Category Archives: Japan

by | 14 February 2009 · 3:05 pm

Changing Court Costumes under Meiji

From “Cultural Change in Nineteenth-Century Japan,” by Marius B. Jansen, in Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of Nineteenth-Century Japanese Art, ed. by Ellen P. Conant (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 40-41:

The need for practicality and efficiency affected cultural policy in many ways. The early Meiji years saw the court trying to do business in the garments of antiquity. Albert Craig writes that “when the government structure was first promulgated, officials rushed out to secondhand bookstores to buy copies of the commentaries on the Taiho code (702) so they would know what the new office titles meant.” Many adopted Heian-period names, and “[e]ven the clothing worn by the councilors at certain court ceremonies was dictated by the new ethos. High-ranking samurai officials were required to dress as nobles; and all, including nobles, were required to wear swords. On one occasion the Saga samurai Eto Shinpei, late for a ceremony, dashed into the court uncapped by an eboshi—a small, black, silly-looking hat that perches forward on the head. A noble asked him, ‘Where is your hat?’ Eto retorted, ‘Where are your swords?’ Both hastened out for the proper accouterments.”

But the work of modernization could not be carried out at a costume party. In 1870 the Daigaku Nanko, ancestor of the Imperial University of Tokyo, still ruled out Western clothing, but that same year the imperial court appointed a Western-clothing specialist to its staff. By 1874 Kido Takayoshi, hero of the Restoration and powerfully influential government minister, was agonizing in his diary over the pain caused by “my shoes.” A year later Mori Arinori (1848-1888), natty in a Western suit, was bantering with the Qing statesman Li Hungzhang. Did he not find it unpleasant to wear such foreign clothes? Li asked solicitously. Had not Mori’s ancestors preferred Chinese costume? Yes, answered Mori, but he was doing as his ancestors had done by choosing the better garb. And, he went on, had Li’s ancestors worn Manchu robes like those his host had on? No, was the reluctant answer, they had not.

Before long the Meiji emperor’s Western military uniform was made court dress, and things moved so rapidly that at a birthday ball in 1885, itself remarkable, only two of the ladies did not appear in Western dress. Westerners usually thought this regrettable. In 1887 Herr von Mohl, a specialist in Western protocol hired for the court, suggested going back to Japanese dress for formal occasions but found that “Count Ito let me know that in Japan the costume question was a political issue in which the imperial household advisors had no voice; he requested that the matter should be viewed as settled and not to waste further time in discussing what is, in fact, a fait accompli.”

By the time the Meiji constitution was promulgated in 1889, Tokyo newspapers reported that Western-style tailors were being swamped with business by prefectural officials who had come crowding into the capital. Eboshi had given way to top hats, which alternated with bowlers in the uneasy combination of dress and footwear that is recorded in many Meiji photographs.

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by | 19 January 2009 · 5:06 pm

Japan’s Women vs. Children Left Behind in China

From Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan, Mariko Asanoi Tamanoi (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 91-92 (Japanese kanji added):

Today the Japanese state and media woman call [women abandoned in Manchuria at war’s end] chūgoku zanryū fujin [中国残留婦人](Japanese women left behind in China) and distinguish them from chūgoku zanryū koji [中国残留孤児] (Japanese orphans left behind in China) in terms of age and gender. The latter were born of Japanese parents, mostly agrarian colonists, in either Japan or Manchuria, and were younger than thirteen at the time of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. In the wake of Japan’s capitulation, their parents entrusted them to Chinese families, either because they were too sick to take care of their children or because the latter had little hope of survival. Children who were orphaned or accidentally separated from their families were also adopted by Chinese families. Today, owing to the tender age of these children at the time they were separated from their relatives, they are unsure of their mimoto, their “roots” [身元]. Since the mid-1970s, such children have been urged by the Japanese state to prove their identities as Japanese in the system of nation-states. Only those who have successfully proved their Japanese nationality have been officially allowed to return to Japan permanently.

