A voter is me!

Today I got my absentee ballot! Hooray for democracy!

I voted for President and for the House seat currently occupied by Doc Hastings. I didn't feel right voting for any of the other issues, though I would have liked to. I feel like, as a citizen abroad for such an extended period, I certainly still have the right to be represented in the federal government, but it's not reasonable for me to be voting on local issues that won't affect me.

Of course, given the liberal bent of Washington State, as far as the Obama and McCain campaigns are concerned I voted six months ago. I hope I live to see the day when every vote actually counts, and you don't have to live in a state that is precariously balanced between conservative and liberal for your interests to get attention from presidential candidates.

Oops

I had two Flickr accounts and inadvertently made the wrong one my pro account. So except for those first pictures (which I don't feel like re-creating the labels for), all of my photos will be put up at http://www.flickr.com/photos/americanumlaut/

Sorry 'bout that!

"Weakness Invites Aggression"

Matthew Yglesias criticizes the conservative trope that our aggressive military posture serves as a deterrent to attacks on the United States.

The entire “weakness invites aggression” worldview is something that’d really be worth looking into at some length. Presumably the truth of these dictum explains why Canada has been subject to so many more terrorist attacks than has the United States. Or it explains why France took advantage of the ongoing political crisis in Belgium to invade and conquer the Walloon portions of that country. And, conversely, it explains why Bush’s belligerence and militarism have managed to convince North Korea and Iran to give in to our non-proliferation demands. I dunno.

I think this is a bit more complicated issue than he makes out - there are plenty of cases to disprove the idea that nations which abstain from state-sponsored violence abroad are immune from terrorist attack. The Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack, for example, was carried out in Japan, which is constitutionally forbidden from using its military outside of its own borders.

I do wonder, though, at a mindset that essentially has come to the conclusion that a preemptive invasion that leaves millions displaced, in poverty and with dead friends and relatives that can be blamed on America's actions can result in there being fewer people in the world desperate and angry enough to carry out terrorist attacks against us. The violent installation of democracy in a foreign country seems hopelessly destined to be the cause of more trouble than it could ever hope to prevent.

I have an idea. When we see that the big, scary guy at the other end of the bar doesn't seem to like us, let's try not kicking him in the nuts until he decides that he really wants to be more like us. I get that diplomacy isn't nearly as emotionally satisfying, but shouldn't our foreign policy be a bit more than the executive arm of the nation's id?

The future is upon us!

Almost every day I am astounded at what an amazing world I live in. We live in a science fiction story that only seems normal to us because we have watched technological magic accumulate over the last few decades to the extent that we simply take for granted that it is possible, for example, to tap incomprehensibly vast stores of knowledge from our living room, or to buy a piece of plastic a quarter the size of a postage stamp that could store more books than you could read in your lifetime. I think there's a strong tendency after a century of such amazing technological progress to simply take as given that such feats are possible. I think we forget to take a step back and realize that we live in a world where we can do magic.

Today I had an hour long, face-to-face chat with a wonderful old friend from my time studying in America. The fact that I was sitting in Chiba and she in Washington State wasn't an issue at all. I made faces with her three year old daughter and spooked her cat, and I showed her around my apartment and she showed me around her house. Aside from having to keep in more or less one spot to be visible, it was little different than sitting across a coffee table from each other.

How can you live in a world where such a thing is possible and not do a groovy little dance each morning when you wake up?

I want to share one more thing - my friend took two pictures of me from my video feed that, when strung together, make me look like I'm doing a fantastic Garth Algar impression. I thought I should share.



Excellent!

A short history of the Burakumin

The first records of the existence of outcaste communities start showing up in literature in the late Heian period (around the year 1000). It's important to note, though, that, at the time, these people constituted far less a true caste than simply a class of people who performed certain ritually unclean jobs and lived in segregated communities. For about six hundred years it remained possible to change one's status by changing jobs.

The incredible number of names referring to these people is testament both to the length of their communities' existence and to the fact that what we today think of as "the Burakumin" originated in fact with many disparate groups. Many terms refer to the locations of outcaste communities - for example kawaramono (riverbank dwellers) or sakanomono (dwellers of the slope) named after Kiyomizu Slope in Kyoto. Other names that eventually came to refer to all outcastes originated with a single profession, such as tosha (butcher) and kawata (plentiful leather - I don't know why "plentiful", maybe they were improbably efficient workers). And some referred to how they were seen in the community, like eta (plentiful filth) or senmin (despised people - also the modern Japanese word for "outcaste").

