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Daikons in the Rough: Making Friends in Japan
Anthony Palmer reflects on the ups and downs of trying to make freinds in a foreign culture. Check it out in our Writer's section!
On Stereotypes and Trust
Anthony Palmer takes a look at stereotypes in Japan on both sides of the looking glass. Read about his thoughts on the subject in our Writer's section!
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One love (Japan mix)
From Kansai Scene
Mention the name of literary great Junichiro Tanizaki to any young Japanese person and the chances are they will have only the vaguest notion of who you are talking about. Mention Beyonce or Bob Marley and they are right with you.
Take a walk down pretty well any street in the Kansai and you see the local kids are dressed in the latest hip hop gear or in shirts display-ing Jamaican great Bob Marley, all the while listening to the latest hip hop music from America and Jamaica. Japan has its own vibrant culture but there has also a very big interest in the music and fashion of America and Jamaica, which is displayed everyday on the streets of America-Mura and beyond
Dark Matter - the status of blacks in Japan
From Metropolis
Not all gaijin are treated equal. That’s what Steve McGowan says he learned in September 2004 as he was boisterously booted from the storefront of G-style eyeglass shop in Daitou Shi, Osaka. He says it was the first time he was called a “kokujin”―said by some to be Japan’s equivalent to “nigger,” the infamous US slur against blacks in his native South Carolina and elsewhere. “I’d heard many Japanese words,” says the 41-year-old designer, “but never ‘kokujin.’ So I called my [Japanese] wife right then and asked her. The man wasn’t saying he didn’t like foreigners―but black people.”
Being a man of faith, perhaps in more ways than one, he sued the alleged, Takashi Narita, for damages. The courts provide Japan’s only legal recourse to combat racial discrimination. The claim? He and a black man from South Africa were reading the shop’s ad near the entrance when Narita exited and ordered them not to touch the window or door and to move across the street. “I don’t like kokujin,” he added. When they returned the next day with McGowan’s wife,a former customer, to smooth things over, McGowan claims that Narita said, “I don’t talk to black people. You are making my floor filthy.” (Narita denies the claim but declines to comment on specifics citing pending litigation.)
Osaka District Court judge Yoshifumi Saga ruled on January 30 that McGowan’s Japanese ability made his testimony inadmissible, and there was no proof the act was due to his race, as opposed to his status as a foreigner. Why he was shooed from the storefront was not addressed, which dismayed supporters who feared it may set a precedent for future such cases. McGowan says after 11 years here, his Japanese is more than adequate―enough, even, to read aloud the kanji-written oath at the start of the court proceedings. He’s filed an appeal.
McGowan admits he’s encountered occasional racist attitudes here, but says this was his first experience of blatant racial discrimination.
Black Champion Hero in South Korea
From AOL Sports:
In a country where most people have no idea what a touchdown is, Hines Ward is suddenly a star - his name buzzing across the Internet, his picture splashed on front pages.
The Super Bowl MVP for the Pittsburgh Steelers, is half-Korean. On Thursday, he was featured in nearly every South Korean newspaper, waving to fans during a victory parade in Pittsburgh. Ward's 43-yard touchdown catch was the key play in the 21-10 victory over Seattle.
Born to a black American father and Korean mother, Ward's story is also drawing renewed attention to discrimination faced by children of mixed parentage in South Korea, where the conservative culture places a strong emphasis on pure blood ties.
The Steve McGowan Court Decision. A loss for him, a bad precident for everyone
From debito.org:
Steve McGowan is an African American and resident of Kyoto Prefecture. On September 4, 2004, Steve was recommending an eyeglass store he had frequented before, named "G-style", to a black South African friend. They were standing outside the shop when the owner, a Mr Narita Takashi, came outside and told McGowan and his friend to leave: "I don't like black people! Don't touch the door! Don't touch the shop window! Get over there!" [shooing them away and pointing across the street]. These statements are part of the court record. So is Narita's claim that shooed them because a neighbor phoned his store to warn him about two scary blacks outside his premises. Subsequent visits to the G-Style by both McGowan's wife (as well as Arudou Debito and other human rights activists; the conversation was tape-recorded) got Narita on record saying that he doesn't like black people, as he'd had a bad experience in Germany (involving a stolen bag and a prurient proposition) many years ago. When the owner refused to apologize (instead justifying this behavior to the press (Tokyo Shinbun Nov 4 2005, see website) as merely part of his personality), McGowan took Narita to Osaka District Court for 5.5 million yen damages.
