The Champions List has now been posted for the most recently concluded Grand Sumo Tournament, the first for 2007. The winner of the highest division (Makuuchi) is, for the 20th time, the Mongolian yokozuna Asashoryu (14-1). Ho-hum. The winner of the lowest (Jonokuchi) division is Hisanoumi (6-1), who hails from Tonga. About time another Polynesian worked his way up the ranks! And the winners of all the divisions in between—Juryo, Makushita, Sandanme, and Jonidan—are Japanese. That, too, is good for the future of Japan’s unique sport.
Category Archives: Japan
Another Profile of Japan’s Brazilian Workers
Associated Press reporter Joseph Coleman recently talked to a few people in Oizumi, home of Japan’s largest Braziltown, in international Ota City in Gunma Prefecture just north of Tokyo, and just across the river from the recent Outlier haunt of Ashikaga City in Tochigi Prefecture. It’s no surprise that the children of the immigrant workers seem to be having trouble fitting into either culture.
A labor shortage during the economic boom of the late 1980s produced a change in visa laws to let in descendants of Japanese emigrants. But if officials figured the immigrants would blend easily back into Japanese society, they were disappointed.
Today, Japan’s 302,000 Brazilians are its third-largest foreign minority after Koreans and Chinese. Watanabe and the other foreigners of Oizumi are the human legacy of that policy.
Instead of a chain of schools to absorb the newcomers into Japan, the reverse seems to be happening.
In 1999 the Brazilian education company Pitagoras opened a school in Ota, a town neighboring Oizumi, to improve the foreign children’s Portuguese and prepare them for a possible return to Brazil. Japan now has six Pitagoras outlets.
Maria Lucia Graciano Franca, a teacher at the Ota school, said many of the workers’ children speak neither Portuguese nor Japanese well and have trouble fully adjusting to life in Brazil or Japan.
“They go back to Brazil, they stay for a while, and they come back here,” she said as children practiced dance moves for a school concert. “And the ones who stay in Japan follow the same route as their parents – they work in the factories.”
The grown-ups are torn too.
Wordcatcher Tales: Iwo, Kakka, Kisamara
Yesterday I went to see the best Japanese movie I’ve seen in a long time: Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima (硫黄島からの手紙). Although Eastwood deserves the lion’s share of the credit, and the Japanese actors were excellent (especially the leads, veteran Watanabe Ken as the commanding general and boyband star Ninomiya Kazunari as the slacker private), I appreciated above all the superb screenwriting by Iris Yamashita, who did an amazing job of bridging linguistic and cultural gaps. The wording of the Japanese dialogue and the English subtitles often diverged radically in order to make each appropriate to the context. Here are a few of the divergences.
硫黄 iou (also ryuuou, yuou) ‘sulphur, brimstone’ – Note that there is no /w/ in the current Japanese pronunciation of this most appropriate name for an island in the Volcano Archipelago (火山列島 Kazan Rettou) that was hell on earth for the men who fought there.
UPDATE: The Mandarin Chinese reading for this compound is liúhuáng. The second character, optional in many contexts, means ‘yellow’, but in this compound it is sometimes written with a ‘stone’ radical (硫磺). The regular Sino-Japanese match should be ryuukou (once written riu-kuwau), but both syllables of the island placename have suffered erosion: ryuu- > yuu- > yu- > i- and -kou > -ou.
閣下 kakka ‘(Your/His[/Her]) Excellency’ – The commanding general is both addressed and referred to as kakka, a term of great deference but not a military rank. I learned my first two Japanese military ranks while watching the Japanese-dubbed Adventures of Rin Tin Tin as a kid: 軍曹 gunsou ‘sergeant’ and 中尉 chuui ‘1st lieutenant’. In English, several of the names for the officer ranks come in pairs: 1st and 2nd lieutenant, lieutenant and lieutenant junior grade, colonel and lieutenant colonel, commander and lieutenant commander, and (my favorite) rear admiral upper half and rear admiral lower half. In Japanese (and Chinese and Korean, I believe), they come in groups of three, each coming in small, middle, and large size:
- 少尉 shoui, 中尉 chuui, 大尉 taii for the company-grade officer ranks (USA/USN) ‘2nd lieutenant/ensign’, ‘1st lieutenant/lieutenant junior grade’, ‘captain/lieutenant’;
- 少佐 shousa, 中佐 chuusa, 大佐 taisa for the field-grade officer ranks ‘major/lieutenant commander’, ‘lieutenant colonel/commander’, ‘colonel/captain’;
- 少将 shoushou, 中将 chuushou, 大将 taishou (as in 将軍 shougun ‘general of an army’) for the general officer/flag officer ranks ‘major general/rear admiral (2 stars)’, ‘lieutenant general/vice admiral (3 stars)’, ‘general/admiral (4 stars)’.
