Kakuta Haruo---Decoding Japan---

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Location: Sakai, Osaka, Japan

Monday, August 16, 2004

Reading: "The Global Me"

G. Pascal Zachary, "The Global Me", PublicAffairs, New York, 2000
"And there are many pieces indeed: as many as 5,000 ethnic groups and 600 living languages."(p.ix)
"As many as 30 percent of all Hispanics and Asians marry out side their ethnic group, and in the nation's most polyglot cities interethnicmarriage is the norm."(p.x)
"This sort of mixing is winning wide acceptance in the United States, but even its fans lack a vocabulary to describe, defend or even celebrate it."(p.x)
"That's because there is no common set of values, practices and perspectives for all of humanity, or even big swatches of it."(p.xv)
"Instead, we have the global me: local people who are neither limited to their particularities nor doomed to an empty we-are-the-world universalism."(p.xv)
"Hybridity flourishes in an environment of social cohesion. But this cohesion arises not from an absence of conflict, but from the capacity to learn and grow through peaceful conflict." "conflict-free society is impossible"(p.xvii)
"Nations that learn how to resolve conflicts between majorities and minorities, natives and newcomers, will increase their chances to create wealth and happiness for all. ... Their various responses to the challenge of diversity suggest that only by supporting hybrid forms of individual and group identity can societies manage the inherent conflict between diversity and harmony."(p.xviii)
"strong ethnoracial affiliations and an openness to new ties"(p.xx)
"human creativity fired by radical mixing"(p.xxi)

Saturday, August 14, 2004

Liberty and Democracy in East Asia

In East Asia, liberty and democracy is still a key issue. That means we still largely lack them. A couple of countries are still openly under one-party rule, while even some more are virtually so. In this world, noninterventionism sounds rather supporting authoritarian regimes than guarding peoples from outer attacks. How would liberal and democratic East Asia look like? East Asia is a multi-religious, multi-cultural, multi-lingual, and, of course, nonclassless society. In one word, East Asia is divers. And a divers society needs pluralistic social system. Taking China's greatness into consideration, divers and pluralistic East Asia needs divers and pluralistic China. Should China be splitted into small Chinas? Not necessarily. Or dictatorial small Chinas might be much worse than one big democratic China. The term "self-determination" implies the independence of occupied or unrepresented people, while it can also mean the personal independence on her/his lifecourse. They not always go in coordination. Especially during the last 2 centuries, nation states prospered, and the former national self-determination was given the priority. Nationalism was strong. Is the latter individual self-determination secured, once the former national self-determination was achieved? As the problem of FGM clearly shows, respect for certain cultures does not always mean respect for every individual member of the cultures. To coordinate both the national self-determination and the individual self-determination, "the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives"(Universal Declaration of Human Rights, http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm) is the key. Regarding the importance of human rights, it must be very easy for pro-self-determination people to agree with the importance, and to unite to achieve the goal. Not really, especially in the international politics. Why not? From the end of the last century, American ruling parties started talking about democracy and human rights to justify their foreign policies. Some leftists accused them of interventionism. The leftists lost the passion to speak and act against dectatorship or authoritarian regime as well as the credibility to do so. They are not free from the spell of noninterventionism.

Saturday, August 07, 2004

The Ketagalan Institute

The Ketagalan Institute
Will it be one of several institutes which suppor human development?

Friday, August 06, 2004

Visitting Iga --- A Famous NINJA Village

A Spanish boy was being immersed in the Ninja atmosphere. Many minutes had already passed, and many Japanese sightseerers had been coming and going. It was something to see. Not Ninja exhibits, but his attitude toward them. Iga is well known in Japan for its 3 historical events. First, it appeared as one of the biggest suppliers of Ninja. Second, it is the birth place of Basho, who created Haiku as a new poetry in Japan. Third, it worked as a location for one of the 3 biggest vengeance (ADAUCHI)in Edo Period. Some suggest their connection. My niece brought the Spanish boy to Sakai. He loves both Japanese historical spots and entertainment quarters, and asked me to take them to Iga, which is 2-hour-drive away from Sakai. We arrived at Iga Ueno Castle before noon. The castle area has a castle tower, Ninja Museum, and Basho Monument. We visited the tower first, which gave us a great view around the castle, and let us imagine how wonderful it must have been to overview 'our' land, and how awful it was to see the castle surrounded by the enemy. Before getting into Ninja Museum, we enjoyed Ninja Show.

We wlked down along Nakano-Tatemachi Street to find a Ninja shop. One of the Ninja Show performers handed me the shop's business card. On the way, we found a tea-leaf store. Iga is one of several second-class tea brands in Japan. The store was not only selling tea leaves but also dealing some antiques as well as Iga souvenirs. After scanning the store, we kept walking in the sun to find the Ninja shop. The shop was seemingly a clothes shop except its sign. An old man welcomed us. As we told him why we had come, he withdrew into the back room, and a young man in Ninja clothes appeared. It was obvious that the heir was remaking the shop as a Ninja boutique. We had found banners along the street appealing to make whole the street 'a museum.' That may be one of renaissances by younger generations around today's Japan.

Hotter Mt Rokko

  A web page says, "Are you interested in living in Ashiya, Shukugawa, or Kurakuen? Those areas are one of the best high-class quiet residential neighborhoods where you can find considerable boutiques and restaurants which enable you to live fashionablly. We introduce you housing and shopping information to help you spend your desirable life here." In a word, those areas are for establishments and establishmentarians.
The areas seemed to be under renewal. Some establishment residences have given their ways to newly built apartment buildings ('mansions' in Japanese terminlogy) to supply rooms to establishmentarians. That causes more cars. It needs to widen roads. More destruction of some other residences. Although we picked up Shukugawa route to drive up Mt Rokko this summer, it was far after passing Shukugawa that we found the atmosphere quiet. For establishmentarians, to be establishments might be a mirage.