This should basically have been a slam-dunk decision. But Japan is a land of surprises.
China's oldest map of Africa unveiled
From BBC News:
The oldest map of the African continent, dating back to 1389, has gone on display in Cape Town.
It is part of an exhibition drawing attention to the history of South Africa and the way it is perceived around the world.The Chinese map, covering more than 17 square metres, was produced in silk.
It is thought to be a copy of a map sculpted into rock 20 or 30 years earlier.
It is never been shown to the public before anywhere in the world, and the South African government was given special permission to take a full size facsimile of the delicate historical artwork.
The Da Ming Hun Yi Tu, or Amalgamated Map of the Great Ming Empire, is a unique snapshot of history.
Once Shunned as Racist, Storybook Bestseller in Japan
From the L.A. Times:
By Bruce Wallace, Times Staff Writer
TOKYO - A writer's death can do wonders for pushing that back catalog. Less drastically, a few books acquire cachet by being banned.
Which may help explain why a reissue of Little Black Sambo, a turn-of-the-20th century illustrated children's book attacked as being racist, is on the bestseller lists in Japan this spring.
The Japanese edition of "Sambo" was a big favorite here, from the time it was introduced in 1953 until it was yanked from bookstores in 1988 after a swift and effective anti-racism campaign.
The rap against it in Japan echoed that heard in the West years earlier: Sambo was a racist term for American blacks and illustrator Frank Dobias' portrayal of the main character, with his bulging white eyes and exaggerated, thick lips, was tantamount to a boy drawn in blackface.
In April, Zuiunsha, a small Tokyo publisher specializing in reprints, bet that there was still a market for a book that had charmed generations of Japanese youngsters who, as adults, were unable to find the book to read to their own children.
The market proved him right. Zuiunsha reportedly has sold 95,000 copies in two months since bringing out "Chibikuro Sambo." Despite being a child's read at a thin 16 pages, "Sambo" sits among the top five adult fiction bestsellers at major Tokyo book chains.
"Some people buy it out of nostalgia," said Tomio Inoue, Zuiunsha's president, who gambled that he wouldn't face a backlash for breaking the informal ban when he picked up the rights to the book. "Many readers didn't know why it was out of print. They missed the book."
"Sambo" has returned to shelves with few objections in a country where blacks remain extremely rare. One complaint has been published in an English-language newspaper, written by an African American resident of Japan. An online petition against the publisher garnered 263 signatures by Saturday, most of them from non-Japanese, many from abroad.
That is a far cry from 1988, when a mainly American campaign drove the book off Japanese shelves. The undoing was triggered by a report in the Washington Post that noted the popularity of a book "that most Americans thought had died a well-deserved death years ago," as well as several Sambo-related doll items on sale in Tokyo department stores.
The article spawned a letter-writing campaign in Japan from the Assn. to Stop Racism Against Blacks, which was later discovered to be essentially a one-family enterprise.
But it sparked a bigger backlash in Washington, where there were accusations of entrenched racism against blacks among the Japanese and protests were held at the Japanese Embassy and threats made to boycott its cultural exports.
This was at a time when Japan, with its then go-go economy, was perceived to be a threat to the United States. Fearing the book was adding a culture war to the trade disputes with Washington, Japan's Foreign Ministry had a word with the publishers, suggesting that a picture book and its spinoffs were not worth wider trouble.
Japanese publishers withdrew the book in less than a week. The dolls went too.
In Nagano City, the education board sent letters to every kindergarten asking parents to burn any copies of "Little Black Sambo" they might have at home.
Of course, Nagano's civic leaders had their eyes on much more than a children's book. The city was then bidding for the Winter Olympics and was eager to appear cosmopolitan.
