#japanese diaspora

[writingwithcolor]

Japanese Q Speedround: Google Is Right There

Hi, it’s mod Rina. It’s time to speedrun some asks. 

@troublsomeidiots​ asked: 

I'm writing a character who is both black and Japanese and lives in japan in a primarily Japanese area and wanted some help in writing a person who is biracial who lives in primarily homogenous society? Like what kind of struggles she would face, especially as a person who has never met anyone who is black other than in passing?

Open Youtube. Hit search bar on Youtube. "being black in japan" "half black half japanese in japan" "black hafu in japan". Try different combinations of keywords. Bon voyage.

(neither Marika nor I are Black. We will not be speaking to experiences we do not have.) (we can outsource to some of our friends if you ask a specific question. These are not specific questions.) 

(Black Japanese readers--please feel free to comment if there’s something you want OP to know!)

@layzeal​ asked: 

Hello! I have a question regarding family/last names in Edo period Japan. My story takes place in 1816, my character was born in 1796 from a commoner family (that she gets separated from a few years later, and in a different country).

I've read that regular people in Japan didn't adopt the use of family names until Meiji restoration, but I'm not sure how true that is. Would a family of commoners in that period carry a family name, or would they only use their first names? And any idea if that family would have to present a last name when moving/passing by a different country that does use them?

It's important for me to know, since the existence of a last name or not would quite heavily influence how hard it'd be for the family to meet again, and which means would be used. Thanks in advance!

When I gave Google some keywords from your query, the second result explained how pre-Meiji commoners without family/clan names used bynames to distinguish themselves, and gives additional data on them. Maybe give it another Google? 

@weavefeather asked:

Hello, I am a writer and I really need some advice. I am wotking on my book since a few years, maybe 2 or 3, and I finally got the points together how it could begin. My plan is that my MC (named Nanami Kudo) is an lawyer of the FBI and has to go to her homecountry Japan, beacuse they send her to foreign investigations about a syndicate of people.....  And the some things happen, like her brother who still lives in jp doesn't really welcomes her, some complications with the police and so on... 

But thats not the point! Im really struggling to take in words how she gets to the other country, leaving her home behind and her partner she worked with. Do you have any advice on it, maybe how to structure it, some words or scenarios that fit?

How she gets to the other country: …..She flies there.

How US government agents/workers relocate and what the experience is like: That's your job to google. We are not government agents. Try anecdata on reddit, reddit AMAs, and Quora.

It’s unclear what her relationship/proximity to Japan is. What kind of nikkei is she? Is she mixed race or monoracial? How much Japanese can she speak? So many unknowns. Go read our Japanese tag and appreciate just how many ways one can be a Japanese person. Until then, you are nowhere near close to being able to write a nikkei homecoming plot. 

Lastly, you are the author. Give us scenarios yourself and come back to us.

In Conclusion

Guys, you all gots to google some more. It’s beneficial to both of us: not only do we get to help with more specific things and have enough info to do so, but you don’t have to wait months until your ask comes through the backlog only to receive an answer you could have researched in anywhere from a couple days to 3 minutes. 

~ Rina

“But Rina, I don’t know how!” 

You’re in luck!

First, try one of our own post on Google shortcuts. 

Second, stay tuned for some very relevant posts...

COMING SOON: WWC’s A Beginner’s Guide to Academic Research

[wearejapanese]

Open Letter to Nikkei on Palestine

We, the undersigned Nikkei artists, academics, cultural workers, and people of conscience, pledge our solidarity with the Palestinian people, who have suffered 75 years of Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism, military occupation, and ethnic cleansing. In response to the open call from Palestinian artists and cultural workers for a cultural and economic boycott of Israel, we pledge to accept neither professional invitations to Israel, nor funding from any institutions or corporations linked to its government until it ends its illegal occupation of Palestine. We call on all Nikkei people and organizations to join us in this boycott. 

[pucex]

#mapporn #globalsolidarity

#japanese diáspora #pucex

#xpuigc

[calixcasual]

https

[sapphire-monkey]

My first tumblr hate message! I feel like a true tumblr citizen! Sorry not sorry that I happened to be born to a half Japanese father and Irish German mother. You're darn right, that I'm going to show support to my father's side of the family when I grew up getting kung fu jokes and being mistaking for being Chinese at school. Your darn right that I'm proud of my Japanese heritage when my father was so ashamed of it that he would pretend like he never grew up with a Japanese mother. He grew up in the American south, I'm not surprised he turned out the way he did.

