A Seoul performance of the palilmu

HERE’S A SERENDIPITOUS FIND: While looking for something else, I ran across a snippet in the Korea Times about the palilmu performance in Seoul last Sunday. The palilmu is a dance performed on the first Sunday in May by 64 women divided equally into eight rows. (It’s a yin and yang thang!)

The dance was brought from China and first performed in Korea in 1116 during the Goryeo dynasty. During the Joseon dynasty, it was incorporated into the Jongmyo Daejae, or Royal Shrine Ritual, a rite to honor the ancestors of the royal family. (The Jongmyo is the royal shrine.)

It used to be a common sight once upon a time, as it was performed five times a year (the first month of each season and in December), but that ended when the Japanese arrived. The performances resumed in 1965.

The word palilmu is derived from pal, or the number eight, and ilmu, which is a line dance. The entire ritual includes other ceremonies, music, and dance, and is conducted according to Confucian practice. That’s not surprising, because Confucianism has been a strong influence in Korea, much more so than in Japan.

After watching the video here, which supposedly has explanations in four languages, I was struck by the similarity of the music with that of gagaku, or the ancient ceremonial music of the Japanese court. (Not the instrumentation, but the underlying music itself.) Like palilmu, gagaku music and dance originated in China (with some performances also coming from Korea), and neither are performed in China today.

There are two varieties of palilmu: munmu and mumu. The women perform munmu in the first part of the video, with three-holed bamboo flutes in their left hand and a wooden bar adorned with pheasant feathers in their right. The latter part of the video shows the mumu, which is a military dance. The dancers in the first four rows wield wooden swords, and those in the last four rows hold spears.

The ceremony has been designated a Korean intangible cultural asset, and (not that it makes any difference) part of UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage of the world. (Here’s the explanation on the UNESCO site.)

I would have loved to have been there to see it, but the video’s the next best thing!

Postscript: Here’s a YouTube clip of a gagaku dance for comparison. Keep in mind the form also includes other dances and music unaccompanied by dance.

Were Koreans Oppressors in the War, or its Victims?

IF YOU CHOOSE TO BELIEVE the newspaper narratives, the Japanese nation denies or chooses to ignore its behavior during the first half of the 20th century, while the Koreans were innocent victims of that behavior.

That might be the price one pays for choosing to swallow the mass media product, but then sometimes the antidote to that particular poison can be found in a surprising place—such as a Korean newspaper!

Here’s an example: Earlier this month, the Choson Ilbo of South Korea published an article titled Were Koreans Oppressors in the War, or its Victims? The piece gives readers a glimpse of a reality more complicated than that usually presented in the popular press.

It is in fact a review of a book recently released in South Korea called A Metahistory of Korean-Japanese Disputes over Historical Awareness. (It doesn’t seem to be available in Japanese yet.) The newspaper (poorly) translated their own article into Japanese, and I’ve tried to render it into English because I think the information it conveys should be more widely known. Please keep in mind that what you see after the process went from Korean to Japanese to English (and in one excerpt from English to Korean to Japanese to English) is probably not what people higher up the linguistic chain got.

The Choson Ilbo chopped up the review into three separate pieces for some reason, so I’ve put them all into one place. I’m not sure how well-written the original was, but the situation is what it is. Hereafter, the voice is that of the reviewer, Yu Seok-je.

*****

A 19-year-old youth born in the colony of Korea volunteered to serve in the Japanese military. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant in the army and became a member of the kamikaze special attack squadron. Before leaving on his mission, he made a sound recording of his will for family members back home. The disc on which that will was recorded was discovered decades later. The voice cutting through the noise on an old record was by no means filled with sadness. It was the powerful voice of a first lieutenant in the Japanese army who pledged his loyalty to “His Majesty the Emperor”, and wished for the health of his parents. After his death in battle, he was enshrined with 26,000 other Koreans in the Yasukuni Shrine.

There was a surprising response to a television documentary broadcast three years ago that contained this information. Previously, one constant in Korean society was that the mention of the word Japan, with its negative image, would create a frenzied reaction. This time, however, there was no reaction at all.

Why was that? It was because these people were victims who, it was claimed, died an unjust death, while at the same time, serving as officers in the Japanese military and shouting Tenno Heika, Banzai! (Long live the Emperor!) In the decades-long debate about the faction friendly to Japan (during the colonial/merger period), dominated by the Korean-Japanese problem, there were no means available to offer an explanation about them.
　
The editors of this book are Kan-Nichi Rentai 21 (Korea-Japan Solidarity 21), a group consisting of Korean and Japanese intellectuals launched in 2004 to seek a new Korean-Japanese relationship appropriate for the 21st century. They are searching for a means to achieve solidarity by examining themselves and achieving a more mature viewpoint that transcends the antagonistic relationship that has arisen between the two countries. In brief, they now want to leave behind the intolerant nationalism with which one party views the other for a closer study of history. That’s why the authors of this book have chosen to step back from knee-jerk nationalism itself and develop a new viewpoint of their own through self-reflection.
　
The book So Far from the Bamboo Grove (In Japanese, Yoko’s Story) touched off a dispute about historical awareness last year. (Note: This is a semi-autobiographical novel by Yoko Kawashima Watkins describing a Japanese family’s escape from northern Korea at the end of World War II. The father was serving there as a government official during the colonial/merger period.) Commenting on the book, UC San Diego literature professor Lisa Yoneyama said, “Yoko’s Story closely resembles that of A Little Princess (a 1905 children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett). Both have the backdrop of a colonialist history that is not American and leave the impression that the United States is not connected with the history of colonial rule. That’s why mainstream American society appreciated Yoko’s Story as a book depicting the suffering of war. In this book, the historical background of Japanese colonial rule in Korea is wiped clean. This is related to the lack of historical awareness in the United States of their own colonial domination of others.”