In contrast, chūgoku zanryū fujin is a gendered category, referring to women who were over the age of thirteen when separated from their families. By 1945, most Japanese men older than thirteen had already been mobilized into the Youth Brigade or military. Hence, whether they were married or not, the women in this category had been left to take care of themselves and all the children. In the turmoil after Japan’s capitulation, some of these women chose to marry Chinese citizens for their own survival, and they stayed in China. These women are different from the children who were left behind in one important way: because they were older, they firmly remember their roots as well as the Japanese language. Precisely for this reason, the Japanese state deemed these women old enough to make choices when they were left on their own. Thus until 1993, the state did not permit them to return permanently to Japan; they were regarded as belonging to China as the spouses of Chinese citizens.

The set of terminology is confusing largely because the difference between the women and the children was artificially created by the Japanese state and media. In addition, the categories excluded Japanese men older than thirteen who left in China as of 1945. In 1994, the Japanese state admitted this confusion. Through the Repatriation Support Law (Kikoku shienhō [帰国支援法]), the state eliminated the differences between the two categories and combined them under the umbrella term of chūgoku zanryū hōjin [中国残留邦人] (Japanese left behind in China). Nevertheless, this term too has generated confusion; as a result, the state and media continue to use the two earlier terms today.

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by | 18 January 2009 · 8:09 am

Japan’s Minority Contender for P.M. in 2001

On the eve of inaugurating a new and different president of the U.S., the New York Times engages in a bit of national oneupmanship by way of dusting off a profile from eight years ago of a Japanese politician who never made it to the top post because of his status as a member of an outcast minority.

For Japan, the crowning of Hiromu Nonaka as its top leader would have been as significant as America’s election of its first black president.

Despite being the descendant of a feudal class of outcasts, who are known as buraku and still face social discrimination, Mr. Nonaka had dexterously occupied top posts in Japan’s governing party and served as the government’s No. 2 official. The next logical step, by 2001, was to become prime minister….

The topic of the buraku remains Japan’s biggest taboo, rarely entering private conversations and virtually ignored by the media.

The buraku — ethnically indistinguishable from other Japanese — are descendants of Japanese who, according to Buddhist beliefs, performed tasks considered unclean. Slaughterers, undertakers, executioners and town guards, they were called eta, which means defiled mass, or hinin, nonhuman. Forced to wear telltale clothing, they were segregated into their own neighborhoods.

The oldest buraku neighborhoods are believed to be here in Kyoto, the ancient capital, and date back a millennium. That those neighborhoods survive to this day and that the outcasts’ descendants are still subject to prejudice speak to Japan’s obsession with its past and its inability to overcome it.

Yet nearly identical groups of outcasts remain in a few other places in Asia, like Tibet and Nepal, with the same Buddhist background; they have disappeared only in South Korea, not because prejudice vanished, but because decades of colonialism, war and division made it impossible to identify the outcasts there.

In Japan, every person has a family register that is kept in local town halls and that, with some extrapolation, reveals ancestral birthplaces. Families and companies widely checked birthplaces to ferret out buraku among potential hires or marriage partners until a generation ago. The practice has greatly declined, though, especially among the young.

The buraku were officially liberated in 1871, just a few years after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States. But as the buraku’s living standards and education levels remained far below national averages, the Japanese government, under pressure from buraku liberation groups, passed a special law to improve conditions for the buraku in 1969. By the time the law expired in 2002, Japan had reportedly spent about $175 billion on affirmative action programs for the buraku.

via Japundit

My father’s first missionary posting after two years (1950-52) of language school in Tokyo was to serve as chaplain at Seinan Jo Gakuin, a Southern Baptist girl’s school in Kokura, Japan, a grimy industrial city that was the original target of the atomic bomb that was redirected to Nagasaki because of too much cloud cover over Kokura that fateful day. My brother and I attended the new kindergarten (founded in 1952) that served mostly school employees. It was not until decades later that my father happened to mention the second preschool, a bit closer to our home, that served children from the burakumin housing complex just up the road from our house on what was then a rather barren hillside. Kokura was one of Japan’s principal coal-mining regions and many of the mineworkers were burakumin and Koreans, along with POWs during the war years. The current Japanese premier is a direct descendant of the owners of the Aso Mining Co., which at one time controlled a large number of coal mines in Kyushu.

