The New York Times is reporting on tensions between the Dojinkai and the civilians living in the neighborhood of their headquarters. Two features of this are worth noting in the context of the Samurai course. First, the Yakuza are widely acknowledged to be one of the last, greatest bastions of feudal samurai concepts of honor and the utility of violence; comparing the modern yakuza to medieval samurai is shockingly fruitful. Second, the social order represented by the neighborhood association is a modern incarnation of the horizontal alliances described by Berry in The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto, the ikki as described by Ikegami, and the goningumi of the great Tokugawa order.

Even the appeal to law, civil authorities, is quite traditional: though the Japanese are considered “non-litigious” it’s really not true of the present or the past. In the present, a lot of disputes are dealt with through arbitration systems that aren’t that different from small-claims courts. In the past, of course, the petition to authority and the lawsuit were common enough to be one of our best historical sources. [crossposted to Japanese History]

Late Update: Going through old email, I found this McNeill Adelstein report on the current state of yakuza. I was surprised to see that the 1992 law had so little effect: when I was in Japan in ’94-95, it seemed like it had done some good.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s recent Japan Focus article, “Migrants, Subjects, Citizens: Comparative Perspectives on Nationality in the Prewar Japanese Empire” is an ambitious attempt to integrate identity, legal and strategic issues related to the problem of citizenship in the context of migrations within and between empires.¹ The primary comparative material is to British examples, and students of “empire” as a category will find both familiar and new material to work with. Japan itself had such complicated migratory patterns that it really is a whole class of “comparative” study in itself. Morris-Suzuki pretty much covers the whole gamut: Japanese emigration to Hawai’i, N. America, S. America and Asia; Korean, Chinese and Taiwanese migration under Japanese imperium to places within Japan and within the empire.²

What makes the article particularly interesting, aside from the valiant attempt to clarify the various legal contortions of Imperial citizenship³ , is that it parallels some of the arguments I made in January (and June) — that Japanese attitudes towards emigration and immigration are structured by nationalistic and imperialistic narratives which obscure important aspects and which lay the foundation for current problems with immigrant assimilation. Morris-Suzuki is taking a more legal and strategic approach, noting the various places in which the end of Japan’s Empire left former colonial subjects stranded without citizenship, and the political and diplomatic problems, some of which are still unresolved, and seemingly unresolvable.

Some of these problems clearly should have been solved by the US and allies after WWII: full repatriation of Korean subjects in the Japanese home islands, Sakhalin and Manchuria, for example, would have been entirely appropriate. Or would it? Part of me thinks that the diversity represented by Koreans in Japan should have been a good thing for leavening, a bit, Japan’s self-definition as homogenous, but clearly, if it was supposed to accomplish something with regard to multi-cultural understanding, it’s a gloriously failed experiment. The paper almost invites counter-factual speculation: if the lines had been drawn differently, would there have been a significantly different result? Could Japan, in the early 20th century, have developed a version of Imperial Nationalism which wasn’t racialist, or a citizenship system which wasn’t patriarchal and instrumentalist?⁴

1. It also contains a citation to one of my own publications, which is always fun, but it’s on a minor point, and her main discussion of material related to my article comes from other sources. Oh, well.
2. She does talk about the integration of Okinawans to some extent, but leaves out their anomalous status after WWII. Not a complaint or a criticism, though it does raise fascinating questions. There’s just not enough room in the world to cover everything.
3. and in this regard, Japan’s koseki family registration system seems to be arguably simpler and more reasonable than several of the British attempts to both authorize and limit the mobility of colonial subjects
4. there was an article in one of my regular journals recently — AHR, JAS, JJS — which argued that Japan’s Imperium forced it to adopt a more flexible definition of multicultural national identity, but I can’t remember which one and the move has obliterated any organization I had in my journals. I wasn’t terribly convinced at the time, and a large part of my reservation had to do specifically with what Morris-Suzuki highlights: the rhetoric of integration was one-sided and the legal status of colonial subjects was never considered a subject for rectification.