Also commenting on Yoko’s Story was Professor Shin Hyon-gi of Yonsei University: “The dispute regarding this book began drawing nationalistic battle lines over the war in memory. Moreover, there was a sense of outrage that the Japanese, in their memories, considered themselves the victims. If you think about it carefully, however, (you’ll wonder) is it true that all Koreans were victims and all Japanese were always the victimizers? Talking about the experience of cruel persecution and ordeals is one way to achieve a collective identity. A clear line of distinction is drawn between the “good Korea” and the others, who are the villains. But crushing the memory of the Japanese does not mean that the memory of Koreans has won.”

Thus the book extends the horizon of thought into “troubling territory” that had been viewed as taboo in both countries. The victims in the victimized country have raised their voices to censure the victimizers in the oppressor country. But neither the victims in the oppressor country nor the oppressors in the victimized country are visible in this construct. No clear distinction can be made between victimization and victimhood, and the construct is both compound and multilayered. When the nationalism of both countries is in conflict, there is no place for one to stand in the rapids.

The Japanese wives have been forgotten by nearly everyone. Professor Kano Mikiyo of Keiwa College asserts that the problems of the past are by no means resolved. In the latter half of the 1930s, the policy of forming a unified whole of Japan and the colony of Korea (in Japanese, the naisen ittai policy) led to the strong encouragement of intermarriage. There were 5,458 marriages between Koreans and Japanese from the years 1938 to 1943, and of these 3,964, or 73%, were between Korean men and Japanese women. Most Japanese women stayed in Korea (after the war), and according to a 1975 survey, 73% of the remaining 956 women were in the economic classification of poverty or extreme poverty.

Professor Kano said, “The backdrop to the tragedy of these Japanese wives is the tacit acceptance of their fate in the patriarchal systems of both countries. In Japanese society, Korean men, who were ethnically weaker, were stronger both socially and culturally in gender terms under the patriarchy. Fixing up these men with the women of the stronger (Japanese) group exacerbated their self-esteem as males. Did this really achieve a balance by promoting equality?”

Considerations of the “troublesome territory” continue. Professor Lee Yon-hun of Seoul National University was critical of the explanation written in a South Korean history textbook that “Japanese imperialism stole 40% of Korean territory”.

In regard to the argument that the Class A war criminals should be separated from the rest of those venerated in Yasukuni Shrine, Prof. Takahashi Tetsuya of the University of Tokyo worries this would be a “dangerous scenario”. “After the Class A war criminals were separated, the war dead who were involved in Japanese invasions overseas before 1928, and who had no connection with the invasions after 1928, would remain enshrined. Once the Class A war criminals were removed, if the Yasukuni Shrine were to become operated by the state and visits by the Tenno (Emperor) were possible, it could be used as a device for supporting Japanese military activity.”

The critical weakness of this book is that the opinions and assertions of the 18 Korean and Japanese authors, and the logic of those assertions, are not unified. One possible interpretation is that the lowest common denominator for the authors is simply that they have removed themselves from the line of sight of nationalism, with which many people have been permeated. As the book itself states, if that is the case, as heated disputes with a multiplicity of viewpoints rage with no one offering a conclusion or a proper answer, its significance can only be discovered by considering it as one attempt to identify their common ground.

Endnotes

I’m not sure why Mr. Yu thinks the lack of a unified voice is a drawback; it is inevitable there will be a wide range of viewpoints in an issue such as this, and I think it is worth drawing attention to them.

The group Korea–Japan Solidarity 21 recently published a textbook examining the war that was written by Japanese, Korean, and Chinese historians. Nothing by that group is available on Japanese Amazon.com, however.

It is interesting to note that a textbook is apparently in use in South Korea with the claim that “Japanese imperialism stole 40% of Korean territory”. Who knew that such a textbook existed? Yet everyone knows about a Japanese textbook that glides over the same period in history–everyone except students in Japanese schools, because only a miniscule micropercentage of them even use it.

It is unfortunate that all the Japanese cited in the review are academic leftists; Prof. Yoneyama in particular seems to have permanently pitched a tent out in left field. Here is her profile on her university’s site, in which she tells us as much about her cat as she does her “partner”. The professor is rather upset at the success of So Far from the Bamboo Grove, as you can tell from this article in the English-language version of The Hankyoreh, a South Korean newspaper. Here is a plot summary of A Little Princess; I haven’t read either book, but to think the two are comparable seems like something dreamt up by a college literature professor with an axe to grind and time on her hands. She’s offended that Ms. Watkins wrote the book, and she’s offended that Americans like it.

Extend the logic of her argument and one would expect her to be attacking Gone with the Wind for its portrayal of slaveholders on a plantation during the American Civil War.

It is worthwhile for people outside Japan to realize that viewpoints such as those of Prof. Takahashi exist, even though the scenario he postulates here is as likely to occur nowadays as a cow jumping over the moon. His Japanese language website describes him as an enthusiastic participant in the Peace Boat voyages to South Korea and Pyeongyang. (Members of their cruises also met several times with Yasser Arafat.)

The Peace Boat project was the brainchild of a group that included Tsujimoto Kiyomi, a member of the lower house of the Diet in the Social Democratic Party (formerly the Socialist Party). She was forced to resign in a financial scandal, and was later reelected through the proportional representation system. She is also suspected of, at minimum, having ties to the Japanese Red Army terrorist group. Others think she funneled them money.

It would be interesting to know if a wider spectrum of Japanese political opinion is represented in Korea-Japan Solidarity 21. There are other currents in contemporary Japanese-Korean relations, after all. For example, former Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro, a conservative/traditionalist, is the chair of the Japan-Korea Parliamentarians’ Union; an assistant executive director of the same group is former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo!

Cultural commissars

THE JAPANESE SHOULD THANK their lucky stars they’ve kept their festival traditions alive over the centuries—and that no megalomaniac dictators decided to eliminate them in the name of progress. Otherwise, like the Chinese, they might be regretting what they’ve lost, as this article in the Asia Times points out.