The much more problematical in-between ranks of ‘brigadier/commodore‘ (with 1 star) are rendered by 准将 junshou ‘(lit.) quasi-general/semi-admiral’. In the U.S. Navy, commodores are now rear admirals (lower half).
貴様ら kisamara ‘you collective (derog.)’ – Japanese has a host of ways to translate English ‘you’. (See the useful summary at the end of the Yale Anime Society glossary.) The most common ones used in the military context of the movie were the gruff, male-bonding omae (お前, etymologically ‘honorable facing [person]’) and the familiar, superior-to-subordinate kimi (君, etymologically ‘lord’). The latter etymon is also the source of -kun, a familiar (usually male) equivalent of neutral -san ‘Mr., Ms.’ and polite -sama (様). As the derogation of 君 ‘lord’ attests, the most derogatory terms often have the most noble origins. And few terms of address have dropped farther down the scale of politeness than 貴様 ‘(lit.) exalted/sacred-sama‘, which is now best rendered in English as ‘you son-of-a-bitch, you bastard’, in other words, the ‘you’ that precedes a fight.
I had heard kisama many times, but had never heard it with its collective suffix -ra—the impolite equivalent of -tachi—until I heard abusive officers use it in the movie script to address troops about to be punished, in fact, troops about to be summarily executed in one episode. That got me thinking about the contexts appropriate for using -ra vs. -tachi. At one end of the scale, you would not combine highly derogatory kisama with a neutral collective marker: *kisama-tachi sounds socially bizarre. At the other end of the scale, you would not (except ironically) combine polite anata with impolite -ra in *anata-ra (although the less respectful anta-ra sort of works, for me anyway). However, either collective suffix seems to work on the gruff, male-bonding terms: omae-ra and omae-tachi both work for ‘you guys’, just as ore-ra and ore-tachi do for ‘us guys’.
UPDATE: Another tricky term of address I heard in the film was onore (己), which my electronic dictionary defines as either (1) ‘oneself’ (syn. jibun), (2) ‘you’ (syn. omae, anata), or (3) “Hey!; Damn it!; You son of a bitch!” [syn. kisama—J.]. In the film script, it was used by a gallant but kind-hearted commanding officer addressing his men after their situation was hopeless, telling them to do what they think is right (like Polonius: “to thine own self [onore] be true”), thus implicitly allowing them to choose surrender. The officer himself chose solitary suicide after being blinded by shrapnel.
Earliest Filipino Immigrants to North America
In 2006, the State of Hawai‘i celebrated its centennial of Philippine immigration, but the earliest Filipino immigrants to North America arrived in 1763, and their story was first brought to the attention of Americans by a writer chiefly famous for his ties to Japan, Lafcadio Hearn, according to The Filipino Americans (1763–Present): Their History, Culture, and Traditions, by Veltisezar Bautista (Bookhaus, 2002), excerpted at length here.
About 235 years ago, a settlement was established by Filipino deserters from Spanish ships at Saint Malo in the bayous of Louisiana, near the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. The people who settled there were called Manilamen, who jumped ship during the galleon trade era off New Orleans, Louisiana, and Acapulco, Mexico, to escape Spanish brutalities. Known as Tagalas, they spoke Spanish and a Malay dialect. They lived together—governing themselves and living in peace and harmony—without the world knowing about their swamp existence.
Thus, they became the roots of Filipinos in America.
