Yeah you’re not up on the “rich gentry” thing.

Karafuto was the name of the Japanese province on the island of Sakhalin, back when they had half of it.

(They originally won it in the Russo-Japanese War, the Soviets took it back when they finally declared war on Japan in WWII)

I’m going for a Japonisme styling (basically, “Japanese inspiration filtered through Western practice”), so “Japanese territory in range of 50°N that the Russians used to claim, totally ignoring the natives” fits.

sonia-marmeladova:

kontextmaschine:

Hot take: insofar as it represented domestic capital and labor overcoming divisions to cooperate in a project of national uplift amidst liberal use of canned slogans and mass gatherings and the suppression of leftist mass action, Japan’s postwar recovery was more fascist than its interwar period

Imperial Japan tortured pregnant women to death and you say this

Whereas postwar Japan valorized motherhood (to boost birth rates to refill a population hole from war). See how it works?

So were there cases of WWII Japanese infantry “banzai” charges successfully overrunning the enemy? What did everyone do, go back to normal combat operations where they tried to preserve their lives?

kontextmaschine:

Hot take: insofar as it represented domestic capital and labor overcoming divisions to cooperate in a project of national uplift amidst liberal use of canned slogans and mass gatherings and the suppression of leftist mass action, Japan’s postwar recovery was more fascist than its interwar period

@plum-soup said: I mean post war Japanese government has been very much been defined by the recruiting of former Japanese fascists, war criminals, etc to form the LDP and make sure an American friendly government maintained a stranglehold on Japanese politics. So yeah, fascism

Maybe there’s something in the way the South Korean government was pretty lineally descended from the Japanese occupation compradors too, and under the postwar settlement these two states took parallel paths, but both of self-directed development within a First World order.

And that was the capitalists’ Cold War pitch: operate within a multilateral capitalist order and you’ll be able to become a rich developed country.

And that was also the communists’: “the capitalists’ plan is really just to put the fascists back in charge!”

Well?

Hot take: insofar as it represented domestic capital and labor overcoming divisions to cooperate in a project of national uplift amidst liberal use of canned slogans and mass gatherings and the suppression of leftist mass action, Japan’s postwar recovery was more fascist than its interwar period

Occasional reminder that the long, skilled, and impressive process of forging a katana did not yield a super-weapon, it mostly compensated for the extremely low quality iron sand and charcoal inputs.

One thing behind the Japanese practice of treating houses as consumable rather than capital goods, intended to last one lifetime and then be replaced, is the legacy of centuries of urban culture in which it was understood that every building would be destroyed in a fire about that frequently so there wasn’t much point in using more relatively more precious building materials in trying to push durability further.

In the 1950s, the Japanese export sector just then standing back up was known for pottery and cheap folded-tin toys.

In the 1960s after investing in machinery more modern than western legacy forges they started towards a leading position in steel.

In the 1970s, they came for big-ticket consumer products like appliances and automobiles.

By the 1980s they were exporting electronics, industrial management expertise, and capital.

(They had been known for optics since before WWII.)

Since the 1990s they have been exporting their culture.

Korea has very intentionally been following the same path with maybe a 25 years’ lag.

kontextmaschine:

pissvortex:

i think i do remember hearing somewhere that if the primary caregiver of a family goes to prison in north korea then the whole family goes with them so that they stay together as a social unit, but definitely don’t quote me on that because like 90% of what comes out about north korea is completely unable to be verified.

there also seems to be a massive industry of english language NGOs set up in South Korea to take advantage of that fact. they conduct “independent investigations” into human rights abuses in the DPRK and report their findings from these investigations to the U.N., which gives them more access to human rights grants and other massive funds.

the methodology for the investigations published by these NGOs is interviewing and giving surveys to a couple dozen north korean defectors. it pretty much starts and ends there. Yeonmi Park is a pretty notorious example of one of these defectors who found monetary incentive to lie and become a media figure, which is what she did. other defectors also usually aren’t going to have a positive opinion of the country considering they left in the first place (if you don’t count the people who defect back to north korea after living in south korea for a while). it’s not exactly rigorous investigation, and there’s usually not a verifiable way to prove that what they’re saying is true.

in the case of religious stuff specifically, north korea has a long history of being harassed by christian missionaries as well as a christian-led reactionary backlash to the revolution that makes this even more complicated. people seem to think that north korea destroys all christians on sight because they hate God and Freedom and are Satan Loving Communists or some shit but historically christianity has existed in NK entirely as political opposition. i made another post on that here (x)

but generally speaking if you google something and it was first reported in the New York Post it’s safe to assume it’s fake and laugh about it

Kakure Kirishitan - Wikipedia

Prophylactically suppressing children of Christian families in defense against Christianity as an avenue for foreign influence of your East Asian country is a tradition!