Here’s what happened:

China’s late leader Mao Zedong had tried to erase many traditional Chinese celebrations by ordering the destruction of religious sites and outlawing folk customs. Everything “old” - from marriages to funerals, from folk medicine to folk music - was targeted.
But as communist ideology gradually lost its influence in contemporary society, Chinese leaders after Mao have tried to fill the void with nationalistic appeals for people to take pride in the country’s 5,000-year-old history and culture.

It’s not so easy to recreate the connection once the ties to the past have been severed, however. Many Chinese find the efforts to reclaim those festivals contrived and hollow:

“Any resemblance to the elaborate imperial sacrifices to heaven and Earth of the past was lost in these caricature performances of poorly trained traveling troupes from the provinces,” columnist Zhang Min wrote of his experiences at the capital’s Temple of Earth in the Beijing News. The exquisite works of artisans that once adorned Beijing temple fair stalls - Peking Opera masks, figurines made of painted dough and modeled on legendary figures, intricate kites and embroidered clothes - have now been replaced with “ubiquitous and cheap mass-produced trinkets”, Zhang complained.

The Chinese also faced an unexpected development. Other countries are claiming Chinese festivals and customs as their own for UNESCO registration:

The country saw one of its most treasured events, the Dragon Boat Festival celebrated in June, nominated and later successfully listed as an intangible part of the cultural heritage of neighboring South Korea. The listing angered Chinese scholars and officials who accused South Korea of brazenly encroaching on China’s cultural heritage.
Since the 2005 UNESCO listing of the Dragon Boat festival, South Korea has applied to have its ritualized Confucius memorial ceremony listed as another unique cultural heritage and is reported ready with an application for the listing of “Chinese traditional medicine” as “Korean traditional medicine”.

This touched off a different kind of culture war. Countries can get just as huffy about their rituals and ceremonies as they can about their territory:

“It is not enough to talk just about territorial integrity - China needs to safeguard its cultural sovereignty too,” argues literary scholar Bai Gengsheng. “Unlike material culture which is traceable, intangible cultural heritage can be very contentious and we must design strategies to preserve China’s heritage from being lost to other countries.”

This debate is fascinating because it highlights both the historical movement of culture in the region at large and some of the tensions that currently exist within it. Regardless of UNESCO bureaucratic fiats, no one can deny that the Chinese are the progenitors of much of East Asian culture that later became localized in other areas. The Japanese, to cite one of many examples, freely acknowledge the Chinese (and Korean) origins for gagaku, or Imperial Court music.

Chinese Overreaction?

But even some Chinese realize that when cultural traditions are replanted elsewhere, they adapt to the new soil and become transformed in the process. As this China Daily article points out:

Some Koreans working in China believe that the Chinese who are upset may be overreacting. A teacher surnamed Kim pointed out that the festival has been celebrated in Korea for more than 1,000 years, since it was introduced from China. It has been integrated with Korean culture over the centuries, so that celebrations now bear little resemblance to China’s.

The same article suggests that the Chinese who object may misunderstand the UNESCO process:

For all the pride the Chinese take in such traditions, however, they do not necessarily hold any proprietary rights over them.
“Unlike natural heritage sites, which are fixed and unique, the ‘masterpieces of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity’ can be shared,” said Wu. “If UNESCO approves something as an intangible cultural property of one country, other countries may still apply. For example, mukamu is a typical music of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in northwest China, but still UNESCO has approved Iraq mukamu and Azerbaijan mukamu as those nations’ intangible cultural properties.”

Choseon Chicanery

Be that as it may, the Koreans are not entirely blameless in this affair, as this brief article points out:

The Chinese domain name for the (festival) website (duanwujie.cn), however, was first registered by a South Korean company in October last year when the two countries had already competed against each other fiercely in a struggle that aimed to include the Dragon Boat Festival as a world cultural heritage of their own country.

It cost the Chinese $30,000 to buy back the domain name.

The Koreans have been known to do this before. They were the first to register the rights for the Japanese name of the alcoholic beverage shochu in the United States, for example, and used it to sell their own version of the drink, which they call soju. The Japanese had to buy those rights back, too.

Everyone recognizes that some cultural practices which originated elsewhere have long been a part of Korean life and have taken on a Korean identity. It’s another matter, however, to register the Chinese and Japanese names with the intent of scamming some cash. And everyone also recognizes that it’s pointless to expect people on the Korean Peninsula to chastise the grifters who scavenge off of the Chinese or Japanese while poking a finger into their eyes. They’re likely to be applauded instead.

The Source of the Problem

But some questions inevitably arise after reading these accounts: Why is anyone bothering to register their cultural properties, tangible or intangible, with UNESCO? Why should anyone think any organization has the standing to render judgments on a country’s cultural heritage?

And who is this all for, anyway? Neither the Chinese nor the Koreans need UNESCO’s “approval” for cultural validation, particularly for a festival that dates back a millennium in Korea and 2,500 years in China. The Koreans haven’t needed it to keep their festival alive, and the Chinese still have their cultural memory despite the social devastation Mao wrought.

A look at the UNESCO website for the project provides some hints.

Other than country-specific lists with brief explanations, the site is short on reports of what it has achieved with actual, on-the-ground projects. Yet it is packed with organizational trivia, rules of procedure, and vapid platitudes. Just the sort of thing to keep people busy without doing any real work. Here are some statements from their convention, which presents the reasons and objectives for their activities:

Considering the importance of the intangible cultural heritage as a mainspring of cultural diversity and a guarantee of sustainable development…

When did intangible cultural heritage become a guarantee of sustainable development? It’s a toss-up which is worse: cutting and pasting political banalities to create a pleasant-sounding but meaningless mush of linguistic oatmeal, or inserting that phrase as self-justification into their convention as if it were an absolute scriptural truth.

An intangible cultural heritage guarantees nothing, least of all sustainable development.

And it’s no surprise that UNESCO should be so concerned about protecting—or enforcing—yet another mushy platitude: cultural diversity. It’s as if UNESCO were encouraging people to have sex. Cultural diversity is what happens when people are left to their own devices to interact naturally. Especially when the NGOs aren’t looking.