To give you an idea of how long the outcaste phenomenon took to fully develop, consider that the phenomenon of separate communities just for leather workers appears not to have begun until the start of the Warring States Period (1467 - 1603), nearly five hundred years after the first outcaste communities appeared. The Warring States Period was basically a hundred and fifty years of angry dudes (the samurai) poking each other with pointy things. To protect their armies from these pointy pokes, the daimyo (feudal lords) needed a steady supply of armor, which they secured by forcing all leather workers to move into communities directly abutting their castles.

An interesting note, all of the literature I read refers to the leather workers "processing" horses and cattle that had died - none of it refers to them actually butchering anything. Back in the year 700, as it turns out, a law was passed forbidding the eating of beef or horse flesh to protect the animals, which had to be imported from the continent at great expense and were essential to the plowing of rice paddies. I can't be totally certain, but from the wording that is always used I get the feeling that leather was produced using the carcasses of animals that had died natural deaths (or had been worked until they dropped).

It wasn't until the end of the Warring States period that a true caste system was developed and two categories of outcastes were created - the hinin (inhuman) and eta. Hinin were largely itinerant workers or entertainers, and eta were those who did ritually unclean work. The eta were truly in a caste - it was legally impossible for an eta or his descendants to escape the status. Hinin were in many places considered to be even lower than eta in status, but it was legally possible for those who fulfilled certain conditions to escape and become townsfolk or peasants.

This situation continued until 1871, when the new Meiji government passed a law dissolving the old caste system and granting the eta/hinin the status of shin-heimin (new commoners), de jure equal to regular commoners but conveniently given a special label for quick recognition. It wasn't until the 1970s that the government finally made it impossible to simply look up whether a given person was Burakumin based on his or her ancestry.

Today most discrimination takes place based on one's address - if you live in a buraku, regardless of your ancestry, it can be difficult to find work with some companies and some families may refuse to allow you to marry into them. This has bizarrely led to court cases where non-Burakumin have sued real-estate agents for selling them property in a buraku without warning them.

There is a lot more to the story - it stretches over a thousand years, after all - but now you have a pretty good idea what it is I'm writing about. When I have a bit more information, I'll tell you more about the specific focus of my thesis. Basically, I'm trying to answer the question of just how much an impact the 1871 law had on the way Burakumin were perceived, both by mainstream Japanese and by the Burakumin themselves.

Quote of the day

"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking." ~John Maynard Keynes

Quote of the day

In early 1977, in Kyoto, Nakamura Michie, a young factory worker of Buraku origin, stood trial for killing her lover of six years who, under family pressure, refused to marry her. The presiding judge threw out the murder charge and had her freed with a two-year suspended sentence for manslaughter, declaring that the killing took place against "a background of unjust discrimination for which the whole nation bore responsibility."

Wow.

Momentum

I am having a fantastic night. I spent the early part of the day in down town Chiba, shopping for a web camera and headset so that I rock it like it's the future. Since about three I've been reading about the Danzaemon, a series of thirteen men who were the rulers of the Eta and Hinin.

When I first got here, I needed several days to get through my first document, and I started panicking about how much I had to read. In the last four and a half hours, though, I've read two chapters!

Benjamin Levels Up!
Int +1!
Lang +3!
Kanji +5!
Str -1!

Word of the day

I searched a long time for an electronic dictionary that could do German as well as English. A lot of words appear in the German-Japanese dictionary that Casio uses that aren't in the English-Japanese dictionary, and vice versa. Also, it is occasionally the case that there's a good translation for a word into German but not into English.

Also I sometimes end up learning a new German word at the same time I learn a new Japanese word. Today's word of the day is such a term:

灯心 - toushin
German: der Docht
English: wick

Subliminality

CNN is running this story on Colin Powell endorsing Obama.

I think it's remarkable and says a lot that one of the country's most respected Republicans is coming out three weeks before a presidential election to endorse the Democratic candidate. On the other hand, I doubt it will sway a lot of votes. The kind of person who I think is most likely to be impressed by a gesture like this - nerdy political wonks like me - is the kind of person who probably has already made up their mind.

That being said, the photo CNN came up with for the article is priceless.

Word of the day

The word hisenshi (被賤視) turns up a few times in a section of a text I'm translating. The first two times it was a verb (hisenshi suru), which I translated as "to despise."

Then I reached a spot where the same word is used as a noun, so I find myself in need of a nominal form of "to despise." I have settled on "despision." Please update your dictionaries accordingly.

Good night.

I am so amused by myself

I've been talking on the phone with my lovely wife Rose all night, and I sent her some pictures of my room and my desk so that she'd know what my surroundings look like. Having learned much of smart-assery from me, she said she was curious what my camera looks like, and could I send along a picture of it.

