#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

[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)

[panvani]

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

[caribbeanart]

The Appearance: Art of the Asian Diaspora in Latin America & the Caribbean Exhibition Catalogue

[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.

[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.

[littlestpersimmon]

Guy with cataracts and scarred from an explosion has a fail toymaking shop in front of a rundown temple and he has a crush on a disfigured lowly priestess whom he suspects is a stealth trans guy because she always picks the boy option when they play board games (he’s right btw)

He's from Kalantiaw, but his mom is diaspora, and I thought her to be half "Japanese" (coded) - still trying to figure out how japanese ethnicities come to play.

She was a sailor turned pirate. She didn't know the language spoken in Kalantiaw (more akin to Khmer), and she spoke a different language (more austronesian), and she named him Kahilingan, which means "wish". But in Kalantiaw, where she settled, his name means "curse" or "bad omen" 💀 it doesn't help that her life ended with the beginning of his. So.

Kahi spends much of his life chasing the image of his mom and trying to.... live up to her- because sailing is the most esteemed occupation in their world. Only very very very very very few people have managed to work on "dragonships".

Basically, their world is physically broken (like living on an asteroid belt) and they sail to and fro each sundering / country on specialized stone ships called "dragonships" / "bakunawa"- and the ships themselves are semi-alive? They're like.. Stone ships laminated with the spirits of devas and dragons and other great beings who have all died because of (redacted).

Anyway, his mom, Maaya, was a renowned sailor- she tamed a dragonship that was imbued with an infamously wild dragon called Duksa- Dragonships are Sponsored, but those who sponsor the ships are almost never in command, and they also easily lose ownership to their hired captains- because the ships themselves are sentient, and they never obey anyone who they deem are incapable of commanding them. Only Maaya could control Duksa hehe. So she became known throughout all their world as this wild woman who loved fast boats and only accepted voyage commissions "if they are very fun". Anyways blah blah blah she fell in love w Kahi's other parent (who is nonbinary) and she got pregnet with him. And they eventually settled in Kalantiaw, in it's countryside near the subterranean capital (Kamharik).

Kahi always annoyed his other parent abt his mom because he too wanted to meet Duksa, but his parent kept warning him not to go near the ship because after Maaya died, it went even more mad with grief. Kahi more of an engineer than a captain like his mom, but his goal was simply to acquaintance with Duksa rather than actually captain her. But Duksa did not accept anyone, not even anyone who was part of Maaya's original crew.. Kahi went to an apprenticeship on shipbuilding-

he became somewhat popular for being clever with his hands, and all around Kalantiaw, everyone thought of him as reliable and very creative when it came to problem solving. So he went from normal ships to fixing dragonships.. ..

The Greatest dragonships are ones that are imbued with the spirits of actual ancient dragons and qilin, bc some are imbued with "lesser" dragons or false dragons, and some are with non-dragon albeit great spirits- like minor gods, wind spirits, phoenix,naga, etc etc..

Duksa was a true and great dragon, and Kahi knew that she was suffering from severe neglect, so all he wanted was to patch her up-

Everyone, every single one of Kahi's peers discouraged him, bc it is known that anyone who even approaches her is immediately kilIed by her; but Kahi, he is different. When he approaches Duksa, she was a shadow of herself, a ghost ship- She senses Maaya, and she even thought that Kahi was her at first- so she lets Kahi patch her big crabclaw sails, fixed her boilers and really tried to replicate how she used to look when Maaya lived.. and Duksa didn't know it wasn't her, because her eyes were covered in barnacles.. The "eyes" of a dragonship is its lodestar, and Kahi was purposefully saving it for last because he is frightened of what Duksa could do to him;;

But before that, Duksa spoke to him, joked like "ah beauty, what happened to you?! Your voice sounds like you swallowed a frog.. are you ill? Why did you abandon me?" Fhjsjs

"Why are your hands so gentle now? I want you to be rough!! Stop this at once! I am not old!"

But when Kahi started scraping finally at the lodestar, and he opened Duksa's eyes to the world once more, she cried in great anger because who tf was this intruder! And why did he carry Maaya's spirit with him !!!

Her entire deck creaked so hard the floorboards broke again, and she swayed her whole body so Kahi nearly fell from the lodestar;; he tried to reason with her, and it sort of mirrors how his mom tamed Duksa. She barrelled in head on and confidently, but Kahi was meek and gentle.

Eitherway.. an angry dragonship is like highly radioactive, its like being in a storm in a contained environment, and she started puffing steam- it's like microdosing being in fukushima; And she called Kahi a fool, he'll never measure up to Maaya, he will never be her- aaaah, but she didn't kiIl him. Maybe because she knew he was Maaya's boy. She warned him never to return, and tossed him into the open shallows. So, he was absolutely brokenhearted. He was 19.

~intense lonely lovestory between him and a closeted trans guy raised by mean transphobic priestesses in a cult the antithesis of a loving and wise lesbian death goddess occurs.~

There she is.. her name is Viharana Magayarin

Names-

Maaya's name is spelled a certain way in kanji, I want it to mean "True"

Duksa's name is Tagalog, it means "grief"

Kahilingan's name is tagalog- and it means "wish". Inspired from.. in tagalog, "curse" is a contronym of sorts- "curse" and "promise" is the same word ("sumpa")

Kahi's trans boyfriend's name is Tala, and it means "star" 😌

[beserkerjewel]

"Enen no Shouboutai" shut the fuck up, that's Fire Force!