Recognizing that the processes of globalization and social transformation, alongside the conditions they create for renewed dialogue among communities, also give rise, as does the phenomenon of intolerance, to grave threats of deterioration, disappearance and destruction of the intangible cultural heritage, in particular owing to a lack of resources for safeguarding such heritage…

We have a winner in the contest for non-native English speakers to see who can write the longest sentence with as many clichés as possible.

The proposition that globalization threatens diversity is untenable. Globalization enhances cultural diversity, and examples abound. To cite one: trends in popular music over the last century on every continent except Antarctica.

“Deterioration, disappearance, and destruction” result from isolation and the rejection of outside influences. Nature loves a wide gene pool. So does culture.

Considering the invaluable role of the intangible cultural heritage as a factor in bringing human beings closer together and ensuring exchange and understanding among them…

If this is referring to specific local areas, they’ve got it backwards. A cultural heritage results from the pre-existing exchange and common understanding between people. And while multinational cultural exchange sometimes does result in bringing people together, it doesn’t ensure it. Exhibit A: the Dragon Festival registration story.

UNESCO also attempts to define what they’re talking about. Here’s one definition:

(d) knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe;

Perhaps the Chinese should register feng shui before the Koreans beat them to it!

Give UNESCO credit for trying to cover every conceivable base, however:

Close to half of the 6,000 languages spoken in the world are doomed or likely to disappear in the foreseeable future. The disappearance of any language is an irreparable loss for the heritage of all humankind.

The disappearance of any language is no more an irreparable loss for our heritage than was that of the pterodactyl. It just means that the language no longer has a practical use. If there were any benefits to be gained from its use, a language wouldn’t have to be protected.

After looking over this website, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the enterprise seems less about recognizing and preserving culture than it is about providing the transnational NGO jet set with a marvelous opportunity for self-congratulation and a chance to dress up and meet people from around the world on someone else’s tab.

If the plug were pulled on UNESCO tomorrow, Koreans would still celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival, Nigerians would still play juju music, the Balinese would still dance, and the Japanese living cultural treasures would still make ceramics and perform kabuki—not to mention holding more traditional festivals than the public sector can count.

Bam Goes Bamian

Yet when a cultural heritage really was threatened, UNESCO turned out to have been all bumper sticker and no horsepower. When the Taliban used the 1,500-year-old Buddhas of Bamian for bazooka practice, as the third photo shows, the largest Buddhist statues in the world–a UNESCO World Heritage site–were turned into rubble.

Here’s what former Afghanistan leader Mullah Mohammad Omar allegedly said to a Pakistani reporter:

“I did not want to destroy the Bamian Buddha. In fact, some foreigners came to me and said they would like to conduct the repair work of the Bamian Buddha that had been slightly damaged due to rains. This shocked me. I thought, these callous people have no regard for thousands of living human beings — the Afghans who are dying of hunger, but they are so concerned about non-living objects like the Buddha. This was extremely deplorable. That is why I ordered its destruction. Had they come for humanitarian work, I would have never ordered the Buddhas’ destruction.”

The Mullah is obviously a lunatic, but there is a point lurking in that nonsense. If multinational organizations think it’s important to save threatened cultural heritages, a good place to start would be to help the culture save itself. Their money would be a lot better spent ensuring that people had safe drinking water than by creating an artificial cocoon for a language or dance form that long ago lost its meaning for living people.

But laying water pipe has very little cachet. At a catered multinational cocktail party, it’s a lot more impressive to be able to boast that one helped save indigenous weaving and dying techniques, and doesn’t that blanket look lovely on the wall of the apartment?

The problem here is not the end, but the means. The ostensible aims of this scheme may be admirable, and I’d elbow my way to the front of the line to see some of the registered activities, but UNESCO is just as likely to get in the way of people devising their own cultural preferences instead of helping them. Like the pterodactyl, cultural practices become extinct for a reason.

The best solution lies where it always has—at the local level. Even the Marxist government of Cuba has kept its local musical culture alive while allowing it to evolve by incorporating outside influences. Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs has a robust program for preserving and utilizing cultural properties, as you can see here. Even Japanese villagers need little encouragement to continue holding festivals that are hundreds of years old and that only a handful of people see.

And they don’t touch off arguments about who has dibs on what is supposed to be the shared heritage of humanity.

Postscript: Here is the UNESCO page for registered Japanese cultural properties. The Japanese seem to be paying a lot of the bills for other countries, while noh, kabuki, and joruri don’t need UNESCO registration to survive. The Japanese government is also playing a leading role in restoring the Buddhas of Bamian.

Ozawa Ichiro’s foreign affairs

OZAWA ICHIRO, the president of the Democratic Party of Japan, the country’s leading opposition party, is considering a trip to South Korea to visit Lee Myung-bak on 22 or 23 February, just before Mr. Lee’s inauguration as president, according this Kyodo report. Prime Minister Fukuda Yasuo also might drop in on Mr. Lee, but he would visit around the time of the inauguration itself.

The Japan Times eagerly suggests in its headline that Mr. Ozawa might upstage the prime minister by being the first to visit Mr. Lee. (The newspaper’s political orientation is such that they would be delighted if that happened.) Upstaging Mr. Fukuda might well be the DPJ president’s reason for making the visit, but the way Mr. Ozawa and the party behaved when he visited China in early December suggests another possible outcome: the visit could blow up in their faces like an exploding cigar.

Mr. Ozawa’s mentor was the late Tanaka Kakuei, the Boss Tweed of Japanese politics. Mr. Tanaka took a special interest in China, and this interest is shared by his protégé. The DPJ president regularly leads groups on goodwill tours of the country. During his tour last December, the group met with Chinese President Hu Jintao. Here’s the BBC report on his visit; the headline reads, “Ozawa beats Fukuda to China visit”, as if the article belonged in the sports section rather than the Asian news category.

Starting at the Beginning

This story begins when the Dalai Lama visited Japan last November on a tour to raise the awareness of the Chinese oppression of his Tibetan homeland. DPJ Secretary-General Hatoyama Yukio held a joint press conference with him during his stay here.

