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

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

That was me. This machine won't seem to keep me logged in.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

I live in Korea, and maybe it's just completely different here, but it seems like the vast majority of the foreigners who complain about racism toward them are in fact, themselves, the biggest racists here, and often build racist comments directly INTO their critiques of supposed Korean racism.

The first guy like this who I met basically had his anti-Korea rhetoric foiled all night long. We were in a cab, and he was talking -- right in front of the cab driver, of course -- about how Koreans will pretend not to understand you, even if you speak perfectly good Korean, because they can't possibly compute the fact that a foreigner would understand or speak their language. And he tried to use our cab driver as his example, giving directions and telling him where to turn in Korean and whatnot. And lo and behold, we ended up having to turn around a couple times ... but only because the guy was an idiot and gave his directions too late, or spoke them too quietly. For which, of course, the driver was rewarded with degrading comments laced with the foulest English swear words out there. And since taxis are so cheap here, he basically got paid a shit rate to be yelled at for 10 minutes.

Then we went to a small corner pub and ordered some beer. The anti-Korea guy was absolutely convinced that the pub owner was giving us the stink eye because we hadn't ordered any food with our drinks, which is apparently not acceptable behavior here. After berating her loudly in English -- guessing that she spoke none -- the woman came over. He was certain she was going to chew us out, but what did she have with her? Free grapes! She was here to give us "service," a common thing in Korean dining establishments. How's that for racism?

It's been my experience that these people like Abadou, who assume the worst of an entire culture on little or no basis, are the more obvious racists. They engineer situations, knowingly or not, that will result in pushback against them, by walking through their worlds with the bitter, cynical attitude that racism and discrimination are waiting just around every turn. In the resulting mess, there is no room for understanding or compassion, only blunt-fisted complaint and feigned victimhood.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I completely agree, but all this is wasted on Kuma, because for him -- and I hope he realises how un-Japanese his way of thinking is! -- this is all a matter of principles, logic and categories. For him it isn't about existing power balances between white people and Asians, actual things actual people have done and the payback they get for them, history, or having a bad attitude or a sense of overweening self-entitlement, or anything specific and contextual like that. It's about "If you tolerate this, your children will be next!" Why will they be next? Because when everything is a matter of principles, logic and categories, one situation is easily mapped to another. A sento owner who had a bit of trouble with a Russian sailor is mapped easily to a slave owner with a cotton plantation in Virginia in the 18th century. The particularities are discarded.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

Uh-huh. And of course, the obvious difference that Kuma fails to address is the fact that blacks in America didn't have to walk around with chips on their shoulders or otherwise engineer instances from which racism would emerge.

This is an important difference! Just as "gaijin" does not equal "nigger," the act of a few onsen barring white foreigners from entrance is not equal to American hotels barring blacks from entrance, or blacks being pulled over at a higher rate for stop & search, or whatever other BS analogy Kuma wants to throw out there.

Foreigners in Japan are in a unique position, for a supposedly oppressed minority, in that they have the ability to speak and argue rationally toward any complaints they might have, rather than treating the slightest instance of discrimination as though it were George Wallace's stand at the schoolhouse door. Mapping alleged discrimination onto the model they know from American history will only engineer a volatile response. But from the way most of these activist-foreigners operate, that doesn't seem to be too far from their ultimate goal.

I really do think that many people of this disposition suffer from some sort of complex that is a response to the racial dialogue in America. They seem to crave the feeling of being foreign to their immediate environment, of being vaguely oppressed, because it allows them to cope with the impossibility of assimilation. When one is the righteous individual amongst the homogenous masses (this is something about East Asia these foreigners tend to fixate on, either in openly or subtly racist ways), it's like being the sheepdog corralling the herd. It allows the foreigner -- forever destined to be an outsider -- to the most important rank of outsider, thereby giving himself a mission, promising that his position, however lonely and alienating, is of cultural consequence.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Of course, people like that (the person you describe) do exist. Do you think that means racism doesn't exist in Japan? I would suggest you are very wrong if you believed that.

There were plenty of things I didn't like about Japan. Does that make me racist? If you think a particular society, not your own, is very racist, does that make you racist?

Maybe it does. But the only way round that I can see, is not to think in terms of groups at all. Japanese society does not exist, etc., is one way not to have to make generalisations about Japanese society being racist.

