Category Archives: Japan

White Peril reminds us that today is the 10th anniversary of the Great Hanshin Earthquake, which destroyed many of my favorite haunts from high school days (and a few not quite so fondly remembered). At the time of the earthquake, I was auditing a class in Japanese newspaper reading. It was a bit over my head, since I had to learn new vocabulary and grammar as well as how to read new kanji and parse newspaper style. I ended up dropping out.

When I was an elementary school kid living in Kyoto, my mother would take me to Kobe to an orthodontist who had foreigners in his clientele. After every visit, mom would take me to the Texas Tavern down toward the Kobe docks near Sannomiya station, where we invariably ordered hamburgers and root beer. Perhaps for that reason, I’ve never had any particular fear of dentists.

During high school I spent many a weekend hour at the Alps curry shop near Sannomiya Station, where you could get curry rice for ¥80 (¥100 with raw egg) and a gin fizz for ¥120 (if I remember correctly). Another favorite hangout in Nada-ku closer to Canadian Academy (which has since moved) was the Gomo theater, where you could see a triple feature for ¥90. These were all good ways to stretch a weekly allowance of only ¥600 (about US$1.70 at the time). There was also an okonomiyaki shop near the bottom of Nagamine-dai where you didn’t have to pay more than ¥70-¥90 for a filling treat.

The Republic of Ezo (蝦夷共和国 Ezo Kyowakoku) was a short-lived breakaway state of Japan on the island now known as Hokkaido.

After the defeat of the forces of the Tokugawa Shogunate in the Boshin War (1868–1869), a part of the Shogun’s navy led by Admiral Enomoto Takeaki fled to the northern island of Ezo, together with several thousand soldiers and a handful of French military advisors and their leader, Jules Brunet.

On December 25, 1868, they set up an independent Ezo Republic on the American model, and elected Enomoto as its president. These were the first elections ever held in Japan. They tried, in vain, to obtain international recognition for the new republic.

SOURCE: Wikipedia, 25 December 2004 (via my librarian brother Ken).

The White Peril posts an interesting take on gay life in relatively constrained Japanese society.

Still and all, there are benefits to Japan’s tradition-mindedness that I think a lot of gays in America have been too willing to cast off. The lack of gay ghettos means that it’s pretty much impossible to wall yourself into a queer-positive echo chamber and start seeing rank-and-file straight people as an enemy arrayed against you. It also means that very few people see their homosexuality as their entire identity, with anti-gayness blamed for every disappointment, setback, depressive episode, and failed relationship. You never hear Japanese gays getting into princessy snits about not being approved of or officially sanctioned exactly like straight people in every last finicking little detail. At ordinary gay bars, you meet brittle, desperate guys who are obviously using a constant stream of sex partners to avoid dealing with their issues much, much less frequently than you do here in the States. (Even here, they’re a minority, of course; their attention-whoring just makes them disproportionately noticeable. But the Japanese in general don’t put the burden of self-definition on sex to the point that we do in the US.)

The bad side, obviously, is that it can be hard for people coming out to find resources, and that people have to keep their most meaningful relationships hidden. It’s not uncommon for employees at the stodgier companies to be informed that they will not be promoted up the usual management-track escalator until they marry and start producing future contributors to the Social Insurance kitty. So many guys use pseudonyms in their gay lives that I only know the real first and last names of, I’d say, my ten or so closest friends. Japan’s shame culture puts pressure on vulnerable gay kids as much as our guilt culture–there’s no finessing that, and it sucks–but most adults who have come out to themselves seem pretty content.

via Simon World

History blogger Rhine River notes an article by Rotem Kowner in Ethnohistory 51.4(2004):751-778 (on Project Muse), entitled “Skin as a Metaphor: Early European Racial Views on Japan, 1548–1853” from which I’ll quote a few passages (omitting footnotes).

The Europeans divided Asians at this period [before the Enlightenment] into three types of color: black, shades of brown, and white. The Japanese and Chinese were evidently white, and this color judgment was related to their habits and abilities. Whereas the “black people” of Asia were regarded as inferior, suggests Donald Lach, “the whitest peoples generally meet European standards, may even be superior in certain regards, and are certainly good prospects for conversion.” Indeed, in contrast to European explorers in other parts of the globe, the Jesuits did not express any racial superiority toward the Japanese. Some may have felt a certain cultural superiority, but this did not prevent them from admiring the Japanese for their dignity, courtesy, sense of honor, and rationality….

Linne’s followers maintained his focus on color as a major component of their racial classification: The Scottish anatomist John Hunter (1728–1793) depicted Mongoloids as brown, whereas Johann Blumenbach was apparently the first to depict the peoples of East Asia as yellow. This color better suited the Japanese, for whom the designation brown was frequently far from reality. The Europeans could easily see yellow in others’ skin color because it is so vague, and it was enough that a few members of a group were perceived as such to generalize the characteristic to the whole group.

In 1775, the year Blumenbach’s book was published, the Swedish botanist and Linne’s disciple Charles Peter Thunberg (1743–1828) left for Japan. Thunberg, who worked as a physician at the Dutch mission for one year, was the first naturalist of the new school to examine the Japanese. A decade later, when Thunberg wrote his own account of his experience in Japan, he depicted the Japanese as having “yellowish colour over all, sometimes bordering on brown, and sometimes on white.” …

The most influential testimony on late Tokugawa Japan, however, was the writings of the German physician and naturalist Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796–1866). The erudite von Siebold, who was employed by the Dutch mission in Nagasaki in the 1820s as Kaempfer had been over a century earlier, took special interest in the origins of the Japanese. Reviewing previous writings on the theme, von Siebold examined four notions regarding Japanese ancestry: they were descendants of the Chinese, of the so-called Tartaric race, of a mixture of more Asian races, or of the aborigines of the archipelago. Like Kaempfer, von Siebold disputed the Chinese hypothesis because of historical evidence, differences in language, and physical traits. He noted, curiously, that the hair color of young Japanese ranged from brown to blond and that among the higher classes the skin color was white and pinkish red (“as among our European women”), whereas the lower classes ranged from copper red to sallow earthlike colors.