Matsuri da (12): Fighting at festivals can be fun!

It might be a citywide extravaganza held over two or three days, or just a small neighborhood affair lasting a few hours, but every day in Japan, there’s a festival happening somewhere. Most are Shinto ceremonies that originated in a religious observance, but they often incorporate behavior that seems downright unreligious: drinking, sex, and fighting.

One of the most common themes of the so-called fighting festivals is a physical confrontation between two groups carrying mikoshi, or portable shrines, which are said to house the spirit of the divinity. The idea of the fight is for one group to wield its mikoshi as a weapon and destroy that of the other group. The winner is considered to have been blessed with the stronger spirit and will enjoy good fortune in the year ahead.

There are gospel singers in the United States who give such an impassioned performance they’re known figuratively as church wreckers. In Japan they take that literally. Years ago, the battles at festials were so intense that they sometimes resulted in fatalities. If fact, a high school student in Saga Prefecture died just last year (by accident) in a fighting festival whose objective was not only to destroy the other mikoshi, but to drive the other group into the river.

Every year, for more than 300 years, the Gosha shrine in Toyo-cho, Kochi Prefecture, has held a day-long festival in late April in which the participants fight it out with both mikoshi and with festival floats decorated with lanterns (first photo). They get an early start, parade around town, and then get down and dirty in front of the shrine itself. It would be as if two men tried to bash each other with four-foot long crucifixes in front of a church after the bishop gave them his blessing.

The city fathers have canceled this year’s festival, however, because they’re worried that once the participants start fighting, they may not want to stop. Toyo-cho’s chief municipal officer formally applied to have the town become the site of a nuclear waste disposal facility. This so enraged one segment of the town’s population that they launched a recall drive.

The authorities’ logic for sitting it out this year is that because people will be drinking (and since this is a Japanese festival, they will be drinking a lot), they’re afraid some serious headbanging will be ignited by the Shinto-sanctioned mikoshi busting.

That’s created a further division in the town, with opinion split between those who think that their enjoyment of a traditional festival by drinking and fighting doesn’t have anything to do with nuclear wastes, and those who’d rather be safe than sorry.

Frankly, I’m surprised the folks in Toyo-cho couldn’t come up with a better solution. For example, they might have gotten inspiration from the festival held every March 28 in Dongguang in Guangdong Province, China. (And no, I don’t mean they should play palindromes with place names and rechristen themselves Yoto-cho).

The festival in Dongguang dates back more than 400 years and originates in the practice of local farmers soliciting strong young men every year to work in the fields. The Japanese translation of the original Chinese name of the event is the Miuri Matsuri, which I wonder about, because miuri means selling oneself into bondage.

That doesn’t sound very festive to me, but you’ve got to hand it to the Dongguangers for taking the idea and running with it. The event has evolved over the years, and now, for some unexplained reason, the entire city takes the day off, school children included, to engage in combat with water guns (second photo). Who knows how they got from there to here? They’re probably having too much fun to care anyway!

Reports say that weapons of various sizes are used, and there is always a very impressive running battle up and down one street that stretches for several kilometers.

Now if the pro-nuclear processing facility faction and the opposing faction in Toyo-cho had decided to settle their differences at thirty paces with a squirt gun, perhaps they wouldn’t have had to go to the trouble of circulating a recall position. Then again, the mayor might have called out the fire truck to outgun the opposition.

But they didn’t even have to look so far to China for inspiration—they could have taken a hint from the Mudslinging Festival held every March 28 in Asakura, Fukuoka Prefecture (third photo).

Every year, a “substitute priest” is selected by lot from among the families patronizing the Aso Shrine in the city. The townspeople dress the substitute in white robes and get him as drunk as a lord (or a Buddhist monk) by making him down five large cups of sake. After the “priest” is suitably sloshed, he is blindfolded and made to walk a 500-meter course from the shrine to the statue of a local guardian deity.

Getting him drunk and blindfolded is a good idea, because that way he can’t see what’s about to happen, and probably wouldn’t care if he could. Boys aged 10-12 line the path and pelt him with mud from small piles conveniently placed alongside the road. The adult onlookers egg the boys on, shouting, “Can you hit him? Can you hit him?” No one cares very much whether the boys have good aim–everyone’s covered in mud when the festival is over. And if they’ve been helping themselves to the sake they forced the priest to drink, the whole lot of them are equally plastered, inside and out.