I'm not sure if you're trying to confuse me with your taxi friend and thereby discredit what I'm saying. If you are there's no way I can prove that I'm not like that, but, for what it's worth, I'm not. I don't walk through the world with a bitter, cynical attitude about racism. For me to see myself as racially oppressed would be ridiculous. That still doesn't stop the fact that if you're going to examine Japanese society as a whole, you'll find it to be very racist.

Now, I'm not completely unable to appreciate the idea of the Japanese having the right to racial discrimination (and, after all, the above entry is not questioning whether or not it exists, but whether it's justified), but I don't think the issue is anything like as simple as this blog entry seems to suggest, that it's just okay for the Japanese to discriminate however they like (because it's their country anyway, presumably), and we should all be happy about that and ask no further questions.

After all, if we say that it's okay for the Japanese to discriminate racially, then what are the implications for us? Why does racism matter less in Japan? Well, there could be a number of answers to that question. 1) It matters less because it's not 'our' country, and it's just not up to us anyway (to which the immediate answer is, well, fine, just don't expect me to approve or like, or pretend I've been made to feel welcome) 2) the reason racism matters in the West is because of a history that Japan doesn't share 3) racial and cultural purity are precious in themselves, and the Japanese, having some measure of these, have the right to protect them in order to preserve, in a way, some of the cultural diversity of the globe 4) as hinted at above, mixed-race societies are less harmonious, and the Japanese have the right to guard against a loss of social harmony.

If there are other reasons why racism shouldn't matter in Japan, I can't think of them right now, but then, it's still early in the morning for me. I don't necessarily agree with any of the above reasons, but they may be put forward.

(To be continued below...)

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

(Continued from above...)

Let's look at what might be the most important one - history. I grew up in Britain, and I would say that racial diversity in Britain is important because Britain has an imperial past. To try and keep out immigrants from other countries would be to try and deny our past and the fact that our wealth is built on a history of imperialism.

Japan has far less of a history of imperialism, so it is, in a way, quite natural that racism and cultural insularity should be questioned less and tolerated more in Japan. Since Japan has interfered less in the world, perhaps it's fine for them to want the world to interfere less in Japan. And this is not an idea I scorn completely. I partly admire the isolationism of sakoku, although it becomes problematical the moment it becomes any of my business in any way. However, Japan does have an imperial past, too, if less successful and briefer than that of Britain and other Western countries. I don't think that the Japanese can claim complete innocence in racial matters in the way that members of an isolated tribe in the rain forest might be able to.

Reasons 3) and 4) are kind of related. I felt guilty being in Japan, if you want to know the truth (and perhaps it's even absurd of me) because my presence there might in some way be corrupting the native culture. Now, if that is absurd, then it is absurd because the culture has long been corrupted by others, in which case, I felt guilty because I am the descendent of the very first to corrupt - the missionaries of the sixteenth century, and later Commodore Perry.

This raises the uncomfortable question of how important racial/cultural purity is. It's uncomfortable, of course, because certainly the former, and frequently the latter, too, are usually bound up with very right-wing ideas of nationalism and so on. Nationalism, incidentally, which was loudly proclaimed in the streets of Kyoto where I lived for a while?

Did I, hearing the vans with their loud-speakers saying that foreigners should get out, feel outraged at the racism of the Japanese, the way I would have been outraged to hear the same sentiments in the streets of London? No. I felt sad. I felt annoyed. I thought that maybe they had a point and I should get out. But it was mostly sad to me that different cultures can't seem to just get on with each other, that there is always a core of resistance manifeested as a desire to draw a line like this. Do they have the right to draw a line? If they want to, no one can really stop them, except perhaps by violence (which, no, I do not condone). It makes me sad nonetheless. Do I have the right to feel sad about that? Do I?

I can go on much longer about this if you'd like, but I suspect you might be bored by now.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

Here's the difference:

While you may not have been welcomed by every living soul in Japan, I think I can say, with a fair bit of certainty, that you never feared for your wellbeing or your life while you lived there. You could basically go pretty much anywhere you wanted, do pretty much anything you wanted to do, without being hounded and harassed in the process. In other words, the cultural war against you and your kind was a fringe one, and one not very likely to impose on your daily life. As I understand it, there exists a similar movement in Korea, yet I've not once encountered any inconvenience founded on it, and I've actually never felt safer or more secure in my life.

So, taking this as it is ...

