All is full of love

Or so I would like to think. Robots making love could teach us a thing or two.

But the truth is that I'm deeply troubled these days, and find my own thoughts obscuring the real world around me. It's like a thick veil between the world and my consciousness. I may have to change my research topic.

The past few weeks have been pretty traumatic for people caught in-between the China-Japan historical/diplomatic/macho battle. Watching both sides is enough to destroy my confidence that history or ethics can ever be rescued and respected again. Friends in China tell me how disgusted they are with the dogmatism there. I also feel ready to retch whenever I see the Japanese scandal sheets threatening military retribution against 'Japan-hating-countries' (from Japan's Weekly Playboy), to a rumor that the Chinese are circulating an 'assassination list' of Japanese politicians and citizens. This is pride, but only the blindly macho type.

[the truth is, the Japanese media is as much a 'national' institution as the Chinese state-run media. their give-and-take relationship with their audience may be different, but they each have a role in whipping up nationalist fury, and assuaging national pride. the media here made a big deal about the 'results' of a DNA test done on the 'remains' of a Japanese abducted by North Korea. they said that the remains came from several different people, none of whom were her. however, an article in the British nature magazine Nature cast doubt on the result claimed by the government. Read about it at a Korean site, because no Japanese media outlets are covering the story. they just shut up about the whole issue, and instead are focusing on China. There is a good, though lengthy writeup of the article by an Australian scholar here.]

But back to my project; at one point I wanted to look at the birth of a multi-ethnic identity in Yokohama, and its manifold possibilities as 'Chinese' and 'Japanese' refashioned a social network that was local as well as global. It seemed to me that the categories imposed on human interaction by nationalism were being undermined, and that flexible identities were emerging that would bridge people living in Japan and China by ironically, not engaging national institutions at all.

My counterpoint would be Yokohama in the 1920s-1940s, where national categories were enforced through police surveillance of 'enemy nationals', and the activities of Chinese government-sponsored associations. My idea was to sketch out the constraints imposed by these institutions on individuals in Yokohama at the time, and how they were be absorbed, inevitably, irrevocably into national bodies.

Well, the contrast just fell apart. The more I look into the historical documents, the closer the present seems to recapitulate the past. The same language 'han'nichi' (anti-Japanese) was used back in the 1930s to describe the textbooks and leaflets published by Chinese nationalists all over the world. The description today of the May 4th (1919) movement as simply 'anti-Japanese' is interesting as well because it seems to follow the same thinking that dominated Japan at the time. While to the Chinese, May 4th was a cultural and literary movement to reinvent the Chinese nation (the boycotts of Japanese goods began much earlier), to the Japanese it was merely resistance to their imperial designs.

Context. Does anyone even remember that May 4th was supposed to start on May 7th? That was the date on which Japan delivered the '21 demands' to China back in 1915. However, to avoid suppression by Chinese authorities, the students had to spring the movement a few days early. But today, the Japanese press just labels it an 'anti-Japanese' movement, without any explanation of its context. Similarly, Chinese nationalist activities in the 1930s were also labeled 'anti-Japanese' sentiment (and regarding Chinese in America, the added comment that they should have been helping their fellow Asians rather than criticizing them), without even an explanation that the Kwantung Army had just seized Manchuria. So little context, then or now.

Ok, but that's jumping ahead a little bit. Evaluating the situation, I'd have to say that we're not quite back in the 1930s yet, but more like the 1920s. So, I guess that means less than 20 more years before another major world war.