The coronavirus outbreak that started in Wuhan, China has become a worldwide crisis, and the virus is serious business – both figuratively and literally. Because the world economy is interlinked and interdependent, a disaster in Asia can have ripple effects across the globe’s financial markets. As countries including the United States cut back travel to China and block people from coming from China, the...
I follow news from all over Asia. Primarily, I pay attention to all the news happening in Japan, from the goofy stuff to the serious headlines. But the world is so interconnected these days, that Japan can easily be affected by news developments -- political, economic, cultural -- in other parts of the globe, and especially Asia. The crazy dude...
This is a disgusting bit of race-baiting. Someone claiming to support Ron Paul's bid for the GOP presidential nomination has posted an attack ad against Jon Huntsman -- who frankly isn't one of the top contenders -- that plays up Huntsman's connections to China. It begins with an ominous challenge asking whether the candidate represents "American values or Chinese?"...
Last week an over-eager reporter for WCCO, the CBS affiliate in Minneapolis, aired a "gotcha" investigative piece about a local puppy mill that had apparently shipped dogs to a meat shop in New York City's Chinatown, where the intrepid reporter, James Schugel, got a clerk to say on the record that they do indeed sell dog as food. The only problem...
Today is the 100th anniversary of the Wuchang Uprising in China, which occurred on October 10, 1911. The date is celebrated annually as Double Ten Day in the Republic of China as the event that marked the end of dynastic rule and the close of the Qing Dynasty. That's the Republic of China, not the People's Republic of China, or...
Emperor Hirohito of Japan gave an unprecedented radio address at noon 65 years ago today, on August 15, 1945, to announce that Japan would surrender unconditionally to the United States and the allied powers.
The Victory over Japan Day, or VJ Day, officially ended World War II on September 2 1945 when Japan signed the documents of surrender aboard the USS Missouri, and ushered in an era of incredible prosperity for Americans, even though more wars, in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and now Afghanistan, would prevent peace in the decades to come.
The end of WWII is justly celebrated as the close to a violent, though heroic, chapter in our history. But our perspective often blocks empathy for the perspective of the vanquished, as with our ignorance of August 6 and 9, 1945, the anniversary of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that led to the August 15 announcement by Emperor Hirohito urging Japanese to "bear the unbearable" and accept the country's surrender.
Except for the elderly veterans and American civilians who served in the Occupation Forces under General Douglas MacArthur, there isn't much awareness of what Japan was like in the months and years after the war. The Occupation lasted until 1952, thr brink of the Koraen war.
But, I would guess that many Americans don't have any awareness of Japan until the 1964 Olympics, which were held in Tokyo, and which heralded the arrival of Japan as a world power that, by the 1980s, rivaled the U.S. economy.
That's why I'm so fascinated by the postwar era in Japan -- it's a hazy, forgotten time. I was born during that era, in Tokyo in 1957, and lived in two worlds -- attending school on U.S. military bases and living in Japanese civilian neighborhoods until the mid-1960s, when my family moved Stateside.
For Japanese, the end of the war is remembered vividly for the atomic bombings and the utter poverty the country was left in by its military leadership. Even before the atomic bombs, its majors cities had been firebombed for months by U.S. bombers. In one night of bombings in Tokyo, almost as many people were killed as by the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and great swaths of Tokyo had been leveled.
It's hard to imagine the scale of death and destruction that modern warfare can inflict on a country and its people. That's why, in spite of a stubborn nationalistic streak that leads to some Japanese still thinking like the country did in the 1930s and '40s, and claiming atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre (where hundreds of thousands of civilians were reportedly murdered by invading Japanese troops) never happened, most Japanese are strongly anti-war and against nuclear weapons. They don't want the world to forget.
But there's a forgotten history, even for the Japanese.
I know I spend a lot of posts writing about the ongoing racism and stereotypes that Asians face in the United States. That's my passion, and it's important to me. But I'm also aware that racism exists all over the world. At its worst, that's why genocide still goes on, after all. And, I'm sad to say, racism is rife in Asia, even (especially?) in Japan, the country of my birth and family roots. It's a tribal instinct to separate people by ethnicity, and we just have to constantly work at rising above those instincts in the 21st century, when we live in a much smaller and much more intertwined world.