Our house was a metal prefab that wonderfully amplified the noise of rain, but was hard to heat during the winter. There was a coal bin underneath to feed the furnace, and at one point we discovered that a homeless urchin had been sleeping there. We two oldest boys spent a lot of time with our maid, a country girl who spoke no English and would threaten to give us to the rag picker (very likely burakumin) if we didn’t behave. Our mother bore two more sons while we were there, the first of them born at home with the help of a midwife. It was mom’s easiest delivery, she later told us.

When we began going to kindergarten, down one hill and up the next, mom would watch us from the sun porch, waiting for us to reappear on the far side of a hidden part of the road. My father tells me that at kindergarten I often served as translator for my more gregarious younger brother.

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by | 16 January 2009 · 4:18 pm

Manshū Jizō for Japanese Orphans & Their Chinese Parents

From Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan, Mariko Asanoi Tamanoi (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 113-114 (inline reference citations omitted):

In 1998, I was introduced to Kōji, a repatriate from Manchuria and a volunteer who assists [Japanese] orphans [left behind in 1945] and their [Chinese] families [who adopted them]. When I visited him at his home in downtown Tokyo, he showed me some fifty tiny figurines of Jizō, placed neatly in a box. Jizō, one of the most important Buddhist deities in Japan, is believed to comfort the souls of dead children while simultaneously comforting their mourning parents. Jizō statues are found throughout Japan, and the deity is “perhaps the most ubiquitous, popular, and widely loved in Japanese religion.” Kōji makes these little figurines. He starts by collecting tiny stones on the beach or by the roadside. Using his artistic skills, he smoothes the surface of each stone, paints a child’s face on it, and transforms the stone into Jizō. Each Jizō represents an immigrant child who died in Manchuria, as well as the sorrow of the child’s parents. According to Kōji, however, each Jizō also represents an immigrant child who has survived in China, as well as the devotion of the child’s Chinese adoptive parents. While the postwar Japanese state regarded orphans as “the dead” for quite some time, Kōji resurrected them in tiny stones and made the compassion of their adoptive parents known to the Japanese public. Kōji also took me to a gallery near his home. Located in the posh Roppongi district of Tokyo, the small gallery attracted many young women and men. There he displayed his figurines—called Manshū Jizō (Manchurian Jizō)—and sold them to gallery visitors. The money he made from the sale of these statues, Kōji said, would go into a fund to support another project: a stone monument to be built in China to express gratitude to the Chinese adoptive parents of the Japanese orphans. Indeed, by the time I met Kōji, the project was already well under way; a well-known artist, himself a repatriate from Manchuria, was already building a monument of a Chinese couple and their adopted son, a child of the Japanese agrarian colonists.

In 1999, Kōji and his group finally completed this grand project. When I read the newspaper report of this event, it surprised me greatly that they had built the monument in Liutiaogou, the very site of the Japanese invasion into Manchuria on September 18, 1931. In addition, they held the ceremony celebrating the completion of this monument inside the September-Eighteenth Museum, which is known for its displays condemning Japan’s imperialism. The monument, then, embodies more than the suffering of the orphans. It embodies the pain of their adoptive parents and, by extension, the pain of the people in China who suffered not only from the departure of their adopted children to Japan but also from the Japanese invasion in the age of empire. Representing the orphans, Fumio spoke at the ceremony to an audience of about two hundred, including his eighty-four-year-old adoptive father. He is reported to have said the following: “After the normalization of diplomatic relations between Japan and China, my adoptive father saw me off to Japan while crying. … My adoptive parents made me eat steamed rice every other day while they ate corn and kaoliang.” Fumio now lives in Japan as a Japanese citizen and yet has never forgotten the adoptive parents he left behind in China.

