Is your daily paper transvaluing values?
Jan. 15th, 2009 12:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusAs 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.
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.
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Re: Are you sure you wanna endorse this Gregory Clark guy?
Date: 2009-01-15 07:15 pm (UTC)I think what you're not registering is that "discrimination" is one of these words like "criticism" that has both a popular pejorative meaning and a technical neutral meaning. Just as it's extremely important to criticize, in the sense of assessing things with some degree of objectivity, it's extremely important to discriminate. As I say further up the page, there can be no justice without discrimination. John Maynard Keynes could not have implemented the socialist welfare policies that prevailed in the Britain I grew up in -- progressive taxation, socialised medicine, unemployment benefit and so on -- without discriminating in the precise, neutral sense: targeting money to those who lacked it, and harvesting money from those who had it. This "corrective" discrimination is the basis of socialism.
In the case Clark is discussing, a few Japanese institutions (private ones, who have as much right to turn people away as does, for instance, the door guy at the Berghain Club here in Berlin -- he turns away about one in ten, for purely arbitrary reasons based on appearance) have barred foreigners after bad experiences with Russians. To those who sue and make a big fuss about this (really just one man, the ridiculous Debito), Clark is responding that discrimination and racial profiling happen for positive reasons as well as negative ones: they are what happens when Justice takes off her blindfold and looks. Affirmative action is one type of positive racial profiling. Aid is another; aid agencies would waste their time helping white South Africans or Jewish settlers on the West Bank, when it's black South Africans and Palestinians who most urgently need assistance.
The same is true in Hokkaido: the sentos have a right (the same right as a trendy techno club in Berlin) to refuse admittance to people who wouldn't fit in. White people in Japan make a pretty unconvincing victim category: cry me a river!
To summarize: Justice does not mean applying the same treatment to everybody. It means treating people differently according to their needs and abilities, and according to how they act. It's the difference between equality of opportunity (which the West tends to mistake for justice) and actual justice.
Re: Are you sure you wanna endorse this Gregory Clark guy?
Date: 2009-01-15 07:51 pm (UTC)While I agree with this to some extent, I think there's also an element of apology for racism here. Gaijin are black as well as white. Would it make a difference if the anti-discrimination activists in Japan were black, or brown? Are Koreans also to be brushed under the carpet?
Re: Are you sure you wanna endorse this Gregory Clark guy?
Date: 2009-01-15 07:52 pm (UTC)Re: Are you sure you wanna endorse this Gregory Clark guy?
Date: 2009-01-15 11:14 pm (UTC)White nations might hold a lot of sway internationally, politically and culturally speaking, but you're completely failing to take into account the small, isolated communities of white individuals that live as minorities that have no sway what-so-ever in foreign countries such as Japan. All the advantages white people might have in other countries don't exist in Japan -- youre applying very anglo-centric cultural standards to Asian countries. "its ok, we're the top dogs, we can take it"... well we're not the top dogs in Japan, not by a long shot. Explain to me why white people should be denied any of the same civil rights the natives has? because they wouldn't "fit in"? Haven't the far right been arguing the same about Jews and fags and well, pretty much every other minority group out there that's different from the majority?
"While I agree with this to some extent, I think there's also an element of apology for racism here. Gaijin are black as well as white. Would it make a difference if the anti-discrimination activists in Japan were black, or brown? Are Koreans also to be brushed under the carpet?"
He's going to say it's completely different. His opinions on this issue are just a liberal take on 'the white man's burden'. The yellow people need protecting from us, y'know, because we're the centre of the world and stuff and we're all-powerful. We're diluting their cultural heritage, and that's just not on because it would completely spoil my vacation experience.
Re: Are you sure you wanna endorse this Gregory Clark guy?
Date: 2009-01-16 12:23 am (UTC)That's simply not true. Look at magazine covers -- many of these paradigmatic images are dominated by white models. Look at manga characters, who are often depicted as Caucasian. Japan is not a colonialised country, but it did lose the last world war to white people and is generally agreed to be a client state of the US, who designed its constitution and still, to this day, maintains military bases on its territory. Where are Japan's military bases in the US? There are none, but there are sites people can show you where, within living memory, Japanese people were interned like criminals just for being Japanese.
As for Quentin's point, I simply don't accept that to be anti-racist is to pay no attention to people's race. As Clark says, there are all sorts of forms of racial discrimination which are progressive. The sento owner in question banned white people because of Russian sailors upsetting his regular customers. He chose to put the boundaries of the ban there. To ban blacks or Koreans wouldn't have been appropriate in that situation.
People who argue for racial blindness -- and they're usually the same people who think equality is the same thing as pie-in-sky "equality of opportunity" (ie equality in some notional parallel world) -- don't realise that they're making it impossible for themselves to take the positions described as "asymmetrical multiculturalism". That is, they're making it very difficult to argue that existing power relations, existing unfairnesses and inequalities, which often run along racial lines, make it necessary to keep race in mind when coming up with solutions. I would say that these arguments need to be made, because context always needs to be taken into account. Context here meaning things like history and hierarchy and poverty and education, all things that equality-of-opportunity people tend to leave out of their accounts, or mix up with "prejudice".
Re: Are you sure you wanna endorse this Gregory Clark guy?