Fuck you if you think I'm ashamed. Fuck you for calling me racist trash. Because I want to show solidarity to my father who is so wounded by his childhood.

[lord-shitbox]

[ask b4 reposting]

ais + japanese culture

insert guy deranged in front of corkboard image. so many feelings about him.

EDIT: THINGS I FORGOT TO MENTION

-the spider lilies on his enamel pin (associated with death in japan)

-red makeup at the outer corners of his eyes (this is a whole thing in traditional japanese makeup, geisha and kabuki makeup styles both commonly have it if you want to look more into it)

[lokh]

why do you still prefer calling him shuro over toshiro? just curious

makes it clearer to the anime onlys and i find it interesting that a lot of japanese fans have no problem saying shuro still lmao

[panvani]

Watched Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence last night. Japanese people are always making some art about how sad WWII was. If you were Japanese.

[cardiac-agreste]

The linguistic richness of Himawari House is incredible. It's a story about a girl whose family moved from Japan to the US when she was little, and now she's taking a gap year to reconnect with her heritage.

But her Japanese is weak from all those years fighting to assimilate into American culture. Her new flatmates include a Singaporean girl, a Korean girl, and two Japanese guys. The first two speak good English, while the latter two do not.

The way the author visually depicts bilingualism, a lack of fluency, dialects, accents, and the process of language acquisition is amazing and a WHOLE ASS MOOD.

I see so much of myself in this story since I, too, moved to Japan from the US with decent but not great Japanese, and come from a household where I had to re-acquire my family's language in adulthood with great effort to preserve my culture.

I can't recommend this graphic novel enough.

[opina-et-ed]

so pissed that I (a hafu) wasn't named midori because 20 years ago naming your asian kid an asian name in a non-asian country was considered weird and bullying worth but today non-asian bitches are using midori and other asian names and naming their non-asian babies those too because "it's kawaii". they either shame us for our culture or they lowkey steal it from us.

[ooglywooglies]

i do hate japan as a nation like very almost as much as i hate america

[reductionisms]

by what point in gintama had sorachi decided gin killed shouyou?

it's helpful to look at history here. shouyou's real life counterpart yoshida shouin was, in actuality, arrested in an anti loyalist purge and beheaded. he also really did run shouka sonjuku, of which rl takasugi and katsura were both loyal students.

unlike shouyou, though, shouin was extremely patriotic/ethnonationalistic. while the eng article doesnt talk much about it, shouin formulated the idea of, and advocated for, japan conquering and colonizing china, taiwan, the philippines, the ryukyu islands (now okinawa) and hokkaido, among other things. this proposal, while ostensibly to counter western imperialism, was founded in a fundamental and violent racism. its results were devastating. i will expand on gintama and actual japanese history further sometime soon.

in any case, the existence of katsura and takasugi in gintama already presupposes that they were devoted students of shou(you)in, and, furthermore, that shouyou was beheaded by the bakufu in the ansei purge (this is basic history you learn in school). since sorachi had gin as jouishishi in bakumatsu era from the very outset, it's safe to assume he also planned on introducing takasugi/katsura from the beginning, and therefore the concept of shouyou is loosely associated to gintama from its conception.

but when gin's past is introduced via katsura (ch. 5), the essential "trauma" is the death of gin and zura's shared comrades in the joui war. this is repeated in harasume arc (gin's nightmare), and even takasugi's introduction (can't you hear the voices of our dead comrades?). if sorachi had 'known' that gin killed shouyou from the beginning-- or, to be even simpler, if he had simply associated gin with shouyou from the beginning in any way-- i feel like gin's war flashbacks/thoughts would be a little more directed.

further, unlike zura and takasugi, gin isn't a historical figure, he's a mythical figure, from almost 700 years earlier. so he has no reason to be connected to shouyou in the first place, aside from the tangential relation of knowing his students.