(The thing was Japanese diplomats at the Chinese court saw Indian nobles complaining about losing their domains to Christianity-as-European-entryism, and when they brought word back to the home islands the Shogunate looked up to notice the Portuguese following the exact same script there and was like “hmmm”, and after Christians joined a local rebellion proceeded to crucify them all for the rest of the bakufu’s rule)

pissvortex:

i think i do remember hearing somewhere that if the primary caregiver of a family goes to prison in north korea then the whole family goes with them so that they stay together as a social unit, but definitely don’t quote me on that because like 90% of what comes out about north korea is completely unable to be verified.

there also seems to be a massive industry of english language NGOs set up in South Korea to take advantage of that fact. they conduct “independent investigations” into human rights abuses in the DPRK and report their findings from these investigations to the U.N., which gives them more access to human rights grants and other massive funds.

the methodology for the investigations published by these NGOs is interviewing and giving surveys to a couple dozen north korean defectors. it pretty much starts and ends there. Yeonmi Park is a pretty notorious example of one of these defectors who found monetary incentive to lie and become a media figure, which is what she did. other defectors also usually aren’t going to have a positive opinion of the country considering they left in the first place (if you don’t count the people who defect back to north korea after living in south korea for a while). it’s not exactly rigorous investigation, and there’s usually not a verifiable way to prove that what they’re saying is true.

in the case of religious stuff specifically, north korea has a long history of being harassed by christian missionaries as well as a christian-led reactionary backlash to the revolution that makes this even more complicated. people seem to think that north korea destroys all christians on sight because they hate God and Freedom and are Satan Loving Communists or some shit but historically christianity has existed in NK entirely as political opposition. i made another post on that here (x)

but generally speaking if you google something and it was first reported in the New York Post it’s safe to assume it’s fake and laugh about it

Kakure Kirishitan - Wikipedia

Prophylactically suppressing children of Christian families in defense against Christianity as an avenue for foreign influence of your East Asian country is a tradition!

Hirohito was Emperor until 1989?

centrally-unplanned:

kontextmaschine:

eightyonekilograms:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

So the American occupations rigged the Italian and Japanese post-WWII election systems pretty steeply, as a necessary condition of keeping Communists out of power (who were expected from Iron Curtain precedent to eliminate any possibility of being removed from power and defect to the Soviet Bloc).

If you will remember your economic materialism this is what you would expect from industrial powers without imperial hinterlands. (This is what the WWII authoritarian culture-states were meant to prevent while they assembled empires!)

@youzicha said: Didn’t @xhxhxhx discuss this petty exhaustively, concluding that the Japanese election system wasn’t rigged?

Maybe? My context is the Cornell Asian Studies program, which is a feeder for/academic arm of the American foreign service/intelligence/military area experts, where my professors were like “oh, my grad advisor was at that postwar conference, he told us how they rigged it”

The major elements were

• Orchestrating a merger of the Liberal and Democratic Parties into the pan-establishmentarian LDP, supported by advisors and cash drops
• Multi-member districts in cities, where Communists having greatest strength, 22 individual districts would elect 22 communists but one unified proportional city would send 12 and a smattering of others
• Not updating district borders as rural population flooded into cities, creating “rotten borough” districts the LDP could buy with agricultural subsidies

So I minored in Asian Studies (Japan) but beyond just learning about Japan, it was in part an education in mechanics of postwar American empire.

My context is the Cornell Asian Studies program, which is a feeder for/academic arm of the American foreign service/intelligence/military area experts,

Huh, is that why my Japanese classes had surprisingly few weebs? Everyone there was planning to go into foreign service and I just didn’t notice?

(I think another factor was that Cornell had a class on Japanese pop culture, and some friends who took it reported that it was full of weebs, so I just assumed that was the quarantine keeping them out of the language class)

That’s more at the grad level (and FALCON) really, but those types make it into normal language classes too. (Well, the good 6/7 credit linguistics track sleeved down from FALCON, which is really built for the Defense Language Proficiency Test, not the 4 credit “functioning as a businessman” one built for the Japanese State Department’s JLPT).

Oh god, I took the pop culture class the first year it was offered, as one of the last ones leaving class once the nihonjin Anthropology professor wearily sighed that he had NOT expected this (a sophomore girl with striped armwarmers challenging his authority on “being a person living in Japan” based on her dad having been at the branch office there in childhood)

Was Nakanishi-sensei still there when you were taking classes? She was my fave.

I think I am team “not rigged” but its really just like definitions (I have no Cornell inside gossip, sorry!) Like the Liberal Party and the Americans absolutely sat down and tried to coordinate together against leftist parties at times, and they did so aggressively. But at a certain point, that is just politics - coalition partners, funding political parties, making deals with unions or businesses, that is just how the sausage of elections is made.

Even as you get into the district proportioning, campaign laws about who can run, etc. that is all pretty normal politics! I don’t like it, and I think the US and UK electoral systems are, in a certain sense, ‘rigged’. But its a loose definition - and in Japan’s case, given that the Socialist Party won the first election and was running the government in 1947, I don’t think anything more than loose applies.

I also as I have mentioned tend to be a SCAP downplayer - they changed Japan much less than they claimed, with the real work of building the system being done by the deep Japanese political-state apparatus. As such, the US only played a secondary role in this process; and I think that is apparent because Japan’s one party state only emerges in 1955, well after the US had left. The impact of the US authority in Japan was probably on net a boost to lefitst parties, as in the beginning they purged right-wing factions and pushed for a western-style legalism that enshrined things like universal voting rights and such.

But this isn’t my area too much, I know the economics better than the politics of the post-war period.

Well the Japanese electoral system was deliberately designed to include all those “normal” features by the American government, which had input on the design as consequence of being the occupying force, that in turn by virtue of having conducted a successful amphibious military campaign against the previous government, is the thing