If the owner of an onsen in a town wished to ban white foreigners, not out of racial hatred, but because it was a practical, enforceable way to prevent his business from being disrupted by Russian sailors who had put a demonstrable strain on his ability to run a profitable business (by driving away all his customers with their rowdy behavior), is this really the grounds where you want to wage your anti-discrimination battle? Because if this is the worst you've got, an honest businessperson facing a local problem, trying to keep his doors open by the means at his disposal, not because he's necessarily racist, then I think you'd be better just to let it rest and find another onsen to patronize.

There is such a thing as having compassion, and trying to understand, instead of whitewashing every discriminatory act as equivalent to Jim Crow conditions in America. People who toss everything into one category, who fail to see these shades of difference, threaten to create the very problem they're trying to solve. It would seem to me, for example, that the owner of this onsen must not have been racist against foreigners, since he allowed them to enter his business before the Russian sailors got rowdy and started disrupting the majority of his clientele. But putting up a fight that pins him as a racist, and refuses to offer any compassion or understanding of the conditions under which he created the new policy may actually push him toward a racist position that he never actually held before. What he's going to see is a pushy foreigner who intends to wreck his business just so he can make a cheap political point (instead of walking his ass to any of the great number of other onsen willing to accept his business).

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I think I more or less agree with what you've written here. That is, I personally would not do what Debito has been doing. I would have walked to another onsen, or taken a bus. I'm still uncomfortable about the idea of simply banning foreigners, but, being a guest in Japan myself, there is a sense in which it's not really any of my business. I don't like it, but/so I'll leave it.

Perhaps the controversy of discussion here is simply that in the comments I was making, I was thinking about all the discrimation I have observed, experienced and heard of in Japan, and whether that was okay or not, not just this single example and the single example of one person's reaction to it.

My attitude is simply this - I am a privileged guest in Japan. However, I have noticed that it is very rare for me actually to be treated as a human being, even if this does not involve violence or oppression. What it generally involves, instead of oppression, is exclusion. Do I like it? No, I don't. It depresses me horribly. I'm under no illusions whatsoever that this experience can compare with that of, say, black people growing up in Britain, even today, though they have more legal rights here than foreigners do in Japan. Even in terms of attitude, I don't think the Japanese look at white gaijin the way that white racists look at blacks.

Now, one thing that many people who could be thought of as racist in the West sometimes say when people of ethnic minorities complain about discrimination is, "If you don't like it here, why don't you leave?" You may or may not think this is a reasonable question, depending on your own philosophy, the country you're in and so on. With Japan, that seemed a kind of reasonable question to me. It was clear I would never be generally accepted as a human being in Japan, and I left. I could not do otherwise, really. I was, at that point, pretty much crippled with depression.

Much as I hate to repeat myself, yes, the Japanese have the 'right' to be this exclusive, but why should I pretend to them, or anyone else, when I am actually asked, that Japan is a wonderful, welcoming, modern, international, cosmopolitan society?

And it's possible from all this that you think I just hate Japan, which isn't true. I'm not militant. I hope I think about things to reasonable depth, but I don't like to impose final categories of thought upon life. I have been friends with Japanese people who have made to me what I would consider racist comments. I found it weird, for instance, when someone told me that all gaijin smell, but I'm not someone who immediately thinks such a comment disqualifies the speaker from being human. It does make it harder for me to respect them, though. Well, this is still a very large and complex subject. Basically I think I've been talking about it in wider terms than the one single example of the onsen and the Russian sailors, and have no wish to pursue controversy on the matter.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I think that this is the dilemma for every expat who wishes to find a long-term home in a country like Japan or Korea, where true cultural assimilation is an impossibility. And while I obviously can't speak for you, I feel like the depression that comes from knowing you'll never be able to assimilate (I've felt this myself, from time to time, about Korea) has a lot more to do with oneself than anybody else. It seems that some people come to the conclusion that they have been treated inhospitably in order to cope with this depression. And they'll exaggerate every circumstance in order to justify this conclusion. You seem far more moderate in your criticism, so I'm not taking you for a Debito-style "hater," but I think the point is worth pondering anyway.