I’m always interested in interesting tales and connections regarding the Japanese diaspora. Here’s a couple that I’ve run across: New research on Japanese settlers in Korea; Jorge Luis Borges, the great surrealist, married a Nikkei Argentinian woman late in life; Japanese post-WWII settlers in the Dominican Republic abandoned by both governments. I love being part — a small part, but nonetheless — of the diaspora studies movement. We’re complicating the history of the world, chronicling the wonderful diversity of seemingly simple things. [continued...]

I followed Konrad’s note about Sayaka’s new blog and the post at the top points me to this Asahi report about a new research conference about “Japantowns” in colonial Korea. The tendency of Japanese migrations to be … lumpy? maybe there’s a better word… anyway, they often involve a lot of people from the same region ending up in the same place. It happened in the Hokkaido settlement, it happened in the migration to Hawai’i, it was deliberately built into the Manchurian settlement program.

Jorge Luis Borges¹ married an Argentinian of Japanese descent [via]:

In 1970 a collection of more traditionally “Argentine” stories came out, El Informe de Brodie, “Dr. Brodie’s Report.” He developed an acquaintance with one of the students who attended his lectures, María Kodama, an Argentine with Japanese ancestry. She agreed to work as his secretary, and eventually their association blossomed into a collaborative friendship. He would later marry her during the last year of his life.
…
Life still had much in store for Borges, however. In 1976, the Japanese Ministry of Education invited him to Japan, and he finally got to visit a culture that had long fascinated him. ….
His travels continued, and accompanied by María Kodama he journeyed around the world and compiled a travel atlas – he provided the text, and she the pictures. The resulting work, Atlas, was published in 1984, and presented their journeys as an almost mythical voyage of discovery, a travelogue through both time and space. It was during these travels that he finally had the chance to fulfill a childhood dream – stroking the fur of a living tiger. Unfortunately, the tiger’s thoughts are unrecorded.
Two years later, near the end of his long and wondrous life, he and María were married. On June 14, 1986, at the age of 86 and having never won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer in Geneva.

There’s even some connections between Japan and the Carribbean² , though not much and not very happy.

Thomas Snitch writes

In early 1956, ads began to appear in Japanese newspapers offering free land to any Japanese citizen who would immigrate to the Dominican Republic [DR]. As a nation, Japan was still suffering the aftermath of World War II and both housing and jobs were scarce. In Tokyo, the Government decided to lease land in the DR–the thought was that this would encourage large numbers of unemployed war veterans and underemployed farmers to leave Japan for this purported tropical Eden.

For those Japanese farmers and fisherman who decided to move, the dream of paradise quickly turned into a never-ending nightmare.

In July 1956, 28 families left Yokohama bound for the Dominican Republic. During the next 3 years, another 1700 individuals followed in their footsteps, and most ended up on small farm plots in eight colonies located very near to the DR’s border with Haiti. The few fishermen who made the journey quickly discovered that there were few fish in the waters they were allowed to fish in, and many gave up. For the farmers, the problems were insurmountable.

Instead of moving to an area of verdant acreage, the Japanese were sent to a land with extremely poor soil in a region plagued with drought. Promises of schools and hospitals were not met, and the farmers had no access to transportation options so they could not take their meager crops to market. The Japanese could barely feed themselves, let alone develop a thriving farm business.

By late 1961, most of the original settlers had left the Dominican Republic for Brazil or to return to Japan. A census in 1962 showed only 276 Japanese emigrants still in the DR.

However, some of the original emigrants and their descendants stayed in the DR and eventually moved to more fertile land. They managed to gradually create a viable community as well as a thriving agricultural business; a number still live in the DR.

In 2000, some of the surviving emigrants filed a legal suit in Japan requesting compensation from the Japanese Government for sending them to a land that proved to be unsuitable for farming. After a six-year legal battle, the emigrants won their case and Prime Minister Koizumi apologized to them for their sufferings. In addition, each emigrant still living in the DR received a 2 million-yen payment, while those who returned to Japan received a lesser amount. The emigrants who decided not to become party to the suit were also compensated.

