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

[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.