that said, i think sorachi definitely knew gin killed shouyou by the benizakura arc (ch. 86-97). obviously here it's established that gin was shouyou's student, but, more importantly, in response to takasugi talking about how he can't help but fight with/hate the world that took shouyou from them, we get zura's "takasugi, i don't know how many times i've thought to raze this world into nothing, but he.. he's withstanding it. gintoki, the one who should hate this world more than anyone else, is withstanding it..." So takasugi and zura reflect on how shouyou (again, the well-known historic "martyr" for the meiji revolution) was taken from them, and the one who should hate the world the most because of that is gintoki. gintoki and shouyou are finally associated; gintoki's "hatred" is given primacy against even that of shouyou's real-life student's. yeah, sorachi knew by here.

but did sorachi know earlier? i mean, why not? just because gintoki's "tragic backstory" before benizakura is centered exclusively around dead comrades, doesn't mean sorachi hadn't decided he'd killed shouyou. i guess i just dont think sorachi was is good at planning, or writing in general, but that's my own issue.

an interesting argument could be made for the rengokukan arc (ch. 42-44). here the gintama-canon shouka sonjuku parallels are ridiculous. a mass-murderer-- literally referred to as a "demon"-- wants to atone, so takes up residence in an abandoned buddhist temple and adopts poor orphans who call him sensei. he and gin sit and talk on the temple porch almost like they're in a rakuyou flashback. gin calls him a human. when he attempts to escape with his kids in the night, he's killed by a shady government organization, and when gin learns of his death, we only see gin's back, a bit of his shaded face (a technique sorachi uses later on whenever gin gets upset about shouyou).

maybe at this point the gin-shouyou backstory was cooking in sorachi's brain. maybe some ideas of utsuro as well-- though probably not utsuro in the form we actually see him, perhaps something a bit simpler. notably, though, the demon/human, doushin, is killed by the bakufu: there's no moral dilemma, no teacher-slaying. it's not as direct as the shinigami arc will later be.

anyways, there was no real point to this, other than that it bothers me. i have no desire to dig through internet archives for sorachi interviews, either, so this is pure conjecture. if anyone has any other ideas i'd be interested to hear.

[mapsontheweb]

Which year it will be on January 1?

The map highlights the diversity of calendars used globally, showing which year it will be on January 1, 2025, according to the Gregorian calendar. Most countries (marked in green) use the Gregorian calendar (2025) for civil purposes. Other calendars include the Islamic calendar (1446), used in Muslim-majority countries; the Hebrew calendar (5785), in Israel for religious purposes; the Buddhist calendar (2568), common in Southeast Asia; and the Chinese calendar (4722), significant for traditional events in China and its diaspora. Unique systems include the Nepali Vikram Sambat (2081), the Burmese calendar (1387), the Ethiopian calendar (2017), the Japanese Reiwa 7, the Bengali calendar (1431), the Persian calendar (1403), the Bhutanese Drukpa (2481), the North Korean Juche (114), and the Taiwanese Minguo (114). These calendars, often tied to religious and cultural traditions, reflect the world’s rich diversity despite the global dominance of the Gregorian system.

by maven.mapping/instagram

[panicinthestudio]

The "dragon” in these photos is a Southern Chinese lion dance (南狮 naam4 si1, the term “lion dance” is directly translated from 舞獅 mou5 si1). Without further detail about the performers or the head and train, it’s hard to say which school or regional style.

Lions and many other mythological beasts like qilin are usually performed by two or even a single dancer, while traditional dragon dances (舞龍) are usually long, heavy pole constructions with much larger teams to create the serpentine movements. A person in a monk mask carrying a fan seen in photos 1 and 5 is a popular character that tames the lion, and helps to direct the dancers in the costume. A flaming pearl or orb is used in a similar role for a dragon to chase.

The style of cheongsam being worn by the women is contemporary and metropolitan for the 1930s diaspora and Republican era. While the dress contains what we would now identify as traditional elements, it incorporates Western tailoring and was popular as women’s regular wear well into the mid-20th century. 

As for the banner, it reads “献金救國” (donate funds, save the nation).

“Chinese Dragon Dance,” un défilé sur les rues Saint-Laurent, Saint-Urbain,  Clark et Sainte-Catherine, 9 juillet 1939. Photos par Conrad Poirier, BAnQ.