It was only after a journalist by the name of Lafcadio Hearn published an article in 1883 when their marshland existence was exposed to the American people. It was the first known written article about the Filipinos in the U.S.A.
(Note: This write-up was adapted from Hearn’s article entitled Saint Malo: A Lacustrine Village in Louisiana, published in the Harper’s Weekly, March 31, 1883.)
The Times-Democrat of New Orleans chartered an Italian lugger—a small ship lug-rigged on two or three masts—with Hearn and an artist of the Harper Weekly on board. The journey began from the Spanish fort across Lake Ponchartrain. After several miles of their trip, Hearn and the artist saw a change in scenery. There were many kinds of grasses, everywhere along the long route. As Hearn described it, “The shore itself sinks, the lowland bristles with rushes and marsh grasses waving in the wind. A little further on and the water becomes deeply clouded with sap green—the myriad floating seeds of swamp vegetation. Banks dwindle away into thin lines; the greenish, yellow of the reeds changes into misty blue.”
UPDATE: In the comments, Lirelou expresses some doubts about the location and date of this account.
There are some definite disconnects here. First, no treasure galleons operated anywhere near Louisiana. Spanish treasure from the Philippines was off-loaded at Acapulco and transported across the country (through Mexico City) to Veracruz, from where it travelled to La Habana, and after that, off to Spain. Second, Filipinos were not unknown in Mexico. Indeed, the Mexican national dress (la Poblana) is generally agreed to have been inspired by the the Filipina wife of a prominent colonial official in Puebla, who was known throughout the city as “la china poblana”. The “chinese” allusion is in reference to her race. Filipinos were classified as “chinos” in Mexican colonial records. More to the point, when the city of Los Angeles was founded in the 1780s, one of the founding families was listed as “chinos” whose place of birth was “Manila, Islas Filipinas”. So, Filipinos played some minor roles in Mexican colonial history as far north as California. The tone of the original article suggests that it was written at a time when tales of Spanish atrocities against their colonial subjects abounded. This does not mean that Saint Malo was not founded by Filipinos who had jumped ship from Mexico. Spain received Louisiana from France in compensation for the loss of Havana in the Seven Years War (1[7]63), and had a tough time recruiting colonists. After several failed attempts in Spain, they turned to Acadians recently paroled to France, with the end result that enough of these latter volunteered to leave us the Cajuns of today. The colony was, until its return to France, sustained and supplied out of Mexico.
Filed under Hawai'i, Japan, North America, Philippines, Spain
Defeated Japanese Exiles in Siam, 1600s
After the American Civil War of 1861–65, many defeated Confederates resettled in Mexico or Brazil. Many defeated Japanese also found refuge in exile as Japan’s long period of warfare (Sengoku) drew to a close around 1600. Among the most successful of the exiles was young Yamada Nagamasa (山田長政 1590–1630).
Yamada Nagamasa lived in the Japanese quarters of Ayutthaya, home to another 1,500 Japanese inhabitants (some estimates run as high as 7,000). The community was called “Ban Yipun” in Thai, and was headed by a Japanese chief nominated by Thai authorities. It seems to have been a combination of traders, Christian converts who had fled their home country following the persecutions of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, and unemployed former samurai who had been on the losing side at the battle of Sekigahara:
“From the years of Gen’na (1615-1624) through the later years of Kan’ei (1624-1644), the Ronin or warriors who lost their lords after the defeats of the battle of Osaka (1614-15) or the earlier battle of Sekigahara (1600), as well as the defeated Christians of the Shimabara uprising, went to settle in Siam in great numbers” …
The Christian community seems to have been in the hundreds, as described by Padre Antonio Francisco Cardim, who recounted having administered sacrament to around 400 Japanese Christians in 1627 in the Thai capital of Ayuthaya (“a 400 japoes christaos”) …
The Japanese colony was highly valued for its military expertise, and was organized under a “Department of Japanese Volunteers” (Krom Asa Yipun) by the Thai king.