You don’t need a fortune cookie to figure out how the Chinese responded. They wrote this letter to the DPJ, which is still up on the website of their embassy in Japan. Here’s a translation from the Japanese of the good parts:

“We express our great surprise and strong dissatisfaction with Secretary-General Hatoyama’s statement of support for the Dalai Lama at the press conference.

“Under the guise of religion, the Dalai Lama is an anti-Chinese political exile working to break up the country.

“Ozawa Ichiro, the president of your party, will lead a large delegation to visit our country early next month.

“We most firmly request that you extend all due respect to China’s position toward Tibet so that a similar event does not happen again, and that relations between the DPJ and China can continue to develop soundly in the proper direction.”

The DPJ’s Response

As it happened, Uyghur human rights activist Rebiya Kadeer, who had spent six years in a Chinese jail, and who was forced to divorce her activist husband by the Chinese government, was also in Japan at the time. She had been invited to attend a study conference organized by Makino Seishu, one of the DPJ’s founding members with Kan Naoto and Hatoyama Yukio. A former lower house member, Makino has for years been an outspoken advocate for the Tibetans and the Uyghurs, and of democracy in Asia.

Ms. Kadeer (shown in the second photo with the Dalai Lama) soon found herself disinvited by the conference. A room for the meeting had been reserved since August in a building used by Diet members, but the party applied some pressure to Mr. Makino to avoid offending the Chinese. She did wind up addressing a study conference, but it was not one with direct DPJ involvement. That get-together was sponsored by three LDP members of the Diet instead: Nakagawa Shoichi, Eto Seiichi, and Hiranuma Takeo.

Those who attended heard about the Chinese imprisonment and execution of Uyghurs and their justification of their behavior by insisting it is part of the global war on terrorism.

Mr. Hatoyama admitted the letter had been delivered to the party, and that party leaders thought it best for the conference to be held at a different location. And so Mr. Ozawa’s Beijing junket remained on the schedule. He did miss a few days of the special Diet session extended to discuss the new bill for Japanese support of NATO’s mission in Afghanistan, but the DPJ boss is not one to let legislative affairs interfere with his other interests.

Mr. Ozawa Goes to Beijing

Alas, Mr. Ozawa didn’t do himself any favors in Japan with his behavior. The DPJ leader can be arrogant at times, particularly when he thinks he has the upper hand in a situation. Indeed, The Economist of Great Britain has in the past referred to him as a bully. But his behavior when he met with President Hu bordered on fawning obsequiousness, according to several sources quoted in the 20 December edition of the weekly magazine, Shukan Shincho.

Photographs of the meeting show the often haughty Japanese politician beaming and sitting up straight in his chair like a child anticipating a special treat. Reports suggest that in contrast to his normally calm and deliberate speaking style, Mr. Ozawa’s voice was high-pitched and squeaky, even quivering at times, as he spoke to President Hu. Instead of the standard bland diplomatic boilerplate, he offered President Hu thanks that came across to some as unctuous toadying.

Two of the magazine’s sources were members of his own party, and they were not shy about speaking on the record. Watanabe Hideo said he found the whole scene too embarrassing to watch, and added that everyone in the traveling party should be ashamed of themselves. Oe Yasuhiro described Mr. Ozawa as behaving as if he were pledging fealty to a feudal lord in an old-fashioned tributary relationship.

Mr. Watanabe recalled that Mr. Ozawa had once given a press conference in which the DPJ president claimed that Japan was too biased toward the US and too fawning toward China. He quoted Mr. Ozawa as saying, “I will say what should be said to both China and the US.” He also remembered that Mr. Ozawa once criticized two-track diplomacy by saying that the conduct of foreign relations is the exclusive right of the government.

It should be noted that both Mr. Watanabe and Mr. Oe were members of Mr. Ozawa’s now defunct Liberal Party. That generally conservative grouping was part of the Liberal Democratic Party’s ruling coalition during the Obuchi Keizo administration. When other LDP members blocked Mr. Ozawa’s readmission to the party (to which he belonged for almost 30 years), he converted that into an opportunity to cross the aisle and join the opposition DPJ.

The two men are now among Mr. Ozawa’s harshest critics, perhaps because the latter seems to have blithely jettisoned his former political beliefs after becoming the leader of the generally more left-of-center DPJ.

Criticism from a Chinese Observer

Also criticizing Mr. Ozawa was the staunchly anti-communist Chinese-born journalist and critic, Shi Ping (third photo). Mr. Shi (who recently took Japanese citizenship) observed that the Ozawa-Hu meeting was given front-page coverage in the People’s Daily the next day. The article quoted Mr. Ozawa as using language that was both fulsome and excessively flowery to thank Hu for meeting him. In Japanese, his words were rendered this way.

日本国民は中国の最高指導者が日中友好に大変な関心を持ってくださったことに深く感動しています。

“The Japanese people are deeply moved that China’s supreme leader has favored friendly relations between Japan and China with his great interest.”

Mr. Shi characterized the Japanese visitor’s attitude as that of a Ginza hostess trying to curry favor with her customers. He thought that Mr. Ozawa’s approach was tantamount to positioning Japan as a Chinese vassal state, and that the description used by the People’s Daily was identical to those the paper prints when provincial Chinese government officials go to the capital to call on President Hu.

He also wondered how Mr. Ozawa could claim to represent the entire Japanese people, much less describe them as being deeply moved.

The account of the Ozawa-Hu meeting is noted with little more than a photograph in the English edition of the People’s Daily. Here is the Japanese version, which uses language more restrained than that described in the magazine interview. Mr. Shi, however, is talking about the Chinese-language version of the article, and the People’s Daily is known to change versions of their coverage depending on the language of the edition.

Is Seoul Next on the Travel Agenda?

But now Mr. Ozawa wants to visit South Korea in advance of Prime Minister Fukuda’s visit. What will he and the future South Korean president talk about?

The Kyodo article suggests one topic—Mr. Ozawa’s recommendation last week that voting rights be extended to Korean citizens resident in Japan for local elections. These Koreans citizens are the descendents of those ethnic Koreans who were either brought to Japan or came voluntarily to work.