1. The best photo of the bunch, mostly because I love pictures of people fiddling with cameras, and it clearly shows the dragon at the heart of the parade, with the parade marshals visible in the left front in their C.N.L. (Chinese National League, the overseas wing of the Kuomintang) shirts. From the newspapers story I could find (but not the story where these photos ran!) the parade was intended to raise funds and support for China’s resistance to Japan. I also love the dresses of the young women on the right hand side. This was apparently taken on Saint-Laurent. BAnQ # P48,S1,P4113. 

2. Children leading the parade; this shot was apparently taken on Saint-Urbain. Their pennants have the Red Cross on them, as some of the funds would go to support humanitarian aid. BAnQ # P48,S1,P4112.

3. It was apparently a bright day - I had to adjust the contrast considerably to make the writing on the banner legible…but of course I can’t read it, which is frustrating. This was apparently on rue Clark. BAnQ # P48,S1,P4111.

4. A group of women in mostly traditional dress and several men (based on their suits, relative age, and place in the parade, I’d guess these are prominent or important individuals) carry a gigantic hand sewn Republic of China / Kuomintang flag. Several Montreal police officers in their own ‘traditional’ uniform of a white pith helmet are visible. This is on Saint-Laurent - the same streetcar visible in the first photo is also visible here. BAnQ # P48,S1,P4110.

6, 7 and 8. Three photos showing the dragon at the centre of the march on Saint-Laurent, with spectators, including a lot of children, watching from behind ropes put up for the occasion. I like that it looks like some folks joined the parade apparently fresh from working - in picture #6 a man is carrying a briefcase. BAnQ # P48,S1,P4105, P48,S1,P4108 and P48,S1,P4091.

[suchananewsblog]

Edmund de Waal: Decoding stories of exile

Twelve years ago, I discovered The Hare with the Amber Eyes, a memoir by celebrated British ceramist Edmund de Waal, in a book store in Edinburgh. It was another year before I read it and it became my all-time favourite book. Over the years, I have gifted it to friends, family, those I met at work and oftentimes to complete strangers. I’ve given away over 300 copies to a mix of people whose…

[specialmouse]

when i talk about japanese exceptionalism/fetishism being racist i dont mean that it solely affects, or even MOSTLY affects, japanese people. japan is the america of asia. japanese people on the mainland are fine. but what japanese exceptionalism and fetishism of japanese culture does is, well, exactly what it seems like im saying--it places japan (a deeply racist imperialist society) as the pinnacle of asian civilization. and what does that do? it places all other asian civilizations on a hierarchy, usually determined by skin color, and how close to "japanese" the asian person/asian ethnicity is. there's a reason why westerners are gooning over south korea right now and it's because they see a lot of similarities between south korean culture and japanese culture (which is funny because uh, colonialism guys. come on)---but hate china and the dprk, and see all of southeast asia as dirty and backwards.

when the archetypal japanese woman (pale, hairless, thin, yamato, submissive, etc.) is fetishized, it is usually not the japanese woman who faces the brunt of fetishistic violence (unless she is of the diaspora in which case... lol)--it is the vietnamese woman, the thai woman, the indonesian woman, etc., because they are more vulnerable to exploitation a) because they are more likely to be brown and *andre 3000 voice* across cultures darker skinned people suffer the most, b) southeast asian countries are still majorly suffering from the after effects of western colonialism and asymmetric warfare that leaves their country far worse off economically (particularly vietnam, laos, and cambodia) and, c) westerners, despite recognizing her as an asian woman, do not see her as a Japanese woman, and therefore treat her worse because they see her as uncivilized. there's a reason why, when pedophiles want an asian child, they go to thailand, not japan---because the sex tourism industry isn't something they can get rid of. japanese women are considered the ultimate trophy to be shown off as a sign of the man's virility and masculinity, and southeast asian women are seen as consolation prizes to the men who can't get the "real thing". do you know how many mixed asians i know whose dads scooped their moms up from a military base in the philippines or okinawa? and the mom has only gone to see her family maybe five times in 20 years? she's not the porcelain doll the man wanted, but she still has to try and "japanize" herself to be seen as even worthy of respect, which she still doesn't get because no matter what she does she will not be japanese. that's what japanese exceptionalism does.