Western English speaking anime fans who insist on using the Japanese titles of anime that are more commonly referred to with their English titles are some of the most annoying people on the planet

[buttclench-ryugazaki]

i think the english localization making phoenix american actually really works, ie breaks the narrative less when taking ryunosuke into consideration. as we know, phoenix was written as Just Some Fucking Guy who becomes a renowned lawyer, but then retroactively making his great grandpa a legal legend who toppled the british judiciary somewhat lessens phoenix's charm as a complete rando. it can inadvertently support the vague idea that lawyering is in the naruhodo clan's blood, y'know what i mean? because ancestor veneration is valued in east asia, it's likely that ryuichi's parents would have put emphasis on ryunosuke being an admirable and aspirational figure. the naruhodos would have their in-house altar and be able to visit his grave and read about his exploits in whatever japanese public archives, on top of recounting their own personal memories of ryunosuke. retroactively, this makes it peculiar that ryuichi or any other lawyer never acknowledges his pioneer great grandfather

but the east asian diaspora tends to have a different relationship to its ancestors because our parents had no choice but to leave everything behind. we don't have access to those things anymore. some of us can't even speak the language, which is obviously a huge barrier. phoenix as a descendant of japanese immigrants would be far enough removed (temporally, geographically, and culturally) from ryunosuke and his legacy that i find it totally plausible that phoenix would never mention him. it would make sense if phoenix were mostly ignorant about who his ancestor even is because that's just realistic to the second-onward generation immigrant experience

[yamujiburo]

Your tattoos are sick as hell and absolutely inspired, but I also love the small irony of getting a tattoo to honor your Japanese heritage, the culture where getting a tattoo is most commonly associated with organized crime

Hahaha that's part of what drew me to the artist. They do a lot of heritage tattoos and they're very passionate about exploring Japanese diaspora, being Japanese American, and being mixed.

I went into the session thinking I was just gonna put on music for myself and let them do their thing but we ended up talking the entire 7 hours just about art, our lives and connection to our cultures. So, so nice. We definitely did talk about the irony of it because they have tattoos dedicated to her Japanese grandparents (my brother and I do as well haha)

[ooglywooglies]

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

[999-roses]

Ken Liu is a Chinese American science fiction author. he is a self-described "tax geek" & into that nitty gritty technicality detail stuff. love that for him. he's also translated prominent chinese science fiction into English, including the first two books from Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem trilogy.

'the man who ended history: a documentary' is a science fiction novella in the format of a documentary.

the characters and the bohm-kirino particles are fictional, but the historic content and grit is very real. [ eg. unit 731 was really shielded from charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity by General MacArthur in agreement to share collected data from these inhuman experiments with the United States. ]

Evan Wei makes me think of Iris Chang, may she rest in peace. I wasn't surprised to see her name first in the dedication.

'who does history belong to' 'who controls history' 'who controls the truth of the past' is a matter that still pertains to the nature of "news" and "truth", as media (both news media and social media) being documenters of current events is how "history" is minted, and then archived.

please check out the author's notes at the end of the document for provided citations and references. (that the sinophobic quips from western voices were directly pulled from IRL are no surprise to me.) this work is quite a mirror to our present reality, in my opinion as a chinese american.

on that note, highly recommend the man who ended history: a documentary by ken liu, the link is literally a free pdf he published on his own author website, you can save it RIGHT NOW, and also if u don’t have time for a novella (worth it though) or want something of a lighter mood (because big big content warning for everything unit 731 related), he has a list of all his published stories with reading links where possible .

[punkeropercyjackson]

The Batkids + their flags(mix of canon and headcanons)

Dick is canonically romani and since the rroma people have many subgroups,i see him as sinti specifically,Cass is canonically chinese and either wasian or full asian depending on the timeline,Tim is cherokee as Janet was from Oklahoma and moved to Gotham in her adult years(his hair is sported as shaggy rather than long here due to still reconnecting to his culture),Jason is black dominican with specific ethiopian and congolese roots because his birthday is the same day as our restoration day and he went looking for his 'birth mom' in Ethiopia which makes way more sense for an afrolatino diaspora kid,Duke is african american and a hood kid(double meaning based on him and Jason being eachother's Robin as in the No52,Duke and Damian reverse chronological Robin spots),Stephanie is blasian jamaican-south korean with a bubble waffles addiction,Damian is wasian chinese-palestinian(not white palestinian for clarification!!Talia is brown/chinese mixed like in canon,the 'w' in his asian heritage comes from Bruce),Maps is japanese and Nell is a black canadian who arrived in Gotham briefly before Batgirl 2009!Also they're all trans and autistic + Cass is a tradgoth butch lesbian dating Stephanie,Tim is skapunk and solarpunk,Jason is afropunk/afrogoth,Duke is afrosolarpunk and glamrock,Stephanie is a punk earthy black girl and a kidcore queen,Damian is a baby bat,Maps is a scene kid and Nell is indie punk🩷

@mayacondotcom @mik3stuff @alternishicons