condition for allowing peaceful foreigners to use the onsen is that we also have to allow the unruly Russians who instigated the ban in the first place, then we have merely taken the justice from one trough and transferred it to another. We have not achieved any objective increase in justice, and I think we need to ponder this instead of whitewashing it with the self-congratulation of "scoring one against the racist natives," as Arudou seems inclined to do.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"Well, I think it's bogus that you think locking drunken buffoons out of a bathhouse in Japan because they're ruining the atmosphere and driving away the custom is the same as barring blacks from a diner in the Deep South because you think their great-grandparents should never have been freed."

It is because not all whites are drunken buffoons and dont deserve to be treated that way. If you cant see that, you have a screw loose IMHO. I believe youre being intellectually dishonest if you refuse to acknowledge the reasons why we outlawed racial discrimination. We never put these laws in place as some kind of token gesture of compensation for bad behaviour against black people, we put these laws in place because we decided that holding someone in a negative regard purely for the colour of their skin is wrong. You know this, I know this.

"Instead of wanting to be the white guy who gatecrashes the onsen drunk and not knowing the protocols, how about working a little so that someone Japanese actually wants to invite you in? "

Thats a little hard when if your host doesnt want to deal with you period because of the colour of your skin. I know the protocol of an onsen, to automatically assume the character of someone because of their race is nonsense.

" I can tell you one thing though, if you arrived at my doorstep with your top-down-imposition-of-the-roughest-possible-societal-blueprint and demanded entrance to my living room I might say no"

Business premises are different to private property. What you're essentially trying to argue now is that people should be allowed to refuse to serve people because of their skin colour or race. You cant justify that, not to me.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

People don't seem to realise that identity is made of a series of exclusions. They think exclusion can only be a bad thing, even if they think that identity -- flavour -- is a good thing. They also don't realise that folk soul does not require Hitler (http://imomus.livejournal.com/308507.html). That folk soul is not the opposite of multi-culturalism, but its essence. (In this sense, the US is the least multi-cultural nation on earth, not the most.)

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

Well, and it seems to be an essentially American mindset that, even if one doesn't ever plan on using the services of a discriminatory establishment, for example, one has the responsibility to make sure that this establishment wouldn't discriminate against him/her if, indeed, he/she did plan on using its services.

It's just the most pointless and droll kind of activism, but Americans take great pleasure in it, like jumping in every pile of leaves on a suburban street in autumn.

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

Yup! Occasionally one has to stop to recall that "discrimination" more or less means "choice"*.

* I hope that no one will decide to read into this equation that I'm clearly a racist maniac.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

Your analogy is false--as are many such analogies--on the basis of exaggeration. You're never going to convince me that doing stop & searches on black people at a higher rate than other races is the same thing as a few onsen in Japan barring foreigners from entrance. The history of brutality and savagery, on the part of the powerful, is not there, and unfortunately your analogy suffers for it.

I don't have to support one side of your analogy merely because I believe the other. The belief that two responses (which aren't even analogous anyway) must remain consistent, even when we're crossing cultural boundaries, dealing with entirely different socio-cultural situations, is absurd.

In America, there are enough people from all sorts of different backgrounds that one can and should reasonably expect to grow up and live there feeling included in, feeling part of, society.

If you're coming into Japan, as a white American, you may be entitled to enter any public building or acquire the services of private establishments, but you don't have any right to feel included in, to feel part of, society. I think the problem is that a lot of Americans take the gains of the Civil Rights Movement to mean that we now have the right to fit in anywhere in the world, and while I would argue that such an ideal, if it came to pass, would be nice, I recognize and respect that it probably will not. And this doesn't mean that the "offending" countries are ass-backwards, or deserving of American-style litigation-up-the-ass for their "transgressions."

Abadou is a citizen of Japan. I think he should fight to defend his legal right to move freely and take advantage of all the things Japanese citizens can take advantage of. That's his right. But it seems that he has a larger philosophical problem, as I outlined above. He believes (1) that an American style Civil Rights Movement for foreigners is necessary and (2) that he's the guy who's going to make it happen. I've seen so many of this super-activist type here in Korea, too. You know, the ones who think they're going to change the education system, or change the "blandness" of the mainstream culture. They spend their whole day bitching, to the extent that it becomes clear the only reason why they're there is to spite the natives. They aren't happy. They are abject and pathetic creatures. And the sad part is that, unlike American blacks fighting for freedom, they have a citizenship elsewhere, and they can go back whenever they want. Yet they choose to stay and berate the backwardness of a culture which they willingly inhabit. It's a sad thing, probably some kind of syndrome.

I think that the best way for Abadou to work his agenda is to not be so combative. Because I think he's talking to a general audience who are willing to listen to nuanced, reasonable arguments, and to extend favor quite readily, of their own free will, to people who act gently in such matters. Judging from your previous analogies, I'm sure you'll come back with "Yeah, and I guess the blacks should have just gone about it gently, too!" And that analogy will, as usual for you, be utter shit and miss the point completely.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

"I don't have to support one side of your analogy merely because I believe the other. The belief that two responses (which aren't even analogous anyway) must remain consistent, even when we're crossing cultural boundaries, dealing with entirely different social-cultural situations, is absurd."

No its not, you just want your double standards. The basic principle underpinning this is that majorities with the majority of the influence in a society shouldnt be able to deny business to minorities purely because the majority feels the minority wouldnt fit in. That's the issue here, nothing else.

"You're never going to convince me that doing stop & searches on black people at a higher rate than other races is the same thing as a few onsen in Japan barring foreigners from entrance. The history of brutality and savagery, on the part of the powerful, is not there, and unfortunately your analogy suffers for it."

The laws we have in place today are to stop the injustices of the past happening again, they're not there purely because these injustices happened! We didnt make these anti discrimination laws as a way of making it up to the blacks as a form of bizarre compensation, they're there to stop the past repeating itself IN ANY FORM because we dont want a society like that.

"If you're coming into Japan, as a white American, you may be entitled to enter any public building or acquire the services of private establishments, but you don't have any right to feel included in, to feel part of, society."

You cant make laws to force people to like you. However, you can deem that someone is a completely cunt if they dislike you purely for the colour of your skin.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

So you're telling me that the existence of two standards in two completely different socio-cultural scenarios is a "double standard"? Unfortunately that's not what the term means. For a double standard to be at work, we have to be talking about the same conditions.

In America, to enforce multiculturalism is to enforce American-ness, because America is a multicultural nation. Perhaps what we need to wrangle with is the distinct possibility that the same impulse -- to enforce Japanese-ness -- might lead some establishments to bar non-Japanese from entrance. We're not creating an equivalent scenario by transferring American multicultural values to Japan. We're actually creating a double standard, by which all nations, regardless of their ethnic demographic makeups are expected to conform to a socio-judicial model that may not even answer any of their national or local concerns.

It would seem that Abadou has already done a good enough job of deeming that the Japanese, as a group, are "cunts." Since when was that right ever denied him?