This last one is particularly striking. The conventional narrative of Japanese emigration stops after 1945, except for war brides and, much later, business emigres. There’s the big wave of repatriation, which effectively ends Japan’s diaspora, as an active process. Then, as Japan’s economy grows, it becomes a destination rather than a source for mobile labor. But apparently, in the period before high-speed growth, there was still a little of the settler spirit — and the bureaucratic search for ways to push problems elsewhere — left.

1. I read Borges in college and found him fun, almost familiar. Most people find Borges challenging, bizarre…. but they didn’t grow up reading my father’s science fiction and fantasy collection
2. I always pick the wrong topics to study: I could be doing my research there

Matt over at No-Sword has listed and linked to a few Japanese authors who, due to the life+50 years copyright rule, now have all of their works released into the public domain:

Public Domain Day: Japan

Also take a look at a list of many other authors whose works are now in the public domain at Copyright Watch.

Matt links to the author entries at Auzora Bunko, where you can read various full texts of authors. It is also where I first heard about a movement to oppose a lengthening of the copyright term in Japan to life+70. I must admit I was ignorant that there was an attempt to extend the copyright protection in the works. I don’t know how far it has come but I find it deeply troubling. Already the life+50 rule has kept out of the public domain a great many out-of-print, rare, and historically valuable materials that would never see the light of a computer screen, let alone publication which could be easily shared and appreciated much more widely. Some works, such as the writings and recorded musical performances of my favorite traitor, Kawashima Yoshiko, are only in the public domain because she was executed at a young age in the early postwar, and even then it is really hard to get out of the restrictive licenses of archives that contain her now, ostensibly, public domain works.

As has been the case in the United States, which has a ridiculously long, complex, and stifling copyright regime, the main benefactor of any extension would be large corporations. In other cases, I am personally completely unconvinced that the benefits of providing the mere possibility of royalties for several generations of descendants can come close to outweighing the benefit to society as a whole of releasing works into the public domain in a timely manner.

You can read more about the movement against the extension here. They even have their own icon:

You can read more in the Japanese news about the attempt to extent the law here. I personally liked this quote in the article:

著作の多くをフリーで公開することで知られている評論家・翻訳家の山形浩生さんは、保護期間延長に反対の立場だ。「私が2050年に死ぬとして、2100年まで守られていた著作権が2120年まで延びると言われても、『すばらしい！　これで安心して創作活動できる！』などと思うわけがない」(山形さん)

In this quote an author by the name of Yamagata Hirô, who is active in the free culture movement says, “If I were to die in 2050 and my copyrights, which are currently protected until 2100, were extended to 2120, I would hardly say, ‘Great! I can now put my mind at ease and be creative!’”

Some more links on the topic:
Wikipedia: 著作権の保護期間
「著作権保護期間の延長を」——権利者団体が要望書　ネット時代も意識
著作権関連16団体、著作権の保護期間を「死後70年」に延長を求める共同声明
著作権保護期間、死後50年から70年への延長を巡って賛成・反対両派が議論
Authors By Year of Death Index

Recently the Japanese Diet has been debating several competing bills to revise the Fundamental Education Law of 1947.  One of the most contested issues is an effort by the LDP to make instilling patriotism an explicit goal of Japan’s national education system, as it was under the education system devised by Mori Arinori in the 19th century and in force in Japan up until the US-led education reforms following World War II.  Reportedly, the original language was even stronger, but the LDP-backed bill that finally made it out of committee and onto the Diet floor still contained the relatively strong phrasing by Japanese standards, 我が国と郷土を愛する態度を養う (“to instill an feeling of loving our country and homeland”). Critics of this clause argue that it will promote militarism and inject further tension into already heated Japan-China and Japan-Korea relations, but the LDP-backed bill seems likely to pass largely as is within the next week or so.

In related news, it was reported this week that many Japanese schools are grading students on “love of country”.  A recent survey in Saitama prefecture found that at least 45 local schools evaluated “love of country” on report cards for 6th-grade students. Under current policy, individual schools are free to decide how report cards are structured and which categories are graded. Officials have argued that the practice is not objectionable because “instilling a feeling of love for one’s country” has already been one of the Ministry of Education’s stated objectives for 6th-grade social studies students for some time.