Date: 2009-01-16 02:01 am (UTC)Exotic imports from your culture being popular with the natives isnt the same as your minority group having significant sway within a society. No British indian was ever empowered by making Chicken Tikka masala for a white man... appreciated a little more as a chef maybe, but thats it. I doesnt really matter to me that much the Japanese like blue eyes and blond hair, or that they wanna practice their English on me. I'd much rather I was treated with respect as a human being than exoticised.
As for the war, Japan started it and they lost -- They're not the victims. Just because America has a relatively large part to play in Japanese politics, specifically their defense policy, doesnt mean the minority of whites who have nothing to do with the military or the government deserve to be treated like bad guys. People should be taken on an individual basis.
Re: Are you sure you wanna endorse this Gregory Clark guy?
Date: 2009-01-15 08:17 pm (UTC)And since it is not possible to bar only Russians, barring all foreigners is the only answer.
I'm trying to figure out if Clark meant that the onsens legally could not bar just the Russians, if he meant that it would have been less politically correct or socially acceptable in some way, or if it was simply a matter of practicality (in that it would have been difficult to distinguish between Russian sailors and potentially destructive sailors of other nationalities).
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming that there is no way to apply the same laws and punitive measures upon the foreigners as are applied to native Japanese customers who are rowdy or destructive.
Is it that there is no authority in place for these situations because there are no incidents of this type or magnitude with Japanese customers? Or are the Russians repeatedly evading Japanese law by way of being foreigners?
I can certainly understand banning or refusing service to a group of people who have repeatedly caused damage and financial ruin in the past. And Clark certainly addresses the issue of there being alternate solutions (lessons on Japanese mores or the creation of a seamen's club) that are ignored by the activists in question. But just because the activists' actions are absurd doesn't negate the fact that the banning of all foreigners rather than of just Russian sailors still seems like a puzzling act of questionable discrimination and justice.
Re: Are you sure you wanna endorse this Gregory Clark guy?
Date: 2009-01-15 08:44 pm (UTC)It means "No yakuza", because yakuza are known troublemakers in the bathhouses. But it doesn't say "No yakuza". It says "No tattoos" (in sign language, not words). Everyone knows this means "No yakuza", but it bans a much wider category of people, potentially -- anyone with any sort of tattoo. It's very similar to the "No foreigners = No Russian sailors" thing, but the discriminated-against group here happens to be a Japanese one. I don't see Debito complaining about this discrimination, demanding that mafiosi crooks be allowed to soap up beside him, and stare him down if he accidentally jostles their elbows or uses their soap.
Re: Are you sure you wanna endorse this Gregory Clark guy?
Date: 2009-01-15 08:46 pm (UTC)Re: Are you sure you wanna endorse this Gregory Clark guy?
Date: 2009-01-15 09:35 pm (UTC)Re: Are you sure you wanna endorse this Gregory Clark guy?
Date: 2009-01-15 10:25 pm (UTC)Re: Are you sure you wanna endorse this Gregory Clark guy?
Date: 2009-01-16 07:54 am (UTC)Re: Are you sure you wanna endorse this Gregory Clark guy?
Date: 2009-01-16 09:16 am (UTC)What can't be denied is that Clark is engaged in exactly the sort of "transvaluation of values" that this blog entry calls for. I can't go through everything he's said, but I find his anti-western (and pro-communist) bias very refreshing. You must admit he has a point about pack journalism, and the more these reduced, simplistic, ideological, west-whitewashing accounts are repeated, the more they beg to be questioned. In his diplomatic experience, Clark discovered that many foreign correspondents in Asia were, quite simply, spies, or at least people vetted by the intelligence agencies before being given their assignments.
Re: Are you sure you wanna endorse this Gregory Clark guy?
Date: 2009-01-16 01:51 pm (UTC)Re: Are you sure you wanna endorse this Gregory Clark guy?
Date: 2009-01-16 05:02 pm (UTC)Re: Are you sure you wanna endorse this Gregory Clark guy?
Date: 2009-01-16 06:50 pm (UTC)Although you have spoken before about how you would prefer that Japan not be "diluted", I don't believe you would follow Clark's broader line about the evils of immigration in Europe and the need for more authoritarian government. You can read a lot of unvarnished Clark on the NBR Forums to get a better idea of his worldview. I also think Clark has made good, if heavy-handed, points about foreigners in Japan but he has increasingly become a ridiculous curmudgeon where he now hardly credits anyone with an ability to understand Japan. He would take great issue with your belief that you can understand something about the nature of Japan and its people without having a knowledge of the language.
Re: Are you sure you wanna endorse this Gregory Clark guy?
Date: 2009-01-16 07:25 pm (UTC)Well, it sounds like he's a bit more consistent than I am, then. I endorse multiculturalism for Europe and the US, but monoculturalism for Japan.
He's probably right about my limited Japanese skills, too. It does limit (or skew) my ability to understand Japan, of course it does. Then again, there's a consistency in my attitude here: if you can never assimilate (I don't believe muslims should have to assimilate in Europe, nor that gaijin can in Japan -- though both can integrate, which is a different thing), why even pretend? Why not enjoy the freedoms that being foreign entails? And the understandings -- limited though they are -- that the foreigner can bring?