In fact, what Mr. Ozawa actually said earlier this week was that he has favored for some time extending the right to vote in local elections to people with permanent resident permits, and that his party would introduce such legislation in the Diet later this session. The ethnic Koreans who would receive the right to vote are estimated to total about 600,000, while the figure for all foreigners with permanent resident permits, ethnic Koreans included, number about 950,000.

His suggestion was immediately seconded by the leader of the New Komeito Party, Ota Akihiro. This was significant because New Komeito is the junior coalition partner of the governing LDP. There has been speculation that Mr. Ozawa hopes to pry New Komeito loose from its ties with the LDP and entice them into a new governing coalition with the opposition parties.

New Komeito is the political arm of the lay Buddhist group, Soka Gakkai. A large number of their membership is thought to be ethnically Korean.

Japan’s citizenship laws are based on the legal concept of ius sanguinis, or nationality on the basis of family origin. This contrasts with the legal concept of ius soli, or nationality on the basis of the place of birth. In other words, the ethnic Koreans who were born and grew up in Japan, speak only Japanese, and often have never set foot on the Korean Peninsula, do not have local voting rights unless they become naturalized Japanese citizens.

Should Ethnic Koreans Have Japanese Voting Rights?

It is not the business of foreigners to recommend to the people of another country with a democratic system to whom they should or should not extend the right to vote. That includes me, who, as the holder of a permanent resident permit in Japan, would gain the right to vote if the proposed legislation were submitted and passed.

But to briefly summarize the pros and cons, those in favor would say that most of the ethnic Koreans born in Japan are virtually indistinguishable from a native-born Japanese with the exception of their passport. Those opposed, however, would assert that citizenship choice is in very real terms a pledge of allegiance. Though Japanese citizenship is relatively easy for ethnic Koreans born here to obtain, those who choose not to do so are pledging their allegiance to another country. In some cases, that country is, de facto but not de jure, North Korea rather than South Korea. Why should people who make that choice be able to vote in Japanese elections?

The Japanese public is of course aware of how easy it is for ethnic Koreans to obtain Japanese citizenship, so Mr. Ozawa deliberately tried to soften the impact of his proposal by including all permanent visa holders rather than specifying Koreans. Doing so would have the drawback of enfranchising some people with a deficient working knowledge of the Japanese language.

But why is this the business of future Korean President Lee Myung-bak, and why should Mr. Ozawa feel the need to discuss this issue him? Does he intend to fawn before the South Koreans too? Does he seriously think this will earn him goodwill from the new government in Seoul? Or is he simply running in a pointless one-man race to meet Mr. Lee before Prime Minister Fukuda does?

The Onus in Foreign Relations is Not on Japan

Many foreigners urge Japan to improve its relations with China and South Korea. The unspoken premise of their urgings is that the Japanese are somehow to blame for the state of the respective bilateral relationships not being as good as it could be. It is as if the Chinese and the Koreans were anxiously pining for Japanese friendship with open arms, while the Japanese are unable to respond because they cannot overcome some obsolete notion of tribal superiority.

If anything, the reverse is true. Both China and South Korea have partly defined their contemporary identity by demonizing Japan for its past behavior; China continues this policy even as Japanese generosity underwrites to a significant degree China’s economic growth. And if anyone in the region cannot overcome the obsolete notions of the past, it is the Koreans. Some members of their government and media seem to encourage anti-Japanese attitudes out of a spiteful desire to indulge the uniquely Korean sense of han, or grudges over past wrongs.

There is very little positive to be said about today’s China, other than the fact that some Chinese know how to make a lot of money. They are manipulated by a brutal, oppressive regime contemptuous of the concept of human rights.

Those who have eyes cannot fail to see that the Chinese are intent on reestablishing their ancient hegemony in the region in an East Asian version of manifest destiny. Meanwhile, North Korea has turned itself into the political equivalent of a suicidal religious cult.

If any politicians or diplomats in the region need to adapt to contemporary political realities, it is those of China and the Korean peninsula. They are the ones who need to readjust their behavior and attitudes toward Japan, whose actions—unlike theirs—have been exemplary for the past sixty years. To assert otherwise is to view the world through the wrong end of the telescope.

To suggest that the Japanese need to change their outlook and behavior toward their neighbors is to suggest that the Japanese need to conduct a regional foreign policy based on appeasement. Such a suggestion cannot have been made by clear-headed observers.

Is it the case that Ozawa Ichiro has fallen under the spell of appeasement? Why else would his party placate the Chinese after their leaders had the effrontery to talk to the Dalai Lama or a representative of the Uyghurs? Why else would Mr. Ozawa behave in front of the new Chinese emperor like a pupil being given a gold star at a student assembly? Why else would he travel to Seoul to discuss the voting rights of Korean nationals in Japanese elections?

Events over the past six months have demonstrated that it is not as likely as it once seemed that Mr. Ozawa will become Japan’s prime minister–or that if he does, his term in office will not be appreciably longer than that of, say, Abe Shinzo, without Mr. Abe’s unheralded accomplishments.

But if he does become prime minister, the reports of his recent behavior in China and the justification for his possible visit to South Korea do not bode well for Japanese foreign policy under an Ozawa administration.

The real cultural imperialism of the West

WHILE VIEWING THE KOREA TIMES WEBSITE when preparing the previous post, I stumbled across this op-ed called Some Foreigners Bash Korea Unjustly, Unfairly, written by an English teacher there.

Substitute Japan for Korea, and the same article could have been published in any of the English-language dailies in this country. Heck, I could have written it.

It’s curious; I’ve talked to a lot of Asians here, from countries as far away as India, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia, and I’ve never heard a negative comment about Japan from any of them. Meanwhile, snide Japan sniping, couched in the fashionable irony that passes for wit and repartee in some countries, is as common a conversational topic for many Westerners as the weather.

One has to wonder when the same sort of people are saying the same sorts of things in South Korea.