Kōji and his friends, who erected the monument and organized the ceremony in Liutiaogou, represent the parental generation of Japanese colonists. I later learned that Kōji, along with Satoshi, was one of the key figures who helped the orphans stage their protest march in downtown Tokyo. These volunteers, who themselves experienced tremendous hardships during the journeys of repatriation, are now keenly aware that the suffering of the orphans belongs not only to the past but to the present and the future as well. They are also aware that to understand their concerns and worries, they must go back to the past, and that is why they traveled to Liutiaogou. By so doing, they went far beyond Japan’s national space to understand not only the fates of the orphans and their adoptive parents but also their own involvement in Japanese imperialism. Are the children of orphans, being Japanese-Chinese, no longer Japanese? Is it necessary for the Japanese public to distinguish orphans and their families from Chinese “economic refugees”? I will leave these questions unanswered for now, but note that the wisdom of people such as Kōji gives us the hope that people, regardless of nationality, can learn the value of humanism from a past that they once shared in some ways.

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by | 15 January 2009 · 4:36 am

Hatsu Basho, 2009

They’re off and shoving! Five days into the Starting Tournament of 2009 in Tokyo, four rikishi remain undefeated: the two Mongolian yokozuna, Asashoryu and Hakuho; the newly promoted sekiwake, Baruto from Estonia; and the rising maegashira Tochiozan from Kochi, Japan, home of the famous Tosa wrestling dogs (which are featured on his ceremonial apron).

Two ozeki, the Japanese veteran Chiyotaikai and the Bulgarian heartthrob Kotooshu, are only one loss behind. But the other two ozeki only have one win each so far: Japanese veteran Kotomitsuki and the lithe Mongolian crowd favorite Harumafuji, who changed his ring name (from Ama) after nearly winning the November tournament and earning promotion to the second highest rank. The latter two risk demotion if they don’t finish with more wins than losses.

UPDATE, Day 8: Tochiozan is still keeping pace with the two yokozuna at 8-0, with Baruto and Kotooshu right behind them at 7-1. Harumafuji has improved to 3-5, but still has to win 5 of his 7 remaining bouts to finish with a winning record.

UPDATE, Day 14: Harumafuji, now 8-6, has somehow managed to get the 8 wins he needs to keep his new rank of ozeki, but Kotomitsuki dropped out after falling to 2-10. Everyone except the two yokozuna have fallen off the pace. Unless Asashoryu (14-0) loses on the last day, he will coast to victory, with Hakuho (13-1) just one loss behind. Nice recovery by Asa, who hadn’t been wrestling very well before the tournament.

UPDATE, Day 15: Hakuho handed Asashoryu his first loss when they faced each other on the final day, leaving both tied at 14-1 and forcing a playoff, which Asashoryu then won, for his 23rd tournament title at the highest level.

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by | 10 January 2009 · 8:29 am

Japan’s Genre of Uprooted Colonist Memoirs

From Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan, Mariko Asanoi Tamanoi (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 53, 59-60 (inline reference citations omitted):

In Japanese, the verb “to repatriate” (hikiage-ru) has multiple meanings; among these are to pull up, raise, refloat, pullout (of a place), and (close a business and) return home. [‘Pull up stakes’ seems the best English equivalent to me—J.] As a noun, “repatriate/s” (hikiage-sha) becomes not only historically but also morally charged in postwar Japan. Repatriates are those who emigrated to Japan’s overseas territories in the age of empire but were forced to (close their businesses and) return home after Japan’s capitulation in the Asia-Pacific War. Once in Japan, however, they were often seen as social misfits, largely because the dominant perception of them dramatically changed over the divide of August 15, 1945. Before then, they were imin (emigrants) who were hailed as the vanguards of imperialism in official discourses. After Japan’s defeat, they were hikiage-sha, who were greeted with pity, suspicion, and callousness by their compatriots who had never left Japan proper. Here, the oral narrative of Aki … is helpful: “When we returned home [to Fujimi in 1946], our neighbors were very cold to us Manchurian daughters. I truly worried that I might become an old mistress.” An arranged marriage for Aki would fail largely because she was “a returnee from Manchuria” who might carry “foreign sexual diseases.” In the end, she married a “Manchurian boy” whom I could not meet since he died a few years before the beginning of my fieldwork. After all, kaitaku imin (agrarian emigrants) were not supposed to return, for they had left Japan to rehabilitate the rural economy at home. With Japan’s capitulation, they lost land and houses in Manchuria that the state had taken away from Chinese farmers. Hence they had no recourse but to return to Japan, the only country on earth that was obliged to take them. Yet in the immediate postwar period, when resources were so meager, the people of their mother villages, who had sent them off enthusiastically, were reluctant to welcome the repatriates back to their home….