Legend has it that the more mud that sticks to the priest’s white clothing, the better that year’s harvest will be. The festival has been conducted continuously since the Edo period, and has been designated an intangible cultural asset of the prefecture.

Now is that any way to run a religion? Getting people drunk and having boys of an impressionable age throw mud at a priest–substitute or not–and giving it the official government seal of approval as a cultural event? It is in Japan.

You’ve got to admit, nuclear controversy or no nuclear controversy, they sure are a bunch of wet blankets in Toyo-cho! They could rig the lottery (instead of an election) and select the mayor as the substitute priest. The town could take its frustration out on hizzoner and bombard him with flying mud. It also would be educational for the mayor, as he’d discover you don’t have to be a politician to be a mudslinger. And after five big cups of sake—probably the size of soup bowls, knowing Japan—he wouldn’t care what was happening to him anyway.

Or they could have formed a sister-city relationship with Dongguang and sent international exchange delegations packing water pistols to each other’s municipality. That would probably contribute more to amity between nations than any of the tame international friendship tea parties I’ve been to. They’d be laughing themselves silly at the end of the day.

Instead, the people of Toyo-cho are going to have to wait until fall for their festival fun when they have their annual sword dancing festival, which uses long bamboo poles instead of swords. I hope they’ve worked out their political problems by then, or they’re going to have to cancel that one, too!

Comfort Women from the Japanese conservative perspective

Now that a month has passed after the initial controvery erupted, it should be apparent that the deluge of blather about comfort women has been simply a superficial exercise in the indulgence of emotions. The participants in this exercise have treated the facts as so many cheap fashion accessories that can be used or discarded to suit the occasion–when they’ve bothered to research them at all.

We all know that people see what they want to see and overlook the rest, sometimes deliberately. That’s true of both left and right, bloggers and the mainstream media, and even the hired experts, who are delighted at the opportunity for a turn on stage in the role of omniscipundit. It’s yet another example of how a debate about any issue these days quickly becomes a waste of time.

Well, let me add a caveat–for some it is hugely enjoyable as entertainment.

Be that as it may, we have seen the anti-Japan position in spades, starting with what was probably a deliberately mistranslated statement in the New York Times and continuing with a House Subcommittee hearing featuring two women from South Korea who openly acknowledged that they weren’t coerced into the business by the Japanese military. (One actually snuck out of the house to volunteer; the other was tricked by a Korean procurer.)

What we haven’t seen in English is a concise, yet comprehensive, summary by Japanese defenders. I’ve been looking around and finally found something that seems to fit the bill. Here is a statement by a group called the Japanese Policy Institute on their website. It is also worth reading their website preface. (They also have a Japanese site here.) This is their conclusion in the matter of the comfort women.

Though it is true that there were “comfort women” in war zones, it is definitely false that these women had been abducted by the Japanese military. In this sense, “comfort women” controversy has already been settled.

When I was a high school student in the Tidewater area of Virginia, one of my best friends was a boy whose father was a Presbyterian minister. I was at his house one day when I heard his father complaining about the Northern Presbyterians. At that time (and perhaps still today), the Presbyterians in the US were divided between a Northern branch and a Southern branch who were often at loggerheads despite the absence of significant theological differences.

I asked my friend’s father why the two groups had such trouble getting along. “Oh, some people are still interested in fighting the Civil War,” he answered. This was fully a century after Lee had handed over his sword at Appomattox.

It’s obvious that the same applies here–some people are still interested in fighting World War II. Isn’t it curious that while the arena itself is deserted, save for a few groundskeepers, the stands are packed with brawlers from the box seats to the bleachers? And it’s fascinating that most of the people who want to duke it out weren’t even alive during the war. Indeed, the parents of many of those people weren’t alive during the war either.

The oddest phenomenon of all? The people most interested in fighting World War II are those from the winning side. It seems as if the annihilation of the defeated nation–Imperial Japan–wasn’t enough for them.

The enormous sums paid in reparations weren’t enough for them, either. They’re still banging their tin cups on the pavement. Some of them won’t accept any money unless it comes in a specially wrapped package with an apology written in a particular kind of ink by the Entire Japanese Nation and delivered in person by the Emperor with his forehead pressed to the pavement. And even then, some would probably still turn up their nose if, with their superior discernment, they decided that the apology wasn’t “sincere”.

One would hope that they don’t expect any sympathy from today’s Japan. But then again, that’s probably what they’re hoping for–no sympathy from today’s Japan.

