The Economics of Fighting

In English, you 'get into a fight.' The verb is a shortened form of the phrase 'get pulled into a fight'  and thus has passive tones, so that a fight is something unavoidable and largely beyond one's control. This may hearken back to the old Anglo-Saxon worldview of life as a series of battles, like those in Beowulf, that bring glory while young, but will eventually lead to doom and ruin.

Shift to Japanese, and the thinking is very different. One 'sells a fight' (喧嘩を売る,  kenka wo uru) or else one 'buys a fight' (喧嘩を買う,  kenka wo kau).  The active nature of these verbs implies that getting into a fight is avoidable, and one has simply to master one's will to avoid buying (or worse) selling one.

This Japanese 'economics of fighting', much like traditional economics, is based on the flawed premise that consumers are rational, which any glance at a Black Sunday sale will tell you they are not. In Japan, one's will regarding fights is only trumped when there is no choice but to buy. Right wing Japanese explain their country's participation in World War 2 as unavoidable because イギリスとアメリカは喧嘩を売ってきた。仕方がなかった。(England and the US came selling a fight. There was no other way.)

This is also fallacy. There is always another way - negotiation, diplomacy, even surrender could have avoided the escalating madness of war. Regarding Beowulf, his tale is only that of two battles. His joys, his daily happiness, the love he shared with others, are all eclipsed in the glow of these two conflagrations - in other words, thinking only in terms of fighting lessens what one is fighting for.

Perhaps it is our penchant for making sense of life through story that limits our thinking and speech in these ways. In English, the two-fight tale of Beowulf has its antithesis in the Ango-Saxon Chronicle, which is history devoid of story, and records all events, glorious and mundane. What Foucault calls the discourse of race allows one side in a conflict to focus on their injuries and victories to the exclusion of all else in their struggle for sovereignty.

I don't know Japanese literature well enough to find an analogy in it, but from what I do know, Miyamoto Musashi's 五輪書 (Book of Five Rings), written by the infamous 'sword-saint' after years of reflection on his turbulent youth, would seem to point in a promising direction for escaping the belief in the inevitability of conflict. In his final battle, Musashi gives up the sword, instead using a carved rowboat oar to best his nemesis, Sasaki Kojiro. He also calculates the time of day regarding light and tides to ensure that he leaves the small island for the duel unscathed. This testifies how a shift in viewpoint or episteme can  cause a change in the framing of a fight.

Yet the result of Musashi's final fight is the same - a man lies dead. It is instead Musashi's reflection that a great swordsman has died and ushered in the end of the age of the bushi (武士) or warrior that allows him to reach enlightenment (悟り, satori) and foreswear the ways of fighting for learning and meditation. Perhaps it is this focus on the loss involved in fighting, not just to ourselves, rather than their inevitability or glory, that can help us find a way out of the conflicts that plague us.

Face Palm Discourse & Moral Reframing

The Picard face palm is a meme that many Facebook users know. It started in 2005 with a reference to the everyday stupid act of locking one's keys in the car ("Facepalm"), and has bloomed into a popular meme to describe the reaction to watching stupidity, especially of an ironic nature.

What gives the meme its force is the figure of Picard, a highly educated and intelligent man who cannot but hide his reaction to the blatant stupidity on display around him. As a high-ranking officer of the Federation, Picard is a figure of leftist values, championing multiculturalism, environmental protection, individual development through education over capitalist valuation as labor, as well as the advancement of science and technology.

It is interesting, then, that the Picard facepalm has recently been seen in right wing memes criticizing left wing thought. Look at this example from the 'Rowdy Conservatives' group on Facebook:

It is an interesting example of the right co-opting the imagery of liberal critiques, with the elite liberal Picard used to reflect on the tying of DNC venue to shadowy 'big banks.' Note that the RNC 2016 venue of Quicken Loans arena in Cleveland could be easily criticized in a similarly simplistic fashion, but that liberals mostly eschewed such criticisms to attack what speaker's said. From a liberal viewpoint, the attack is puerile, when critiques of policy or funding would be far more logical, yet less emotionally appealing.

There is thus a profound disconnect between word and images, between the conservative attempt at fanning moral outrage and the use of a decidedly left-leaning 'socialist' image. This is due to what Willer (2016) calls the use of 'moral reframing' in the creation of the picture, specifically the change of viewpoint for an issue towards a conservative moral judgment over liberal concerns for greater human values. The meme is designed to morally outrage the reader, but the image is of a person who keeps his moral judgments in check over actions, but who reacts to transgression of values, as liberals are wont to do. Thus, a palpable gap in words and images is felt by readers, especially those who tend towards liberal values.

Willer describes the difference between liberal and conservative discursive strategies or leanings that engenders this gap thusly:

"we find that liberals tend to endorse values like equality and fairness and care and protection from harm more than conservatives do. And conservatives tend to endorse values like loyalty, patriotism, respect for authority and moral purity more than liberals do" (3:46-4:37)

Although this picture can be seen as merely an inexpert fusion of image and political text, complex semiotics fused to crude ideology, instead it is also an example of a meme constructed specifically to make liberals, who are supposedly more open to discourse, rethink their positions. If Picard, the porte-parole of socialism and humanism in an American symbolic fiction, can be moved to a face palm over the Democratic Party's supposed hypocrisy, shouldn't the reader feel the same?