Some people–again, mostly Westerners–think McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and popular music are symbols of cultural imperialism. That’s silly, of course. Those are just consumer goods purchased freely by people with other choices for spending their disposable income.

The real cultural imperialism is the attitude.

We can be friends if you do what I say

HERE’S ANOTHER POST inspired by something a reader sent in: I received an e-mail from C.B. sending along a link to an article he read in the Korea Times called First Sunrise by the East Sea.

By the East Sea, the author is referring to what the rest of the world knows as the Sea of Japan.

C.B. wrote, “This part is great… “

“…it is unnatural that waters off our beautiful coast in the east should be called the Sea of Japan. It is absurd that Korea’s offshore islands should float on the surface of the Sea of Japan.”

and continued, “but this is better…”

“I have a long wish list for the New Year. Among many things, my humble but earnest wish is that the naming dispute should not get in the way of the sound development of bilateral relations between Korea and Japan in this era of globalization in which cooperation among nations for peace and co-prosperity becomes a keyword. I look forward to the day we will be able to welcome the first sunrise of the New Year by the East Sea, not by the Sea of Japan.”

C.B. concluded: “…in other words let’s co-operate and be peaceful, and let’s do it my way.”

To which I would add:

“Now, the naming dispute has erupted between Korea and Japan again.”

No dispute has erupted between Korean and Japan. The Koreans keep complaining, the Japanese keep objecting, and international bodies maintain the status quo. As I reported in this post, the international conference on geographical name standardization stuck with the Sea of Japan, and they won’t take it up again until the next conference in 2012.

…the issue involving the East Sea also carries symbolic importance for the Korean nation whose national anthem begins with the words, “East Sea.”

The anthem has so much symbolic importance there were several versions of the lyrics until 1907, and it was sung by most Koreans to the tune of Auld Lang Syne until 1948.

Furthermore, the sea area is shared by four countries: Korea, North Korea, Japan, and Russia, consisting of territorial waters and Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) of each country. It is, therefore, inappropriate to name this area after one particular country when several countries share sovereignty and jurisdiction.

Now that you mention it, do you have any suggestions for renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the Indian Ocean, and the English Channel?

Why are there no complaints that the East China Sea isn’t named the West Sea? Or is that just too much chutzpah, even for a Choson nationalist?

It is against this backdrop that Korea is asking the international community to use “East Sea” and “Sea of Japan” simultaneously as the international standardization rules require, until the issue is settled in an amicable manner.

Or until, in what is more likely your strategy, you browbeat the rest of the world into giving in just to make you shut up and go away.

UPDATE: Reader Aceface wonders about the Northeast Asian History Foundation, because the author of the piece is identified as an “ambassador” there. Well, ask and ye shall receive!

Here’s a recent article about them from KBS Global. It says:

The Northeast Asia History Foundation, officially initiated on September 28, is…expected to play a significant role in efficiently coping with China’s recent claims over Korea’s ancient history and Japan’s repeated attempts to whitewash its past wrongdoings and its claims over the ownership of Dokdo Islet….(T)he academic foundation was established to systematically respond to those historical fabrications.

Well now, didn’t that cause your eyebrows to rise? I guess it’s easy to wax poetic about the sun rising over the East Sea when one is a paid employee of a quasi-governmental propaganda agency. Here’s their website.

While the article focuses more on China than Japan, the foundation’s website states their key programs include international exchange based on peace, strengthening their claim on Dokdo (Takeshima), developing strategies to deal with Japan’s “shift to the right”, seeking international support for the names of the East Sea and Dokdo, and “providing logical responses to history related controversies”. Good luck with the first and last one if they insist on the middle three.

Their mission statement claims they aim to achieve peace and prosperity in Northeast Asia by confronting distortions of history.

And people think I’m a lobbyist!

The Japan Wave in South Korea: It’s older than you think

THE SEOUL CORRESPONDENT for the Nishinippon Shimbun filed a fascinating report today that demonstrates the recent surge in popularity of Japanese culture in South Korea—the so-called “Japan Wave” (illyu in Korean)–is by no means a new phenomenon, and that interpersonal relations between Japanese and Koreans are more amicable than the picture the popular press in other countries (including South Korea) chooses to present.

The article is in Japanese and it’s not on line, so here is my quick and dirty translation:

I formed the Aimai Club(あいまい会), a language study group consisting of Japanese, such as me, for whom the Korean language is still hazy, and Koreans for whom the Japanese language is still hazy. But as you might expect, most of our time spent learning the unvarnished truth about each other occurs when we go drinking or mountain climbing together.

We held a year-end party at a karaoke room, and the mood was immediately enlivened by the performance of songs I didn’t expect to hear. One Korean sang “Gingiragin Sareganaku” the 1991 hit by Kondo Masahiko. Another club member, a 48-year-old Korean man, told me this number was so popular during his college days that people would spontaneously get up and dance whenever it was played at a Korean night club.

Other well-known Japanese songs sung during the evening included Buru Raito Yokohama, the 1968 song by Ishida Ayumi; Koibito Yo, Itsuwa Mayumi’s 1980 hit; and Endoresu Rein, released in 1989 by X Japan. The beauty of it was that every one of those songs was popular in Korea at the same time they were hits in Japan.

It’s been just 10 years since the South Korean government gradually began to lift the restrictions on the import of popular Japanese culture in 1998. For the Koreans to have been familiar with the songs they sung at the karaoke room, either their countrymen in Busan and other areas in the southern part of the country heard them from radio and TV signals coming across the Korean Strait from Kyushu, or they became hits after they were taped and smuggled into the country.

Regardless of what actually happened, however, either way would have been fine. The important lesson is that things which resonate in the human heart resonate even when they are prohibited. The Aimai Club chair, a 37-year-old Korean woman from Busan, immediately designated Buru Raito Yokohama as the official club song when she was chosen, perhaps because it has stuck in her memory since childhood.