It gives them the chance to continue entertaining themselves by fighting a war that’s been finished and done with for more than 60 years.

Then there are the folks whose entertainment is to be found in bashing Japan for whatever reason seems to be handy at the moment. But we don’t have to spend time talking about them.

After all, they do know who they are.

Japanese videos from the 30s

The JapanSugoi site has two YouTube videos taken in Japan during the 1930s. The first shows a Kyoto festival in 1937 and a Tokyo flower show, while the second shows Tokyo street scenes from 1935 and 1937.

I’m the big festival freak, but I found the second to be much more interesting. They’re both definitely worth watching, though.

Ave atque vale: Ueki Hitoshi, Japan’s premier comic actor (1927-2007)

Sad news: The foremost Japanese comic actor of his–and perhaps any–generation, and my hands-down, all-time favorite Japanese show business personality, Ueki Hitoshi, died this morning in a Tokyo hospital of respiratory problems. He was 80.

Ueki was a multitalented performer who started out singing in a band (called the Crazy Cats), turned to comedy with the other band members, and won respect as a serious actor later in life. If he is known abroad at all, it is for his appearance in Kurosawa Akira’s Ran in 1985. In 1993, he was awarded the Medal with Purple Ribbon for his contributions to culture, and in 1999 he received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette.

But it was as the lead in the comedy Nippon Musekinin Jidai (Japan’s Irresponsible Age) in 1962 that he made his name. The movie was a huge success and morphed into a series of films throughout the 60s that used in their title the phrase Nippon no Ichiban — Otoko (Japan’s Most – Man). Both Ueki and the films had a brash, energetic, and positive quality that paralleled the developments in Japanese society at the time, as the country’s economy and confidence skyrocketed during the period of rapid growth. He became enormously popular, particularly among salarymen, both for his films and his comic songs. The title of one of those songs, Wakattchairu Kedo Yamerarenee (I know, but I still can’t stop) became a national catchphrase in its own right.

There was no one quite like him in Japan, and no one quite like his character in the West, either. He was brassy, exuberant, zany, slightly roguish, yet perpetually bright and cheerful, and audiences loved him. To describe him in Western terms, think of Bob Hope in the early Road movies with Bing Crosby, remove the cowardice, add an irrepressible cheerfulness, and that puts you in the ballpark.

There’s also never been anything quite like those movies he made during his peak years, either. They were comedies that appealed to a mass audience, but they also had a touch of the freewheeling and slightly surreal that was also a part of popular culture throughout the West in the first half of the 60s.

My favorite of his films was one of the last of the Nippon no Ichiban — Otoko movies: Nippon no Ichiban Uragiri no Otoko (Japan’s Biggest Backstabber). In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine that it got made at all, and it’s proof that the Japanese can make black comedy as well as anyone. In fact, the first scene is one of the most astonishing I’ve ever seen in any movie.

Here’s some quick background—there are two subjects in modern Japanese film and television that are always used to create the ultimate tragic mood. Those are the tokko butai pilots (kamikazes) and the Emperor Showa’s radio broadcast to the nation on August 15, 1945, announcing Japan’s surrender. No one would dream of parodying these two subjects.

Except Ueki, and he took on both in the movie’s first five minutes. He plays a kamikaze pilot about to leave on his last mission—this is a comedy, remember—and he and the other pilots are mustered to listen to the Emperor’s broadcast before they depart. But the reception of the radio broadcast is poor and filled with static, and they ask their commanding officer what the Emperor said. The officer answers that the Emperor asked them all to die for their country, so they climb into their planes and take off.

Ueki crashes his plane into an American battleship, but it doesn’t explode and he survives. The American sailors are curious about this Japanese pilot sitting on the deck of their ship, and they wonder if he’s going to commit hara-kiri. Ueki at first defiantly announces that he’s going to do it, but keeps coming up with new conditions that prevent him from going through with it. The helpful American sailors then find ways for him to satisfy those conditions. The pilot warns them it’ll be a bloody mess, so one of the sailors thoughtfully rolls some toilet paper in his direction. Finally, Ueki says tradition demands that ritual suicide requires the presence of a registered nurse.

And then the opening credits start.

He was probably the only actor in Japan who could get away with a scene like that, and he knew it, too. In a newspaper interview published 18 years ago, he remarked about the series in general, “I just made up my mind that I would be the only person in Japan capable (of performing that role), and I ran with it. In the end, no one’s been able to make anything like them.”