"Nagano was very nervous about its reputation," said Kazuo Mori, an educational psychologist at Shinshu University in Nagano. "The reaction was to be overcautious."
But Mori said most Japanese were surprised to learn that "Little Black Sambo" had racist overtones. "It never occurred to us," he said. "It was just a story."
Intrigued by the controversy, Mori conducted academic experiments involving readers that he said showed the Japanese take nothing racist away from reading "Little Black Sambo."
He offered a group of kindergarteners and another of senior citizens a look at two versions of the story: one with the Dobias' drawings, another with the central character drawn as a black Labrador puppy. The test groups found both illustrated versions equally amusing.
Ergo, no racism, Mori concluded.
He then fine-tuned the drawings of the puppy, found himself a publisher, and in 1997 released a "nonracist" version of the tale, titled "Chikiburo Sampo."
That version has sold more than 50,000 copies.
"It's a sort of hit," he says with a laugh. "I bought a car."
The original "Little Black Sambo" was published in London in 1899 and in the United States a year later. Written by Helen Bannerman, a Scot living in India, it recounts the adventure of an Indian boy who encounters tigers and bargains for his life by surrendering his fine clothes.
But the tigers, each with a different garment, fight over who is the grandest among them, pursuing each other in frenzied circles until they dissolve into pools of butter.
To its defenders, Sambo is heroic and the story a harmless fantasy. "The little boy faces dangerous situations, but he manages to escape every time by his quick thinking," Japanese publisher Inoue says. "Sambo was small but smart."
Bannerman did not retain the copyright to her work, which she had illustrated herself, and in subsequent editions other artists were commissioned, most portraying Sambo with the exaggerated lips and simpleton look that critics found cartoonish and derogatory. (It has never been definitively explained why artists opted for African characters to illustrate a story set in India.)
After World War II, as the West became more racially sensitive, Bannerman's book ran afoul of the NAACP and other campaigners who pointed out that Sambo had been a racist epithet for blacks since the mid-18th century.
The book was banned in many U.S. schools, and by the 1960s had been chased out of most libraries and gradually disappeared from bookstores. Recent editions with different titles and illustrations are available online.
But a Sambo boom was on in postwar Japan. The prestigious Iwanami Publishing Co. issued a version of Bannerman's story, using Dobias' drawings that had been done in the 1920s for an American edition. Although there were as many as 40 other Japanese editions, the Iwanami version became the most popular, reportedly selling as many as 1.2 million copies.
The Japanese read it at bedtime and they read it at school. And the Dobias drawings were a hit in a country that loves animated characters with garish features, from the futuristic Pokemon crew to the stylized, frightening children with ballooning heads drawn by pop artist Yoshitomo Nara.
"The Japanese people can be racist when it comes to Koreans living here - it's well known," said psychologist Mori. "But racist against blacks?"
"We have no experience in dealing with black people," he continued. "Where would we get it from?"
Special correspondent Naoko Nishiwaki contributed to this report.
Marven Payne makes the right moves
From Japan Today:
Sometimes when you pass by a train station, or walk between buildings in Shinjuku at night, you can see many kids practicing their dance routines in front of big windows, which they use as mirrors.
"It is good that dancing has become a major thing in Japan, but at the same time it is also bad that a lot of these kids do not have the basics," says Marven Payne about the current dance trends in Japan.
One of the originators of the "LA style jazz," Marven is considered one of the best choreographers in the business with 20 years of experience under his belt. He is the only foreigner to hold the position of artistic director of a major Japanese dance company such as Hiromi Dance Company, one of the most renowned companies in Japan.
Will Smith Urges Rappers to Be Role Models
From ABC News:
Will Smith has one big introduction to make at Tuesday night's BET Awards: Gangster rappers, meet the rest of the world. Smith told The Associated Press he hopes to impress the global significance of U.S. black culture on the show's audience and artists.
"The kids that are making these trends, making these songs, don't understand the level of effect that black Americans have around the world," he said in an interview. "... Black Americans are so elevated, it's almost worship."