In the space of fifteen years, Yamada Nagamasa rose from the low Thai nobility rank of khun to the senior of Okya, his title becoming Okya Senaphimuk. He became the head of the Japanese colony, and in this position supported the military campaigns of the Thai king Songtham, at the head of a Japanese army flying the Japanese flag. He fought successfully, and was finally nominated Lord of Ligor (modern Nakhon Si Thammarat), in the southern peninsula in 1630, accompanied by 300 samurai …
Following Yamada’s death in 1630, the new ruler and usurper king of Siam Prasat Thong (1630-1655) sent an army of 4000 soldiers to destroy the Japanese settlement in Ayutthaya, but many Japanese managed to flee to Cambodia. A few years later in 1633, returnees from Indochina were able to re-establish the Japanese settlement in Ayutthaya (300-400 Japanese) …
Nagamasa now rests in his hometown in the area of Otani. The remnants of the Japanese quarters in Ayutthuya are still visible to visitors, as well as a statue of Yamada in Siamese military uniform.
Wordcatcher Tales: Mō’ili’ili, Ishizuchi
For our first meal of the (solar) Year of the Pig, the Far Outliers pigged out on Chinese dimsum at Honolulu’s Chinese Cultural Plaza with old family friends from China who have since immigrated to Hawai‘i. Later that afternoon, I took a long walk through Honolulu’s old Japan town, Mō‘ili‘ili, with camera in hand (see Flickr for more photos). If I have time, I’d like to put together a neighborhood blogpost à la Dumneazu. In the meantime, all I can offer is a bit of etymological talk-story. It all starts with lava rock.
Mō‘ili‘ili gets its Hawaiian name from the small, round pebbles (‘ili‘ili) of lava that were washed down by Mānoa Stream, which has flooded many times, most recently during October 2004, when it destroyed basements and ground floors of several crucial buildings on the campus of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, including the medical school and the graduate research library. According to UH geographer Abraham Piianaia, the area had been referred to as Ka moana ‘ili‘ili ‘the pebble sea’, Ka moku ‘ili‘ili ‘the pebble district’, or Ka mo‘o (‘aina) ‘ili‘ili ‘the pebble (land) parcel’. Ka mō‘ili‘ili is a contraction of the latter two. However, the place name later came to be associated with Polynesian legends of the lizard (mo‘o), and the folk etymology for the name is ‘pebble lizard‘.
In addition to its pebbles, Mō‘ili‘ili was known for its underlying limestone karst from raised coral and its overlying ridges of volcanic Sugarloaf basalt, which provided the stone for many a building in Honolulu, most notably the New England–style sanctuaries of Central Union Church in neighboring Makiki. The Mō‘ili‘ili Quarry employed mostly Japanese workers, whose families lived nearby, turning the neighborhood into Honolulu’s Japantown during the 1920s and 1930s.
Back in those days, Japanese speakers called the quarry face Ishiyama ‘Rock Mountain’, and “the Quarry” is still how everyone refers to what’s officially known as the Lower Campus of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, which is now filled with a huge multistory parking lot and sprawling athletic facilities.
Ishizuchi 石鎚 ‘rock hammer’ is the name of the tiny Shinto shrine not far from the Quarry, a name I thought most fitting after I deciphered it. There are a lot of Buddhist temples of various sects in the neighborhood, and at least a couple of Christian churches with strong Japanese American membership (Church of the Crossroads and Olivet Baptist Church).
The shrine was all decked out on New Year’s Day (top photo). Unlike most Japanese shrines, but in harmony with its geographical and cultural environment, the purification trough (bottom photo) was made of lava rock and offered paper towels to dry off with.
A Contrarian Take on the Six-Party Talks
On Christmas Eve, the Wall Street Journal‘s Opinion Journal ran a short stocking stuffer of an op-ed by literary contrarian B. R. Myers, who wrote his dissertation on North Korean literature (reviewed here).
No country today is as misunderstood as North Korea. Journalists still refer to it as a Stalinist or communist state, when in fact it espouses a race-based nationalism such as the West last confronted during the Pacific War. Pyongyang’s propaganda touts the moral superiority of the Korean race, condemns South Korea for allowing miscegenation, and stresses the need to defend the Dear Leader with kyeolsa, or dare-to-die spirit–the Korean version of the Japanese kamikaze slogan kesshi [決死]. The six-party talks are therefore less likely to replicate the successes of Cold War détente than the negotiating failures of the 1930s. According to early reports from Beijing, the North Korean delegation appears more confident than ever. It has clearly been emboldened not only by its accession to the nuclear club, but by the awareness that Seoul will continue providing food and financial support no matter what happens….