Five minutes later, she got this:



I am so clever.

Kyoto Fu: the Legend Continues

So. Friday, with about three hours of sleep, I set out to explore Kyoto not as a tourist destination, but as the site of a year of fond memories. Where I had spent Thursday visiting holy sites featured on post cards and famous around the world, I spent Friday visiting unremarkable places special simply because of their place in my heart.

My first stop was at the Kyoto University of Foreign Languages, where I spent the days of my exchange year studying Japanese. My first impression was of how beautiful the campus is; my image of the university was always shaded by my first impression that it was tiny, cramped and ugly compared to my home university of CWU. But then, CWU's immense, park-like campus was built on cheap land on the edge of a small town, and KUFL was built in the middle of a fairly large city. I've seen a bit more of the world now (I'm looking at you, Germany. Fund your damn schools!) and realize that American universities are something special, and actually it's pretty impressive what KUFL was able to do, considering that space considerations essentially forced them to build a university consisting entirely of high-rises.

I didn't spend as long at the university as I thought I would. It was packed with people, but it felt like a ghost town to me. After all, it was the people who made Kyoto a place full of special memories for me. I could go back to the University, but I couldn't bring back the afternoons spent skipping class and drinking hot sweet green-tea lattes from the vending machine - the vending machine isn't even there any more. I could go back to the all-night convenience store around the corner, but I couldn't bring back Thomas, Raymond and Brad to play hacky sack at two in the morning in the parking lot. There are moments in your life when you are starkly confronted with the irretrievable goneness of the past.

As it turned out, though, not everyone from my time in Kyoto was gone. As I stood in front of my old dormitory, a freshly-purchased potted plant in hand, I wondered who would come to the door. Tsuda-san, who had been in charge of the dorm when I lived there and had shown me around Kyoto and told me stories from the fifties and sixties throughout the year, is sixty eight now, and I was sure she must be retired. She had never responded to my letters, and I didn't have her phone number, so the only way to find out was to drop by unannounced.

And she was there! She invited me in, made happy noises over the strange, bulb-shaped flowers of the plant I had brought her, and sat with me for a couple of hours over iced coffee. For a long time, we discussed nothing of import, the kind of conversation common to old friends who joyfully reunite but actually have nothing in common. Then she asked me what I was studying, and I made a leap of faith and I told her the truth.

You should understand that my studies are not politically correct. The words "eta" and "hinin" were for more than two hundred years the legal term for the class of people I am researching. The history of a people whose government termed them "the plentiful filth" and "the inhumans" is obviously an ugly one, and their historical and - to a certain extent - contemporary oppression is something many are ignorant of, and many others would simply rather not talk about. As a foreigner, I am especially careful about who I talk about my research with - I tell most people that I am working in "minority studies."

The reward for my faith in Tsuda-san was an amazing hour of conversation about her view of the Burakumin (the "village people", the term in contemporary use and the one they use themselves), especially the role of the government in subsidizing growth in historically Buraku districts now called "dowa" districts. In Japan, this issue is somewhat similar to the issue of affirmative action in America, with similar arguments on both sides of the debate. In fact, the parallels between Buraku and African American history are plentiful; the Burakumin were legally declared to be human beings just eight years after America prohibited the ownership of brown people by pink people, and both were forced to then fight for the enforcement of their de jure equality.

It was indescribably fascinating for me, as someone who has been interested in the history of these people for years, to hear the perspective of a perfectly ordinary Japanese citizen on a subject that I had only been exposed to from an academic viewpoint.

So finally I had the chance to reconnect with my past, to renew a friendship that I have missed these four years, and to discover a window into a viewpoint I had long since given up on ever getting access to.

And it was only lunch time. This was going to be a good day!

Where I've been all day

I spent the day at the Japanese equivalent of the Library of Congress - there are advantages to living just outside of Tokyo - and found a huge amount of material with the help of my friend Akiko, who is also studying the Burakumin. Unfortunately, since it's all in Japanese (most of it classical Japanese, which is significantly different than the spoken language and still quite alien to me even after two years of classes in it), it's going to take me piles of time to get through it all.

For the last half hour, this is what I've been doing:



The marked section is a single sentence, stretching across half a page. This isn't unusual, either. Japanese lends itself to sentences in the narrative style of a five-year-old - "and then... and then... and then..." I actually read an entire seventeenth-century essay once that consisted of a single, two page run-on sentence.

Brainache

I spent my first night in Kyoto in the Kiyomizu Youth Hostel, which is an utterly charming, newly renovated hostel in a sort of mixed Japanese/Western style - tatami mats in the lobby and an ofuro to bathe in, but bunk beds in the rooms. The owner was charming, and the other guests were great, except for the Belgian dude who told me he'd recently had surgery to fix his terrible snoring, but that it hadn't worked very well.