This sort of popularity of Japanese culture before the import restrictions were removed has been referred to as the ‘underground Japan wave’. Now a new Japan wave is at its height. Last year, 10 films based on original Japanese stories were filmed in Korea, including Kanna-san Daiseiko Desu! (written by comic book author Suzuki Yumiko). Also last year, Japanese works had a higher share of the Korean fiction market than did Korean works by a margin of 31% to 23%.

What was it that created the intense motivation to understand the real Korea during the Korean wave that hit Japan several years ago?

From my perspective, regardless of what happened in South Korea 10 years ago, Japanese-Korean relations–which had been capable only of creating a historical pattern pitting the victims against the victimizers—will thrive in the future.

Japanese-Korean relations at the person-to-person level are a lot healthier than some people would have you believe, and are likely to keep getting better.

Endnotes: Aimai is usually translated as “vague”. When the author wrote that the club consisted of people for whom their understanding of the other country’s language was hazy, the word he used in the original was aimai. I don’t think “vague” works well in that context, however, so I came up with “hazy” off the top of my head. There is probably a better alternative.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Koreans at the southern end of the peninsula can pick up Japanese radio or television without special equipment. The regulations governing broadcasts in the two countries are different.

In the U.S., for example, it is easy to pick up distant commercial radio stations at night. (I could regularly pick up stations seven to eight hundred miles away on a 10-transistor radio during my high school days.) The same is true for South Korean stations; the reception for KBS radio in Busan at night here in Kyushu is very good, and I can tune in even more stations if I’m driving out in the country.

Japanese radio stations broadcast with a lower wattage, however, so it’s easier for me to pick up stations from Korea than it is other Japanese stations even nearby in Kyushu.

That’s why I suspect music and TV programs were either smuggled in or picked up using satellite receivers.

One further note: Suzuki Yumiko’s website is in Japanese, but even those not fluent in the language might be interested in discovering the consuming passion of her life by paying it a visit and clicking a few of the categories at the lower part of the screen.

UPDATE: Reader Aceface reports that the reception of Japanese television is possible somehow in Busan and points south, and that many in Korea’s entertainment industry made special trips there specifically to watch it.

He also sends along this article in Japanese that says former South Korean President Kim Young-sam’s television channel of preference is Japan’s NHK. Mr. Kim says he tuned into Korean television for the first time in several years to watch the recent election day coverage.

The Marmot and the foreigner

WHAT IS IT ABOUT FOREIGNERS in Northeast Asia? Judging from this post at The Marmot’s Hole, called Foreigner Learns About Prostitution, Writes Letter to Editor, the outlanders in South Korea are every bit as clueless as their cousins in Japan.

Adding to the amusement is that the foreigner in question tries to act as if he is knowledgeable about Korean customs despite the fact that he is clearly oblivious to his surroundings. Factor in his deadly earnest attitude and a whiff of priggishness, and that wraps up the package.

It’s worth reading to see how deftly the Marmot handles it.

Spirit of the Season in Seoul

THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT LIVES in Northeast Asia too, as this brief article from the Chunichi Shimbun reveals.

It was written by the newspaper’s Seoul correspondent, is in Japanese, and will not stay online for long, so here’s a quick translation:

I went to buy a Christmas tree with the family. We were looking for a large one about 180 centimeters high. We were told they would be cheaper than trees in Japan.

The store had several different types on display, with different heights and branch arrangements. We found a tree that we liked, and with the lights and silver-colored decorations, the bill came to 87,000 won. (About $US 92.60)

The clerk explained that the tree would be delivered to our home in the next two days, but it didn’t come. What did come was a call from the shop on the evening of the second day. “We’re all sold out of the tree you ordered. Would you like to have a different tree that costs 15,000 won more? We’ll cover the difference in price ourselves.”

I wondered how it would be different from the tree we ordered. The clerk explained the differences in the shape of the branches and the color, but I only vaguely understood what he said because he used a lot of vocabulary that I wasn’t familiar with. I asked them to deliver the tree on the condition that we could return it if we didn’t like it.

Happily, my family liked the tree, so I was relieved. I can understand the Korean that I use in my work because I’m accustomed to hearing it, but shopping still gives me a lot of trouble.

You might keep that story in mind the next time you read an article that would have you believe the Japanese and Koreans get along poorly with each other.

Note on the Tree

Sorry, that’ s not Seoul, but a Christmas tree story needs a Christmas tree photo, and I liked this one.

The tree is actually made of poinsettias and is on display at the Hiroshima Botanical Garden in Hiroshima City. About 130 plants were used to create the 2.5-meter high tree.

It is part of a larger seasonal exhibit in one of their greenhouses, which also includes the Manettia luteorubra, whose flowers are said to resemble candles, and cat thyme, which is a potent form of catnip and has silvery leaves.

Mr. Lee’s yen for yen

POLITICIANS EVERYWHERE LOVE TO SPEND other people’s money, but here’s an idea that transcends the usual political chutzpah. The presidential candidate has a big idea–and he wants another country to pay for it.

Lee Myung-bak, the former mayor of Seoul who has a 30-point lead over his closest challenger in Thursday’s South Korean presidential election, floated his idea during an appearance on SBS-TV on the 14th.

You can see the brief TV report that appeared on NNN in Japan at this link. Here’s an English translation of what the Japanese news reader said:

Lee Myung-bak, the favorite to win the South Korean presidential election to be held on the 19th, said he would seek help from Japan to provide economic assistance to North Korea and improve the living standards of the people.

Mr. Lee promised that if the North Koreans renounce nuclear weapons, he would raise the annual per capita income of the people in the country to US$3,000. Discussing the source of the funds during a program on SBS-TV on the night of the 14th, Lee said he would ask international institutions and Japan for US$40 billion dollars in assistance. He described this as the primary source for the economic assistance to be paid when Japan and North Korea normalize diplomatic relations.

Notice that he left himself an out in the last sentence: “when Japan and North Korea normalize diplomatic relations”.

He’ll need one if he brings up that idea during his first Tokyo-Seoul summit.

Note: That’s a link to a brief story on a TV network website, so I don’t know how long it will last.