Item: from last week's story on "China's Far West" in the online Asia Times, I extract the name 'Akbar Kahriman' ("...the pungent guitar sounds of Akbar Kahriman...") and ask google for more, but all I get is the ONE link to the story I "just happened" to read in Asia Times, and that link didn't work the first time I tried, though I can get to the cached version... and I've grabbed it as escobar1.htm by using the SAVE AS function in the browser...
So what have we GOT here? How does this news feature connect up with what we already have talked about? And what new questions does it raise?
These obviously come in several varieties:
- new things we don't know anything about, like 'Yengisar knives', 'girde nan', the phrase "beyond the pale"...
- and some factoids we have already encountered, like "Uighurs and other "ethnic minorities" are less than 6 percent of the total population of 1.3 billion, but they occupy more than half of Chinese territory...", and
- things that are implied by and implicated in other things we've looked at briefly, like "China's economy needs to grow at least 10 percent every year just to absorb new contingents of job seekers... While some sectors of "market socialism" have degenerated into gangsterism, and human rights, from Beijing's point of view, means only economic development, hundreds of millions of people are involved in the largest internal mass migration movement in history. Dozens of millions of unemployed threaten social cohesion."
Item: a search I happened to be doing on some migration issues led me quite by accident to "Immigration within Asia: Case of the Yakuza" By Rawlein G. Soberano, Ph.D.
This one ties in with what we've been doing in multiple ways, but also adds some new territory to explore. Again it might be the factoids that draw our attention:From official Japanese statistics, there were 166,767 Filipinos in 1999. The number is broken down into 115,685 registered aliens; 36,379 with expired visas; and 84,767 new arrivals, minus 70,064 for the entire year. A good proportion are women. Of the 115,685 no less than 98,103 were female. In the same year, about 46,000 entertainers are OPAs (Overseas Performing Artists) entered Japan.Having never heard the term 'Japazuki', my curiosity was piqued. A google search wasn't very helpful... and it turns out that the term is actually 'Japayuki' (though I can't reconstruct now how I discovered that, alas...), and a google search for that version is much more successful... but plunges me into deep waters immediately, as I struggle to figure out where this new information belongs in my personal catalog of information about Japan and East Asia... and what DOES it connect to? I think of prejudice and stereotyping, 'racism', notions of uniqueness and superiority... see material on NihonjinronBy November 2000, that figure has soared to 53,997. The less flattering term so relished by journalists is Japazuki. The OPAs are mostly singers and dancers (hostesses), employed in clubs and hotel function rooms all over the country.
Item: trying to think about how to summarize the problem of decoding what 'the Japanese' are all about, I thought of the phrase that I knew had 'mystery', 'enigma', and 'riddle' in it... but WHO was it that coined the phrase? I thought I dimly recalled that it was Winston Churchill, but I couldn't remember either the context or the precise quotation. A google search led me to The Phrase Finder's entry (though I had to add 'quotation' to the search to get around all the purloiners of the quotation), which was originally about Russia ("...a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma"), but seems as applicable to Japan.
Along the same lines, I happened to be watching the DVD version of James Clavell's Shogun [which has also been repurposed as a Broadway musical, a board game, and a computer game...] last night, and was brought up short by one bit of dialog, in which the Englishman Blackthorne's Japanese (female) interpreter says to him:
The one thing we do not have is privacy, so we must learn to create out own. We are taught from childhood to disappear within ourselves, to grow impenetrable walls behind which we hide... we have an endless maze to hide in. Rituals and customs. Even our language has nuances which allow us to avoid any question we do not want to answer. Do not be fooled by our bows and smiles, our gentleness and attentions. Beneath them all, we can be far away, safe and alone. That is what we seek: oblivion.Now, this is a fascinating passage. On the one hand, it seems to unlock some of the 'secrets'... but can we take it as "truth", or as ethnographically correct? Remember that it's written by a European novelist, though the words are put into the mouth of a Japanese. It's part of the long and fascinating history of transcultural contact that History documents and Anthropology (and other disciplines... Literature, Psychology, etc...) attempts to decode and comprehend. It also steps into the territory of Orientalism, a concept you really should be familiar with, because stereotyping, seeing others as other, and facile generalizations are exactly what we're trying to develop sensitivity and alternatives to.
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So we're in familiar General Education territory: we need/want to find out more about some things, and need/want the means to organize and store for possible eventual retrieval the path(s) to these items, using whatever earmarks will let us retrieve them at will...
The mental exercise IS a lot like the "six degrees of separation" game (google search for phrase, and amazon.com ditto [297 hits in books], and three from Annie), or James Burke's wonderful leaps from thing to thing ("How can you not love a host who makes an historic link between Napoleon's battlefield successes and toilet rolls? Or the invention of the thermometer and the music of Haydn? What Burke does so well is play the parlor game of Six Degrees of Separation with science and history, demonstrating that it's not all linear cause and effect, that there is more serendipity than manifest destiny to many inventions and discoveries. "Everything can be linked to everything else," he says about historical events." [from a 1997 review of Connections]) --see The Knowledge Web, which "...provides an interactive, 3D framework to map people, places, events and innovations, allowing the user to investigate history's serendipitous chain reactions." ...and there's a book with the same title by James Burke...
But we're getting carried away in serendipities and tenuous links.
To bring us back to the subject at hand, I want you to write a meditation on reading, incorporating your thoughts on your own history as a reader, and the strategies you use (or have tried and discarded) for managing what you read. How do YOU deal with the reading you are assigned, in this and other courses? What do YOU read that's outside what you're assigned? What have YOU read in the last week? The last month? ...and save as /anth230/reading.html(results)
And so to a case in point, a collection of extracts from one of the most provocative books on Japan that I've read in the last few years, Patrick Smith's Japan: a reinterpretation (1997)