I do my best to put up with a wide variety of people whose ideals and values may differ from mine, but I'm pretty sure you'd have to be dropped on your head more than the usual number of times as a child to grow up thinking it's okay to reserve a shared room with three strangers after an unsuccessful snorectomy.

I did the only intelligent thing, and hit the sack around nine to make sure I could reach a state of unconscious bliss before he went to sleep. Unfortunately, I vastly underestimated what I was dealing with.

To make a long story short, I spent the night on the floor of the lobby. I could still hear the guy's jackhammer-like labored breathing (the next morning, everyone at breakfast was talking about it, even people on the other end of the building), but it was distant enough to let me sleep.

A hard land

A boy, given a new hammer, quickly comes to see all nouns as variations on the nail. For him, there are few problems for which a pounding solution cannot be found. I feel like Japan's relationship with concrete must be based on a similar principle. They started with perfectly normal things: sidewalks, buildings, bridges. Then, like a man who's still enjoying using his chainsaw but has already cut down the tree he bought it for, the Japanese realized there were all kinds of things that needed to be poured. Not enough wood or metal? We'll pour the telephone poles! Rock slides getting you down? Paved mountainsides don't slide, baby! Flooding? What could be more logical than paving the riverbed?

And after the war, when they wanted to erect a statue of the Buddha of Compassion in memorial to the unknown dead of the Pacific conflict, do you think they carved it from stone? Cast it from bronze? Forget it, dude - they did that in Kamakura and Nihonji, and it was totally hard work and stuff. Behold: the Ryozen Kannon.



And to be perfectly honest, it's quite lovely from a distance. When you get up close, though, it looks pretty cheap, like something a gas-station owner built on the side of the highway in the fifties to attract customers. Or like a prop for some weird chain of restaurants.

"Buddha Burger: we'll make you one with everything."

Inky Dinky Doo-Dah

I promise I really am working on my stories of Kyoto. I spent too much time yesterday actually working on my master's thesis. Sorry.

To help you keep up your good spirits while you wait:



Good morning, Internet!

(Via Ectoplasmosis)

Regrets

When my mom came to visit me in Kyoto in the summer of 2003, she wanted to go to a kimono-rental place where they dress you up like a Geisha and let you wander around for an hour. Embarrassed, I refused to let her do it.

What a fool I was. That would have been so much fun.

Mom, if you read this, come to Japan with me again some time and we'll do it. I'll even find a place to dress me up as a samurai so that we match.

Arrival in Kyoto

Being in Japan again is almost indescribably wonderful for me; this whole country is like my holy land, a place so richly filled with new words and experiences that every walk down the street is like a university course - in a half mile on Friday I learned ten new words, discovered the Japanese Communist Party and learned how tatami are made. I am a man floating in an endless ocean, filled with the insatiable compulsion to drink.

Thursday, things got even better when I finally had the opportunity to return to Kyoto, the place where I first got to know this remarkable country. From March 2003 to March 2004 I was an exchange student at the Kyoto University of Foreign Languages, where I did all of the wonderful and foolish things that exchange students do. I visited amazing landmarks, met fantastic people from around the world, drank ridiculous amounts of alcohol, fell in love once or twice*. And in my spare time, I even studied a bit.

Ever since I began planning my trip to Chiba I've been eagerly anticipating my chance to go back to Kyoto, to revisit the scenes of so many happy memories. I was only able to stay three days on this trip, but they were as wonderful as I could have hoped for.

Over the next day or two, I'll post the story of my trip to Kyoto. As I transition from the newsletter format to documenting my adventures in a blog, I intend to write shorter entries that document a single scene or idea rather than writing up the events of a month in a single narrative. That way, you can just read one scene and then come back later instead of having to read several pages at one go.

In addition to this blog, I have created a Flickr account to upload my photos to. You can cause your computer monitor to produce graphic representations of my recent adventures by clicking here.


* With my wife, for example.

A short missive from heaven

Heaven, it turns out, is right around the corner from my dorm in Chiba. Who would have thought?

I am writing this post from a three-story internet cafe, fully equipped with free drinks, massage chairs, a huge library of manga and magazines, televisions on which to play DVDs from their huge library of those or Playstation 3 or XBox 360 games from that library. This place is awesome.

Unfortunately, it's not cheap and until next week it's going to be my only source of internet. So my blogging will be quite sparse for another few days yet. Just bear with me - another few days and I will fill your Intertubes with delicious text and graphical content.