Although the first memoir written by a returnee from Manchuria appeared as early as 1949 (and was reprinted in 1976), the upsurge in this genre came decades later, from the late 1960s to the 1990s, with several published in the early years of the twenty-first century. This means that the majority of authors waited for more than two decades before publishing their memoirs—in order, possibly, to keep a certain distance from the past. What characterizes the memoirs is that most authors rely only on their personal memories, as well as the memories of their fellow settlers that they (over)heard while fleeing from Manchuria. In addition, they cite each other’s memoirs, rather than primary or secondary sources on Japanese imperial history. After all, hikiage-mono are the authors’ eyewitness reports and they force the reader to believe in the authenticity of their personal memories.

For all these reasons, the genre is called hikiage-mono rather than hikiage-bungaku, “repatriate literature.” Though a generic term for “genre,” mono is primarily used for classifying popular cultural productions such as movies, comedy shows, and songs. In other words, the term indicates the genre’s lower position in the hierarchy of cultural production: it is neither “literature” (bungaku) nor “history.” Indeed, most repatriate memoirs have small readerships, as the authors, being amateurs, submitted their works to small, local publishing houses. Many of the works are not even for sale. Others are not books at all but short essays printed in magazines published by organizations of former colonists and soldiers, as well as alumni organizations of the Japanese schools built in Manchuria. In fact, I bought most of the works that I examined in secondhand bookstores in Japan since the collections at university libraries are rather limited. It is for this reason, I believe, that Japanese as well as Anglophone scholars have hardly paid attention to them.

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by | 21 December 2008 · 5:39 pm

Niall Ferguson on Current Economic Prospects

Economic historian Niall Ferguson weighs in on China’s and America’s role in the current global economic crisis under the provocative headline, What “Chimerica” Hath Wrought.

The most important thing to understand about the world economy over the past decade has been the relationship between China and America. If you think of it as one economy called Chimerica, that relationship accounts for around 13 percent of the world’s land surface, a quarter of its population, about a third of its gross domestic product, and somewhere over half of the global economic growth of the past six years….

Yet commentators should hesitate before prophesying the decline and fall of the United States. It has come through disastrous financial crises before—not just the Great Depression, but also the Great Stagflation of the 1970s—and emerged with its geopolitical position enhanced. That happened in the 1940s and again in the 1980s.

Part of the reason it happened is that the United States has long offered the world’s most benign environment for technological innovation and entrepreneurship. The Depression saw a 30 percent contraction in economic output and 25 percent unemployment. But throughout the 1930s American companies continued to pioneer new ways of making and doing things: think of DuPont (nylon), Proctor & Gamble (soap powder), Revlon (cosmetics), RCA (radio) and IBM (accounting machines). In the same way, the double-digit inflation of the 1970s didn’t deter Bill Gates from founding Microsoft in 1975, or Steve Jobs from founding Apple a year later….

But the most important reason why the United States bounces back from even the worst financial crises is that these crises, bad as they seem at home, always have worse effects on America’s rivals. Think of the Great Depression. Though its macroeconomic effects were roughly equal in the United States and Germany, the political consequence in the United States was the New Deal; in Germany it was the Third Reich. Germany ended up starting the world’s worst war; the United States ended up winning it. The American credit crunch is already having much worse economic effects abroad than at home. It will be no surprise if it is also more politically disruptive to America’s rivals.

Among the other developed economies, both the Eurozone and Japan are already officially in recession, ahead of the United States. The European situation is especially precarious because, contrary to popular belief, European banks are in worse shape than their American counterparts. Average bank leverage in the United States is around 12:1. In Germany the figure is 52:1. Short-term bank liabilities are equivalent to 15 percent of U.S. GDP; the British figure is 156 percent. Indeed, the United Kingdom runs a real risk of being Greater Iceland—an economy crushed by a super-sized financial sector.