No one anywhere has been able to make anything like them because Ueki was a true Japanese original. Here’s how the newspaper interview concludes:

“I (the interviewer) suggested to him that he had an upright and steadfast character, but he became embarrassed and let out a loud, boisterous laugh—‘Iya, uhhihhii’. It was the same laugh that delighted so many people over the years.”

Anyone who has seen any of Ueki’s movies will recognize that laugh immediately and hear it in their mind’s ear.

We’ll all miss it.

Matsuri da! (11) The rites of spring in Japan

With the official arrival of spring, if not spring weather, the focus of Japanese festivals turns from nearly naked men testing their endurance against the elements to events with warmer themes. One such festival was the Ondaue rice-planting festival in Aki-machi, Oita Prefecture on the 21st. Participants in this event mime the complete series of tasks required to plant a rice paddy. This includes sowing seeds, using an ox to plow the paddies, and having young boys play the role of saotome, or girls who sing as they plant rice. The indispensable element of all festivals is the enjoyment of the participants and viewers, so their performance is purposely comic.

The highlight for the onlookers came with the appearance of a papier-mâché black bull with two men inside. They pranced around wildly, neglecting their farm work while ignoring the farmer ordering them to plow.

The Ondaue Festival is an intangible culture property of the prefecture and has been performed for more than 180 years. It was formerly held on January 15, which was the old date for celebrating the start of the New Year, but lately it has been timed to coincide with the spring equinox.

Handa in Aichi Prefecture held their Otsukawa Festival on the 24th. Known locally as a harbinger of spring, the first part of the festival is performed for two days this month, and will continue on two more days each in April and May. The highlight is the shoving and tussling between groups of young men as they pull four floats weighing four tons apiece up a hill to the local shrine. The festival floats are the most elaborate of the 31 floats that have been used over the years in the city. Each float is pulled by a groups that number upwards of 100 men. They begin scuffling among themselves as they vie to take control of the floats’ steering mechanisms when they approach the foot of the hill.

They say that a young man’s fancy turns to love in the spring, but there are still some guys in Japan who’d rather dress up as a prancing bull or drag dead weight up a hill!

The contrasting national flowers of Japan and Korea

The Japanese Meteorological Agency can usually be counted on to nail their annual cherry blossom forecasts, and they were spot on again this year, too. The local TV station led off their dinner-hour news program earlier this week with an agency update reporting that the buds on the area’s cherries would start opening on the 25th. A walk in the park around the prefectural offices this morning confirmed that the trees had indeed begun to flower

Over the next month, the media will continue to provide daily updates on the sakura zensen, or cherry blossom front, as the location of those areas with newly blooming trees moves gradually up the archipelago until the last of the flowers emerge for the spring in Hokkaido at the end of April.

It’s no surprise that the Japanese should get it right when the subject is cherries. Hanami, or parties for viewing cherry blossoms, first became popular among the aristocracy during the Heian period (8th to 12th centuries), and reached an extreme with Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the late 16th century. The custom spread among the common people during the Edo period, and it’s still a part of the annual cycle of events today. Everyone’s been to a hanami at least once.

Spend some time in Japan, and you’ll soon understand the reason; a park with cherry blossoms in full bloom is stunning in its loveliness. Is there any other country in which such a commonplace act as a picnic in the park is infused with such natural poetry? Yes, some at a hanami may drink too much and sing too loudly, but isn’t the purpose of a party to eat, drink, and be merry? Besides, the revelry seldom gets out of hand, and the Japanese have a knack for tuning out the neighbors when the occasion demands.

One reason the cherries have such a hold on the popular imagination is that their peak period of beauty is so brief. The entire season for the flowers lasts little longer than three weeks from beginning to end. For the Japanese, the cherries are a symbol of the impermanence of life, and they frequently use the word hakanai (short-lived, fleeting, transitory) to describe both the flowers and the evanescence of existence. In addition, the verb chiru, meaning to be scattered or fall, is used to describe the scattering of the cherry petals. In some instances, the same word also is used to mean death. Accounts of the Second World War often speak of the many young lives that “chiru” on the battlefield.