In my experience, I've found that Koreans are very blunt and direct. I'm not sure whether Japanese people are the same way, but I mean, Koreans will just up and tell people that they need to go on a diet, or that they don't look so pretty today, stuff like that. I don't think it would be beyond a Korean person to say that they think foreigners smell. I'm certain it must have been said to somebody, at some point. But the problem I have with singling this out for general criticism is that we wouldn't do the same thing for people in our own countries. At least, I wouldn't generalize that way about Americans. I think we sometimes tend to assume that because Japan is more or less a monoculture (or Korea, in my circumstance), if one person says something, then he/she is representing the views of the whole. All Koreans dress more or less the same. They all listen to more or less the same music. They all drive more or less the same exact car. They all wear their hair more or less the same way. So if one of them says foreigners smell, that must mean all Koreans feel more or less the same way. I see this logic all the time amongst the hater-activist types here, constantly talking about the Korean "hivemind."

I think what we lack, almost always, in these situations, is perspective. We want so badly to fit in that the slightest overt hint that we are not where we're supposed to be sends us into shock. It's like a high school freshman who knows he isn't old enough or cool enough, and works through all the possible scenarios of rejection beforehand, but decides anyhow to attend a party for upperclassmen at some kid's house, and then when he gets there some asshole says "Hey, what's the freshman doing here?" As knocks go, it's slight, but if your need or desire to be part of what's going on is strong enough, it may prove a fatal blow to your psyche.

Perspective is what we need in these situations. We need to step back and examine the possibility that the goons who say subtly or overtly racist things are not necessarily representative of the whole. It obviously helps if you have friends who don't say stupid things like that, and actually work to make you feel welcome, part of society.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't like you to feel obliged to carry on this exchange forever, but I just thought I'd make a couple of responses.

I feel like the depression that comes from knowing you'll never be able to assimilate (I've felt this myself, from time to time, about Korea) has a lot more to do with oneself than anybody else. It seems that some people come to the conclusion that they have been treated inhospitably in order to cope with this depression. And they'll exaggerate every circumstance in order to justify this conclusion. You seem far more moderate in your criticism, so I'm not taking you for a Debito-style "hater," but I think the point is worth pondering anyway.

Yes, probably so. I won't say I've necessarily pondered it sufficiently. If pondering is the answer, then I certainly haven't pondered enough to arrive at a conclusion that satisfies me. I do think that probably the alienation a gaijin feels in Japan is in part simply the alienation of being a stranger in a strange land. I have noticed that when groups of foreigners are visiting/living in Britain, and especially if they are new to the country, or here temporarily, they will tend to stay in their own national groups. This seems, to some extent, a mutual and spontaneous segregration. I understand the reasons why this happens, on both sides, that don't necessarily indicate a pernicious prejudice, though they do indicate habit and disposition.

One thing I've also noticed in both Britain and Japan, and possibly elsewhere, if I could only remember, is that at parties where the native nationality is dominant in numbers, but there are one or two foreigners, very often a conversation will be held almost as if to the audience of the foreigners, without including them. While I understand why this happens - laziness, actually - I think it's bad form.

Much of my experience of Japan was that kind of experience. I felt I was wanted as an audience to clap and coo at how wonderful things were, but not wanted really for anything else.

Beyond that, I do think there is a racist problem in Japan, as there is in perhaps most countries. Of course, not everyone is actively or maliciously racist (I happen to think that everyone is potentially racist, and if I were to exclude myself that would mean I never examined my own attitudes). I mentioned the person who told me that gaijin smell not as an attempt to typify the Japanese attitude, but as one small example of how I have reacted to what could be thought of as racist. Not everyone in Japan, probably, thinks gaijin smell, though I haven't carried out a survey. My impression, though, is that racism is more generally tolerated in Japan than in the West. The large number of 'no foreigners' signs in Japan (that onsen was not unique by any means), the fact that it's common for landlords to specify that they don't want gaijin, and that, if you're going through an agent, the agent will simply say, "Oh, sorry, no foriegners", as if that's all very normal, the fact that on a television prank show, one 'hilarious' prank can be a Japanese girl pretending to her parents she wants to marry a black man, the lack of legal rights for Koreans born in Japan, the politician who publicly talked about the black population of America bringing down the national IQ average, because he knows such opinions will help rather than harm his image... I could, I'm afraid, go on - all these indicate to me a strong element of racism in Japanese society, and I am concerned that possibly too many gaijin simply want to be polite and nice to the Japanese when asked what they think of Japan, and that if gaijin are only ever treated as an audience who must clap and praise, and if they always only accept that role, that the issues of racism will never be addressed. The Japanese will go away from their gaijin audience every time thinking, "Well, we're doing everything right. No need to change."

Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but this is where my comments on this thread have come from.