The ideological landscape of the peninsula defeats the reasoning that led to the six-party talks in the first place. North Korea is not a communist country with ideological and sentimental reasons to listen to China and Russia; it is a virulently nationalist state that distrusts all the other parties at the table. And though the rhetoric of a “concerted front” against North Korea has proved to be just that, it has sufficed to heighten South Korea’s sense of solidarity with the North. This will continue to mean plenty of aid money for Kim Jong Il with which to build weapons. The U.S. has urged Beijing to bring more pressure to bear on the North. But if America can do nothing with its own ally, it can hardly expect the Chinese to do more with theirs.
UPDATE: B. R. Myers responds to comments over at The Marmot’s Hole.
A Korean Worker’s Take on Korea, Japan, & China
Four or five years ago I was asked by one work site manager to make the “direct commute” (as we day laborers say) to a job that I had originally obtained through the Center. I did this for about ten days running. Two Koreans, one about fifty and the other in his mid twenties, were working there, and they would chat with me in their broken Japanese during rest periods and the noon break. I couldn’t figure out their relationship. That they were not parent and child was obvious I enough. I decided that they were two men of differing ages who just happened to be getting work, illegally (or so I surmised), with the same firm. That peculiar rule in Korean society of deference by the junior party to the senior (something I learned from my reading), which would have applied had they been acquaintances from the same village and come to work in Japan together, was not in effect between them. If the older man were indeed fifty, he would have been just a couple of years older than I, yet he had a commanding presence that made him seem for all the world like my father. When I got to talking with him, I realized that he was a fervent patriot. Somehow I was not surprised. He said his name was Shin.
“We go ahead of Japan. This I am sure. Less than ten years.” These are the kinds of things he liked to say. The younger Korean appeared to be uninterested in talk of this sort and simply wolfed down his boxed lunch. For ten days I teamed up with this Korean duo and took orders along with them from the site manager. The older Korean assumed the role of team leader and told us what to do. He was far more proficient at Japanese than his young compatriot, and it was possible to carry on an extensive conversation with him.
“I am not man who works like this. I was company president. Do you understand? My company closed. I was forced to come to Japan and earn money.” As he spoke, Kim, the younger Korean, would look on with an ironic smile without really listening. (He rarely spoke a word; indeed, it’s possible that he understood no Japanese.) Kim did not have the face of an educated person—that much was certain.
“I have three children,” Shin said. “Oldest one in college. ——— University. You know it?” When I shook my head, he continued, “Good school. He join elite. Give orders. We three here take orders. This is difficult thing.”
Shin may have had a problem with Japanese at the level of nuance, not being able to inflect his emotions correctly, but his very direct and open manner of expressing his desire to advance in the world definitely got my attention.
Shin asked me how old I was and learned that I was a bachelor and living alone. “You have no family at your age?” he proclaimed haughtily. “That shameful! You should not tell it to others. I feel sorry for you.”
Sometimes I would get into arguments with Shin.
“Japan not apologize for things they did to us. This no good. One day maybe we attack Japan. But we not do to you what you do to us. We are moral people. We are most moral and most superior people in Asia. This I am sure.” …
“Japan number one in Asia now, Korea number two. some day Korea number one.” The hierarchy featured in these pronouncements appeared to have nothing to do with morality, however, and everything to do with economic and political power in the global pecking order.
“That’s not true at all,” I countered. “China’s number one in Asia now, if you ask me.
Shin immediately shook his head. “No, very wrong—very wrong!” he snapped, curling his lips in contempt of China. “Look at Chinese. They fall behind. Long ago they were teacher. Now they are backward country. Their income less than one tenth of Koreans. That country is lowest country. It is dirty country.” …
And so I learned that not only was Shin a stalwart anticommunist, he also had no love, as I’d heard most Koreans had, for China, the country that Korea once recognized as its master.