Moreover, unlike the United States, there is no single European Treasury that can implement multibillion-dollar fiscal stimulus. Monetary policy may be uniform throughout the Eurozone, but fiscal policy is still a case of every man for himself.

Emerging markets, too, have been hammered harder by the crisis than the “decoupling” thesis promised. In the year to the end of October 2008, the U.S. stock market declined by 34 percent. But Brazil’s was down 54 percent, China’s 58 percent, India’s 64 percent and Russia’s 66 percent. When Goldman Sachs christened these four countries the BRICs, they little realized that their equity markets would one day be dropping like bricks. These figures are scarcely good advertisements for the more regulated, state-led economic models favored in Beijing and Moscow.

via A&L Daily

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by | 12 December 2008 · 10:33 pm

Japan’s Many Failed Stimulus Plans

In Wednesday’s Washington Post, Amity Shlaes chronicles the failure of Japan’s attempt to stimulate its economy during the 1990s by heavy government investments in infrastructure.

The situation in Japan then was similar in some ways to that in the United States today. A dramatic market crash and a plunge in real estate prices shook what had been a confident nation. Japan turned inward; economists talked earnestly about paradigm shifts. The obsession with exporting no longer seemed to be serving the country well. Leaders cast aside their previous concerns about budget deficits. The then-Ministry of International Trade and Industry sorrowfully let it be known that there were “areas in which Japan lags behind major developed nations.”…

The projects were similar to some infrastructure plans under discussion here today. Bridges? Japan put up the longest suspension bridge in the world. Airports? Kansai International, yes, on an artificial island, but also local fields such as Ibaraki Airport near Mito. Roads? Japan built new streets and highways, including the famous New Tomei Expressway. For biotech and telecommunications, Japan poured out the subsidies.

When one plan proved insufficient, another was begun…. Between 1992 and 2000, the Japanese launched 10 stimulus packages that included public works. The Land of the Rising Sun became the Construction State. Other worthy issues, such as consistent tax reform, lagged. In fact, fiscal reform overall was postponed. After the 1995 Kobe earthquake claimed thousands of lives, the focus on infrastructure was reinforced….

“The construction state is in some respects akin to the military-industrial complex in cold-war America (or the Soviet Union), sucking in the country’s wealth, consuming it inefficiently, growing like a cancer and bequeathing both fiscal crisis and environmental devastation,” commented Gavan McCormack, a professor at the Australian National University. The stimulus plans had the opposite effect of what was expected. Appalled at the country’s new deficits, Japanese consumers closed their wallets.

Worst, though, was the failure on jobs. Unemployment fell in many nations in the 1990s. In Japan, the ’90s were a lost decade: The unemployment rate more than doubled and surpassed the U.S. rate — an unthinkable occurrence just a few years earlier.

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by | 18 November 2008 · 6:58 am

‘Quit India’ vs. the Muslim League

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 127-128:

IN JUNE 1942, [American journalist] Louis Fischer spent a week at Gandhi’s ashram and observed the preparations for a new campaign under the slogan “Quit India.” The slogan was not only catchy but accurate: the British administration was to be harried, disobeyed and besieged until it simply upped and left, war or no war, economy or no economy, responsibility or no responsibility. The Quit India resolution, passed by Congress on 8 August 1942, announced that Congress would “no longer [be] justified in holding the nation back from endeavouring to assert its will” against the British administration, and sanctioned “a mass struggle on nonviolent lines under the inevitable leadership of Gandhiji.” The struggle would only begin at Gandhi’s word; but this was a call for treason as far as the British were concerned. The first arrests were made in the early hours of the morning of 9 August.

Over the following days, India exploded in violent uprisings, described by the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, as the “most serious since that of 1857.” There were Quit India hartals across the country, which turned into riots. The police and the army fought back, often brutally, leaving an official civilian death toll of 1,028; bazaar gossip put the total at 25,000. Effectively, Congress had given the raj an excuse to imprison hundreds of its leaders, including Gandhi himself and Nehru—who, according to his sister, was almost thankful for it, so uncomfortable had he felt opposing the war effort. The resolution could never have succeeded. Britain could not evacuate India in the middle of the Second World War, with Japan looming on its eastern front. But the empty space created in politics by the Congress leaders being in prison gave the Muslim League its chance to rush in.

