Pontifications on the senmin: A new series from the American Umlaut

I've just returned from a party thrown by my professor, where I had the remarkable experience of eating lasagna containing fruit. It was surprisingly good, but I don't know if I could ever get used to the experience of finding slices of banana in my pasta.

A couple of hours before the party ended, I was visited by my muse and a theory of domestic-policy logic for issuing the 1871 Emancipation Edict (which legally made the senmin (literally "despised ones" - members of the various Japanese outcaste groups) burst fully formed into my brain. I rapidly negotiated permission from my new friend Yuri to convert his paper plane into scrap paper and scribble my thoughts on it before I forgot them. I got the paper, he got to sit in my lap and rub my whiskers while I wrote - I should mention that Yuri is four, and beards and blonds both being relative rarities in Japan he found me really fascinating.

My scrap of paper reads as follows:

A nation state requires recognition from within and without - from within to establish the imagined community that lends the legitimacy that is the true source of institutional power in any nation and from without to guarantee at least a certain level of legitimacy for its geographical/physical boundaries - there can be no "nation state" if there is no general agreement as to its geographic definition.

The ostensible reason for the Kaihou-rei [the senmin emancipation edict] was the latter, but the former was no less important. It may seem silly to say that consistency was important in an authoritarian country, but the "plausibel und anschließbar" [plausible and applicable/attachable - this is a quote from Alois Hahn that I'll explain in a later post] criterium surely applies to the labels defining Us as well as those defining the Other.

I set out to write up a post explaining the ideas crammed into these two paragraphs, and ended up with three only very slightly less unreadable pages. I'm not a particularly gifted writer, but if I can't explain my ideas well enough that you can understand them without being a japanologist, then I have two problems: I'm really not accomplishing much with the non-autobiographical half of this blog, and I probably don't understand my own theory well enough.

So instead of drowning my poor audience in a single hopelessly tangled mess that most of you would skip over anyhow, I'm going to take my time and write a series of posts that explain what I'm thinking and what others have written that makes me think that way. I don't know if I'm up to the task, but I'm going to do my best to emulate my favorite authors and make a dry, academic subject live and breathe for you - to open a window into a world you might not otherwise visit and share with you the passion that I feel for it.

And hopefully, by the time I'm done explaining my theory to you, I will finally understand just what it is I'm talking about.