SOURCE: A Man with No Talents: Memoirs of a Tokyo Day Laborer, by Ōyama Shirō, trans. by Edward Fowler (Cornell U. Press, 2005), pp. 92-95
Tobi, the Aristocrats among Day Laborers
Tobi [鳶 ‘kite (bird)’, or ‘steeplejack‘, the latter short for 鳶職 tobishoku ‘high-rise scaffolding work’] are the aristocrats of San’ya. In the same way that it is possible, in Europe, to distinguish the aristocracy from the common folk by how they look, so it is possible to distinguish tobi from common day laborers by their appearance (their faces more than their physique). The training required to nurture their skills to a level worthy of their calling and the confidence gained through having those skills recognized by their peers give them a commanding presence and bestow on their countenances a certain poise. All in all they cut a very dashing figure. There is a certain crispness about their movements and indeed about their entire demeanor. I would imagine that their individual abilities vary considerably, but the best have a truly unmistakable aura about them. One can tell at a glance: yes, this man, without question, is a tobi.
Carpenters and ironworkers are not employed as day laborers or as contract laborers, so there are none in San’ya. Here, the word shokunin—skilled worker—means only one thing, and that is tobi. Men like Saito (Mr. “One-Man Salvation Army”) and Ikeno (the former stockbroker) are exceptions; you could never surmise from their characters what the typical tobi is like. I have never actually met a tobi who treats laborers like slaves, barking at them and driving them into the ground; I have, however, run across several who were proud to the point of arrogance—so much so that they never paid us laborers any heed. (It was as if we never even entered their field of vision.) And I must say that I was not necessarily put off by their arrogant pride.
My hatred of working as a tobi’s assistant and being hounded on the job lives side by side with my admiration for the tobi “race.” Yet when all is said and done, it seems to me far preferable that the haughty arrogance of these men live on than that it wither away—these men who work closer to death’s door than any other group of skilled workers in Japan. There are among tobi some men (although admittedly few in number) who actually consider themselves works of art. I would much rather that such men never vanish from the scene. More and more of late I hear stories of this or that tobi doing the work of a common laborer. I fervently hope that these men—San’ya’s very own aristocrats—will be able to ride out this terrible recession. Speaking as a common laborer from San’ya’s “plebeian class,” I pray that San’ya’s spiritual patricians, defending their manly pride and honing their reputations in the face of great danger, manage to survive these hard times and live another day.
SOURCE: A Man with No Talents: Memoirs of a Tokyo Day Laborer, by Ōyama Shirō, trans. by Edward Fowler (Cornell U. Press, 2005), pp. 61-62
On Leaders Forged (or Not) in Manchuria
It is extremely difficult to try to generalize, but I think that we must consider this issue—including the problem of war responsibility—in a multilayered manner. I myself think that at present this is a theme for future research, not a time at which we can offer generalizations. Thus, let me just say a few words about the directions subsequent research might take and how we can try to place Manzhouguo in world history.
Although I have written about it in a number of articles, I think we need to reassess once more the meaning of Manzhouguo in postwar Asia. The legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party derives at least one of its bases in the fact that it won the anti-Japanese war which began with the Manchurian Incident. In this way, the fact that some Japanese argue for the legitimacy of Manzhouguo thus denies the very legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. This dispute is unproductive, with a strong probability of the two sides following parallel tracks semipermanently.
Let me focus for a moment, though, on the importance of Manzhouguo on the Korean peninsula in postwar East Asia. First, in the Republic of Korea there were a number of men who were educated in Manzhouguo—such as Pak Chŏng-hŭi (1917-79) and Ch’oe Kyu-ha (b. 1919) who graduated from the Daidō Academy—and acquired power in postwar Korea. [Aikido had a curious prominence in its curriculum.—J.] In this instance, Manzhouguo served as a supply base for human talent. We certainly cannot say this was always the case, for the debate continues over what the “pro-Japan faction” in Korea was. I have only introduced a very limited number of such men in my own work, but in fact there were a large number of them.