These ephemeral qualities are one facet of a fascinating contrast between the informal national flowers of Japan and Korea. While it may not occupy the same place in the Korean imagination as cherries do in Japan, the Rose of Sharon (mugunghwa in Korean, mukuge in Japanese) serves as a similar symbol. The cherry, as we’ve seen, is a fragile blossom that quickly reaches its peak and just as quickly disappears. The Rose of Sharon is the opposite. A hardy plant, it continues to bloom from June to October through the hottest months of summer, and each plant produces several thousand blossoms a year.

The Koreans are said to find this hardiness appealing. One adjective that often crops up in Japanese descriptions of Koreans is shibutoi—tenacious and enduring. Tenacity is an essential survival trait when you’re the runt in a neighborhood that includes the Chinese, Russians, Japanese, and Mongolians.

Korean references to the national flower date as far back as the Silla Kingdom, (57 BC-935 AD), which metaphorically referred to itself as Mugunghwa Country. The South Korean national anthem, Aegukga, has the line, “Mugunghwa filled three thousand li of splendid rivers and mountains…” (A li is roughly 2.44 miles, making this lyric an echo of the phrase about cherries in the old Japanese song Sakura, Sakura: “miwatasu kagiri”, or as far as the eyes can see.) One of the trains in the national railway is called the Mugunghwa. And in a good-humored touch, the Koreans use pictures of the mugunghwa flower rather than stars to rate hotels.

There is a theory in Japan that the cherry is so popular because the Japanese prefer flowers that are falling rather than flowers that are blooming. That would explain their love for the cherry—even a relatively mild breeze is enough to send a spray of petals floating like so much pink snow. When the cherry motif is used on television, such as a backdrop for the performance of a song, the blossoms are often shown fluttering to the ground, rather than in a static scene. The attraction for the Japanese is the brevity of the beauty, which contains an intrinsic poignancy and tension.

The meaning of the underlying Chinese characters for mugunghwa, however, is quite the opposite. The characters are 無窮, which is pronounced mukyu in Japanese. It means endless or eternal.

Takeshima/Dokdo: The comedy continues

A reader sent in some links to a Sapporo blog called Suika Dorobo (Watermelon Thief), and while wandering around the site I found this post called “Look, polar bears, Dokdo belongs to Korea”. SD displays a photo of the members of a Korean Arctic expedition team holding up a sign that reads, “Dokdo is our land”, during their trip to the North Pole.

Hey, I told you this was all part of a Korean comedy routine!

SD also links to a Japanese-language site about affairs on the Korean peninsula, where the blogger uses that snapshot for a Photoshop workout. You can see some of the truly inspired results here. The caption on the sign in the next to last photo reads, “We love Japan” (the background was taken at the Mt. Fuji summit) and the caption in the last photo reads, “2005 South Korean commemorative photo corner.

The watermelon thief makes the trenchant observation that the Koreans are capable of doing this everywhere on the planet except The Hague.

Easier than a koto: The Do-re-mi Popcorn!

Have you ever wanted to play a traditional Japanese koto, but been put off because:

• You’d have to learn to read Japanese and to decipher the instrument’s unique notational system?
• It’s not possible to play a koto in the diatonic (do-re-mi) system?
• You’d be stuck learning to play such tunes as Kojo no Tsuki and Sakura, Sakura, when you’d rather open up your repertoire to include pop hits, jazz, and samba?
• The instrument is too big to lug to somebody’s party and jam in the living room with the guitarists?
• You’d have to wear formal kimono and sit on the floor when you play?

Well, now your problems have been solved, because here’s the Do-Re-Mi Popcorn!

Yes! You can learn how to play the new Do-Re-Mi Popcorn using traditional staff notation! It’s two-thirds the size of a traditional koto, and you can put it on a stand and play, making it easy to take to friends’ homes or really shred with a band on stage! The Do and So strings are colored green and yellow, allowing beginners to jump right in! And, it comes in a wide array of pastel colors!

There’s even a website!

You can see photos of a command performance for Prince Albert of Monaco! You can order a CD to hear a band led by Do-Re-Mi Popcorn inventor Masako Naito perform such songs as The Beatles’ Yesterday and And I Love Her, Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, Duke Ellington’s Satin Doll, Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Agua De Bebel, and the well-known surf guitar instrumentals, Diamond Head and Pipe Line!

You also can see videos and hear sound clips of the Do-Re-Mi Popcorn in performance!

As the website states,

“Doremi Pop-corn is the poptaste koto flapping to the world. It’s the newest koto with a poptaste breaking the image of frodition. Now, let’s create a sensation Doremi Pop-corn in Japanese music world!”