According to Jinnah, it was not in the interest of the Muslims for the British to abandon them in a potentially hostile swamp of Hinduism. The logical position of the League was actually to keep the British in India—at least for as long as it took to convince them of the case for Pakistan, and perhaps indefinitely. The effect of Gandhi’s Quit India misstep, and the League’s hugely successful campaign during the 1940s, can be seen from the election statistics. In the general election of 1945–46, the Muslim League would win about 75 percent of all Muslim votes. In every previous election, its share of the Muslim vote had hovered around 4.6 percent. During the war years, Gandhi and Congress handed Jinnah a sixteenfold increase in his support. Quit India damaged the chances of a united India at least as much as any single act of the British administration ever had.

Linlithgow wrote to Churchill, admitting that he was concealing the severity and the extent of the violence from the world. But the Americans found out and sent their own mediators to Delhi. The Americans’ “zeal in teaching us our business is in inverse ratio to their understanding of even the most elementary of problems,” Linlithgow complained to the secretary of state for India, Leopold Amery. It would be bad if the Americans came, he averred; it would be worse still if they tried to talk to Gandhi or Nehru. He pleaded with Amery “to arrest at least for a time this flow of well meaning sentimentalists.” But the flow of Americans continued, and Indians delighted to see them spoiling official occasions for the British by wearing the wrong clothes, disregarding procedure and cheerfully ignoring distinctions of rank.

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Filed under Britain, democracy, India, Japan, nationalism, Pakistan, religion, U.S., war

by | 16 November 2008 · 1:37 pm

Sumo’s No-throw Zabutons

This year’s Kyushu Grand Sumo Tournament is at the halfway point, and Kyushu-based blogger Ampontan explained after the first day how the Japan Sumo Association has reconfigured the zabuton (lit. ‘seat futon’) in the box seats in order to discourage fans from throwing their seat cushions when some lower-ranking rikishi upsets a yokozuna. Since the yokozuna fight last, cushion-throwing opportunities tend to come at the very end of a long day of sitting.

The new, difficult-to-throw zabuton made their debut at the Kyushu tournament at Fukuoka City’s Fukuoka Kokusai Center on Sunday the 9th. The space in the box seat areas have been expanded, and instead of having four individual square zabuton for each of the patrons in the box, they will be provided with double zabuton sets. These consist of two rectangular cushions measuring 125 centimeters (49 inches) by 50 centimeters and attached by a cord. A fan would have to be seriously upset to get one of those things airborne.

The reactions to the new cushions have been mixed. One member of a local Kyushu group with ringside seats (called suna kaburi in Japanese, or “covered with sand”) said, “I’ve been hit by flying zabuton before, and it didn’t hurt. But some people who have been hit said that it hurt a lot, so I’m glad they’re doing something about it.”

In contrast, one woman in her 20s from Fukuoka City who plans to attend the tournament said she was disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to see any flying zabuton because she thought it represented the real sumo atmosphere. A housewife in her 50s said she thought it was a bit frightening because people might decide to throw something else instead of the zabuton. (Are not those views representative of the classic difference between youth and age?)

The first day must have been frustrating for would-be launchers of zabuton torpedoes because the lower-ranking veteran Aminishiki gave the live audience a perfect opportunity by defeating reigning champion Hakuho.

After Day 8, however, Hakuho remains tied for the lead, at 7-1, with Miyabiyama, another lower-ranking veteran who is currently the heaviest rikishi in the top division, tipping the scales at 179 kg, just 2 kg more than the giant Estonian Baruto.

Among the fresh foreigner faces in the top level this time around are: the Mongolian Koryu, the Russian Aran, and the Georgian Tochinoshin. There are now eight Mongolians in the top division, and six more in the Juryo rankings, along with two Georgians, one Bulgarian, one Estonian, one Korean, and one Russian.

Now if they could just prevent the wrestlers from throwing matches …

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