In North Korea as well, Kim Il-sŏng (1912-94) derived one of the bases of his legitimacy in the victory against Japan in Manchuria, and this legacy continues for North Korea today. There are pros and cons, but the postwar in East Asia cannot be understood without Manzhouguo.
By the same token, as concerns wartime and postwar Japan, Tōjō Hideki (1884-1948) came to amass such great power by virtue of the unification of the military police (kenpei) and the regular police in Manzhouguo. It was the first case he confronted as commanding officer of the Guandong Army’s military police, when he was awakened to his administrative skills. Until that point, he had always been treated rather coldly in Japan, but in the process of his acquisition of power thereafter, the administrative experience tying him to the military police in Manchuria was to have critical importance.
Kishi Nobusuke spent only three years in Manchuria, but the money and personnel he put together at that time was to have a huge impact on postwar politics. Together with such men as Shiina Etsusaburō (1898-1979), Nemoto Ryūtarō (b. 1907), Hirashima Toshio (b. 1891), these mainstays of the Liberal Democratic Party all had Manchurian experience. At the time of the revision of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty (Anpo) in 1960, Kishi made a trip to Southeast Asia before visiting the United States. The reason for this, in Kishi’s words, was that, for Japan to cross swords as equals with the United States, it was best for it to assume a position as the leader of Asia. Only then, as he put it, would Japan be on an equal standing with the United States and thus be in a position to have the Anpo Treaty revised.
In reply to a question from an interviewer, Kishi noted: “My present feeling that Japan must become the leader of Asia is no different from the consciousness I had when I went to Manzhouguo. This has not changed in the least even in the postwar era. If indeed I possess a kind of pan-Asianism, then my present sense of things is completely linked to the time when I traveled to Manzhouguo.” Thus, his Manzhouguo experience—including the money he amassed—played an extremely important role in his career. Although a well known story, Kishi told a fellow bureaucrat upon returning to Japan: “It’s best to use money after filtering it.” The effectively plutocratic essence of the Liberal Democratic Party as it has come down to us now may then be said to trace its roots back to Manchuria….
The generation of Japanese prime ministers from Yoshida Shigeru (1878-1967), who was consul-general in Fengtian, and Kishi down to Fukuda Takeo (1905-95) and Ōhira Masayoshi (1910-80) all had Asian experience. When he was serving as a secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Fukuda spent over two years in Nanjing as an advisor on economic affairs to the government of the Republic of China. Ōhira worked in the Asian Development Board in Zhangjiakou and the liaison section of the Mengjiang regime.
Through the years of Fukuda and Ōhira, it was people who knew Asia as a tactile experience who served as prime ministers. Thereafter, Japanese policy toward Asia became thoroughly clumsy and unskilled. To be sure, the early men had stood on the side of the rulers, but they understood, as if it was experience acquired through their skin, about the vastness of the Asian mainland, the atmosphere prevailing there, and the enormity of the population. This also meant that they understood its formidable character. The prime ministers who followed them, however, lacked as a sense of touch this spatial understanding of Asia and China, and the influence exerted by this absence of experience on Japanese policy vis-à-vis Asia has been immense. In particular, from Hosokawa Morihiro (b. 1938) to the Koizumi Jun’ichirō (b. 1942) now, the continued blur of Japan’s Asian policy is, I believe, linked to a lack of Asian experience. I would even go so far as to say that there is no remedy for this lack of sensibility.
I by no means want to leave the impression that their role in colonial rule was a good thing, but the fact that the policies of Japanese political figures, including diplomatic officials, toward Asia has now entered a dangerous stage is, in my view, heavily influenced by the lack of experience—including that acquired in Manzhouguo—gained through the senses and not simply having seen the place but having lived there. This will remain a problem for the future. I would argue for the need for men and women who wish to become politicians to spend two or three years wandering about various sites in Asia.
SOURCE: Manchuria under Japanese Dominion, by Yamamuro Shin’ichi, trans. by Joshua A. Fogel (U. Penn. Press, 2006), pp. 238-239
And the same goes for would-be leaders from other parts of the globe. Well, I can’t quote any more from this book. I have to send it on to my brother who just finished teaching a course on East Asia.
Far Outliers 