If you become proficient enough, you can go to Japan and become a licensed Do-Re-Mi Popcorn instructor!

You can even order one from Lark in the Morning in the U.S. for only $1,125!

Get one today and astonish your family and friends with:

The Do-Re-Mi Popcorn!

The South Korean government: One custard pie after another

Just when you thought the zaniest comedy troupe in Northeast Asia—the South Korean government—couldn’t milk any more gags from their Takeshima/Dokdo routine, the longest running joke in Seoul show bus politics, they come up with even wackier material that tops everything they’ve done before.

Take this story from the April edition of the South Korean monthly Joongang, as reported in the Joongang Ilbo newspaper in Japanese, and this Kyodo coverage in the Yomiuri Shimbun in Japan. (Both versions of this exploding cigar are in Japanese, and I couldn’t find an English version when I looked earlier.) The report is featured in the Korean magazine’s 39th anniversary issue and is confirmed by the comedy writers directly involved in the events.

Recall how upset the Koreans have been over the past few years with Japanese claims on Takeshima/Dokdo?

It’s all been part of their act!

Five months before the Japanese and the South Koreans signed the 1965 Treaty of Basic Relations that restored ties between the two countries, both governments reached a secret agreement about Takeshima/Dokdo, the disputed islets in the Sea of Japan. In fact, one of the Japanese negotiators was the late Sosuke Uno, then a member of the Diet, but later to become foreign minister and, briefly, prime minister. (Uno later took a pratfall of his own after slipping on a banana peel in the form of a pseudo “geisha” when he tried to perform the old comfort woman routine with her.)

Here was the deal:

1. Both countries would recognize that the other claimed the islets as their own territory, and neither side would object when the other made a counterargument. They agreed to regard it as a problem that would have to be resolved in the future.
2. If any fishing territories were demarcated in the future, both countries could use Takeshima/Dokdo as their own territory to mark the boundaries. Those places where the two lines overlapped would be considered joint territory.
3. The status quo in which South Korea occupied the islets would be maintained, but the Koreans would not increase their police presence or build new facilities.
4. Both countries would uphold this agreement.

But you know what those madcap jokesters in Seoul did? They broke all four conditions in the deal!

Here’s how they aimed the seltzer bottle at Condition 3:

Since July 1954 to the present, the Republic of Korea has stationed a number of security guards on Takeshima, the scale of which has continued to increase year by year, including lodgings, a lighthouse, a monitoring facility and antenna. In November 1997, despite repeated protests by Japan, a docking facility to enable use by a 500t supply ship was completed. In December 1998, a manned lighthouse was completed.

The Korean treatment of condition #4 is one of the greatest comedy stunts of all time. Their objections that Japanese claims to Takeshima were just a sign of resurgent Nippon militarism and dreams to recover the empire? It’s just canned laughter! The joke’s on you, Japan!

And we haven’t gotten even gotten to the best part yet! The only copy of the agreement was in the possession of South Korean President Park Chung Hee. After he was assassinated, one of his successors, Chun Doo-hwan, saw the agreement and knew this might ruin the act for good. So what did he do?

In a stroke of comic genius, he burnt it!

Who knew that Chun was the classic straight man? He set the scene so South Korea could play Lucy for the next two decades and pull the football away from Japan’s Charlie Brown every year. And to go one up on Lucy, they get to blame the Japanese every time!

The audiences laughed so hard, they were boiling tea in their belly buttons!

But every good comedy troupe has more than one good routine, and the South Korean government is no exception. In addition to their famous Takeshima/Dokdo shtick, they’ve also got another old standby: Japanese school textbooks!

And in the tradition of all the comedic greats of the past, the South Koreans have updated their material by adding a new twist:

They’re going to hire new gag writers and rewrite their own school textbooks!

Get a load of this side-splitter from the Chosun Ilbo in English!

The conflicts between South Korea, China and Japan over differing claims of territorial control and historical fact will be addressed in a new course and textbook for 11th and 12th graders to start in 2012.
The “East Asian History” textbooks will handle in separate chapters Japan’s claim over the Dokdo Islets and its glorification of its war of aggression and China’s “Northeast Project” assertions on early Korean history.
The current Korean history and geography textbooks discuss only briefly Japan’s role in war-time sex slavery and the Dokdo issue.