My mother, who was born in Japan and moved to the U.S. in the mid-1960s with my two brothers and I when my father (himself Japanese but born in Hawai'i) was transferred stateside for his federal government job, is about as old-fashioned as they come. She's been in the U.S. for over 40 years, but she's still FOBish ("Fresh Off the Boat") in a lot of her values, even today. When I called my parents to announce that my first wife -- who was European American -- and I were going to get a divorce, her first comment wasn't anything sympathetic. She said bluntly, "See? I told you you should marry Japanese."
Thanks mom, for the support.
So I was saddened but not exactly surprised to follow the controversy in China over Lou Jing, the Shanghai-born college student who's shown in the video above, singing on "Go! Oriental Angel," China's version of "American Idol." Lou (pronounced "LOH") is mixed-race. Her mother is Chinese and her father, whom she's never met, was African American. She's a beautiful young woman, and a talented singer (her favorite performer is Beyonce). That's a picture of Lou with her mother on the TV show, above.
But she's such an unusual sight in China that the TV show labeled her "Black Pearl" and "Chocolate Girl," and the media picked up on her inclusion in the show and made her a national racial sideshow. In a cultural switch from the "You speak such good English" line that Asian Americans get in the U.S., she's grown up hearing people ask how she can speak such good Chinese. "Because I'm Chinese" is her answer, of course.
Following her appearances on the TV show, the Chinese blogosphere became filled with hateful comments aimed at both mother and daughter, venting outrage that her mother would have sex with a black man and calling Lou all manner of names and telling her to leave China (she will if she gets her wish for post-graduate study in the U.S.).
There are a lot of different ethnic groups in China, and they don't all get along, as witnessed by the recent violence between ethnic Uighurs and Han in western China. But the majority of Chinese -- 90% -- are descended from the Han race. Although some Chinese are tolerant, many apparently are not.
CNN has a good video report with accompanying text about the racial issues that Lou Jing has sparked in China. Here's a video of Lou performing on "Go! Oriental Angel":
Racist caricatures of Japanese were common during World War II, with even Bugs Bunny getting into the act in a cartoon, and a young Theodore Geisel -- Dr. Suess to decades of American kids -- contributing his share of racist stereotypes. These images, though despicable, are somewhat understandable because of the long history of racism against people of color in the U.S., and in particular the decades of "Yellow Peril" hysteria that had been building before the war. There was context for racial stereotypes, no matter how wrong and unjust.
The attack on Pearl Harbor lit a tinderbox of racial hatred that was ready to burst into flame, and one of the results was the imprisonment of 120,000 people of Japanese descent in American concentration camps.
Another was the proliferation and propagation of racist stereotypes.
One incredible example is a training booklet published by the U.S. Army titled "How to Spot a Jap," which was drawn by one of the most acclaimed comic artists of the time, Milton Caniff. Caniff drew a popular comic strip called "Terry and the Pirates," about an American adventurer fighting pirates in "the Orient." The settings for his strip were a natuiral fit for the Army to hire Caniff to illustrate the differences between the enemy Japanese and our allies, the Chinese.
The booklet makes outrageous claims comparing a Chinese man against a Japanese man, such as the Chinese "is about the size of an average American: (the Japanese) is shorter and looks as if his legs are directly joined to his chest!" "The Chinese strides... the Jap shuffles (but may be clever enough to fake the stride)." "(Chinese) eyes are set like any European's or American's-- but have a marked squint... (The Japanese) has eyes slanted toward his nose."
These expressions of racism, as ridiculous as they seem today, were produced (I hope) in the name of patriotism, which doesn't excuse their ugliness but does explain their existence.
Unfortunately, because many of these images are available today on the Internet, they're being resurrected, without their original context, and by a surprising group: bloggers in China. The Global Times, a state-owned English-language daily based in Beijing, reported yesterday on a disturbing phenomenon with an equally disturbing tone of gleeful agreement: Chinese websites passing around the Milton Caniff booklet and stirring up "a nationalistic and racist buzz among some Chinese online users about the differences between the two historic enemies."