Comedy lovers have to worry if the Korean clowns are painting their nose just a little too red with this one. They say the textbooks discuss Dokdo only briefly, so the 11th and 12 graders need to learn more? The premise is a little weak.

Heck, the audience already realizes that everyone over the age of six in South Korea knows all there is to know about Dokdo!

But the sure-footed Choson chuckleheads will probably recover from any missteps, because most Korean claims about Takeshima/Dokdo are a classic study in slapstick to begin with. They start with the granddaddy of Korean comics, Ahn Yong-bok. Ahn wrote the book for Takeshima/Dokdo vaudeville. Here are just some of his greatest skits:

• He had three different stories for why he went to the islets in the first place—when it was against Korean law for him to go!
• He claimed he saw people living on the islets—when they don’t have any fresh water!
• He insisted that he met the Tottori feudal lord and told him that the Tsushima feudal lord snatched from him a note written by the Shogun stating that Takeshima was Korean territory—when both lords were staying in Edo for a year at the time!
• In fact, he even had this parody of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First” in which he kept getting the names of the different islands in the region mixed up. With Ahn, it was “Where’s Dokdo?”

(At the hospital) “Hey Ahn, who was that lady I saw you with last night?” “That was no lady—that was my Dokdo!”

Recognizing sheer talent when they see it, the other masters of Korean comedy gave this ground-breaking funnyman one of their greatest accolades.

They named Ahn the Father of the Korean Navy!

Another sign of the comedic brilliance of the Korean government is how they borrow other well-known material and rework it into their own act to leave a whole new generation laughing in the aisles. Here’s an example of how they spoofed the famous Warner Bros. cartoon character, Foghorn Leghorn. Get set for the punch line as the Korean Education Ministry justifies their new textbook:

The Education Ministry said, “We have decided to establish East Asian History as a new course not to deal with the historical distortions by China and Japan, but to help future generations seek reconciliation and cooperation.”

Comedy lovers will spot right away the echo of Foghorn’s trademark justification in every cartoon:

“It’s a joke, son. I said, it’s a joke!”

Comfort women Q&A

Ain’t it always the way? Just two days after I slam The Japan Times for its journalistic practices, they run an excellent, unbiased Q&A type column on the comfort women controversy. Staff writer Akemi Nakamura presents the contrasting views of Japanese historians Ikuhiko Hata and Yoshiaki Yoshimi, and for once the paper manages to keep its finger off the scales (except briefly at the very end).

The article contained two items that I thought were particularly noteworthy. The first looks at the number of women involved:

How many women served soldiers at the brothels?

No official figures have been provided, as there are few documents discovered. Historians have calculated the numbers by tallying how many soldiers were in the field and consulting documents on the ratio of women to soldiers. They also made assumptions about the “replacement rates” of women at the brothels.
Hata has estimated there were up to 20,000 “comfort women,” while Yoshimi says the figure was between 50,000 and over 200,000.

Just about every Western media report I’ve read contains the statement “historians estimate the Japanese had 200,000 sex slaves during the war.” This is a classic case of the media focusing on one part of one statement by one person to emphasize an extreme, artificially boosting the number of sources, and running that through an echo chamber until it drowns out other views.

It wasn’t “historians estimate”, it was “one historian, Yoshiaki Yoshimi estimates”. And it wasn’t “200,000″–it was “50,000 to 200,000″ by his estimate, numbers that cover one heck of a lot of territory. And all these estimates are based on assumptions; an accurate accounting is probably impossible unless new documents turn up.

Here’s the second item:

A 1944 U.S. document on 20 Korean “comfort women” and two Japanese civilians in Burma shows the women were given sufficient food and goods while they took part in sports events and picnics with officers and could refuse “customers.” Although the women received pay, “the ‘house master’ received 50 percent to 60 percent of the girls’ gross earnings, depending on how much of a debt each girl had incurred when she signed her contract.” The master charged high prices for food and other articles, which made life very difficult for the girls, it said.

I certainly would like to know more about that document! For starters, where and how did the US get that information.

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UPDATE: Jion999 and Matt provide a link to the 1944 US document, which is here. Thanks, guys!

Here’s a fascinating excerpt!:

“The average Japanese soldier is embarrassed about being seen in a “comfort house” according to one of the girls who said, “when the place is packed he is apt to be ashamed if he has to wait in line for his turn”. However there were numerous instances of proposals of marriage and in certain cases marriages actually took place.”