In 'Rhétorique de l'image', Barthes distinguishes two functions for the text accompanying an image: 'ancrage' (anchorage) and 'relais' (intermediary) (1982: 31). The text anchors the image by naming it:

'la légende...permet d'accommoder non seulement mon regard, mais encore mon intellection...le message linguistique guide non plus l'identification, mais l'interprétation...le texte dirige le lecteur' (1982: 31-32).  Whereas the text linking the DNC venue and 'big banks' by itself could easily be criticized as simplistic and unfounded, when anchored to the image of the socialist Picard, they create a relay with the reader's intellect, forcing them to consider the proposition seriously in a way that the words alone could not.

In my Facebook feed, there has been an explosion of these hybrid memes, such as the one below of the 'Annoyed Picard ' used to criticize Bernie Sanders for his belief in a universal basic income:

Try to analyze this image as I did the first one.
How does the shift from the external act (the stupidity that causes the face palm reaction) to internal affective display (annoyance) reflect the creator's discourse?
Does the inclusion of two figures, one real and one fictional, mean anything?
Considering that this image was taken from a Canadian relative's Facebook page, what does this imply about the spread of these 'moral reframings' to socialist societies?

Sources

Barthes, Roland. (1964). 'Rhétorique de l'image', Communications 4: 40-51. Reprinted in Barthes 1982 : 25-42. 

http://www.americanbanker.com/news/law-regulation/sanders-warren-target-big-banks-in-dnc-keynote-addresses-1090389-1.html

Know Your Meme website. "Annoyed Picard."
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/annoyed-picard

Know Your Meme website. "Face palm."
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/facepalm

Willer, Rob. (2016). "How To Have Better Political Conversations."
http://www.ted.com/talks/robb_willer_how_to_have_better_political_conversations/transcript?language=en

On Scorsese's "Silence"

I just watched Scorsese's Silence in a theatre in Japan. It was in the original English but with Japanese subtitles. It is the tale of two Portuguese priests (portrayed by Spiderman's Andrew Garfield and Kylo Ren actor Adam Driver) who travel to Nagasaki in a time of religious persecution to find their mentor priest (Liam Neelson), who is ex cummunicado but is rumoured to have gone apostate.

As such, it is basically Apocalypse Now (or Heart of Darkness if you prefer) for Christians, and has much of the same discourses evident.

First, there are the graphic images of violence, much like those in the Vietnam or African scenes of the oeuvres above. People are crucified, showered with boiling water, drowned, beheaded, and hung upside down in pits to bleed dry. In the religious context of the film, it constitutes the Christian torture porn of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ and thousands of years of Christian imagery. The cathartic violence of Christian imagery has served as both titillation and a badge of shared identity since its inception. This visceral violence fits perfectly with the Japanese antagonists, samurai who are as sadistic as the depictions of bushido in Nanjo Norio's classic novel Shigurui (Crazy for Death). Indeed, viewers of Silence are treated to fervent foreign priests, pious Japanese peasants, and two-faced samurai who are all equally 'crazy for death.'  The largely male nature of the cast also adds a masochistic homoerotic tinge, equal parts Yukio Mishima disembowelling himself and the twelve disciples washing and kissing each other's feet. The inquisitor Inoue and his lackeys top this off with their simpering, overacted sadism, which validates Nanjo's assertion that bushido was only possible in a society constructed of a mass of masochists at bottom and a few sadists at top.

Next, Japan and the Japanese themselves constitute the jungle of civilized savages that has made up much of their depiction by westerners. Besides being all 'crazy for death', they are depicted as inscrutable when Garfield's priest describes their faces as 'masks', a common trope Ian Littlewood (1994) has explored deeply. They are also portrayed as inhuman, unfeeling of fear of death, or pain, unlike the priests who agonize over these threats. This is a clear discourse of western cultural superiority, a humanity the Japanese lack because of their misunderstanding of the religion that supposedly is the fertile soil of its growth. Indeed, the inquisitor Inoue calls Japan a 'swamp' in which the seed of Christianity rots, again echoing the jungle image of Apocalypse Now or Heart of Darkness. As such, the film recreates the battle of the conflicting discourses of bushido's physical hegemony and Christianity's spiritual hegemony. Although these are depicted by the inquisitor Inoue as a clash of civilizations or cultures, in truth they are also a naked power play for the body as well as the soul of Japan by means of dominating the bodies and souls of Christians there. Inoue's offer of life to those who renounce Christ by stepping on his image is thus a reverse Pascal's Wager, asking why not say you don't believe if their is no punishment, rather the end of suffering?

I haven't read Endo Shusaku's original novel, but I have read his novel Samurai, which is almost the inverse tale of samurais traveling to South America and finding faith in Christianity there. Samurai was a nuanced work, with Christianity serving as the only option in a world of dominance and suffering by the enforced karma of Japan's vertical feudal society. Silence has much of the same themes, but by putting westerners at the centre it robs Japanese of agency, and thus both their sadism and piety are rendered meaningless. The final shot of the film, which shows the final, inner victory of Christianity, also seems hollow as this victory was only possible by the white male's painless sacrifice of apostasy and becoming a member of the Japanese hierarchy, and not the sacrifices of the many Japanese who gave their lives for a foreign god.

Sources

Littlewood, Ian (1994) The Image of Japan. London: Seeker & Warburg.

Nanjo, Norio. (2012). Shigurui 1. Tokyo: Akita Bunko.

Ancient Wonders and the Backward Worldview

I was watching Ancient Impossible on the History Channel and was struck by the hegemonic discourses it presented as self-evident truths. Particularly, the discourse of relativist historical valuation and the obfuscation of inequality were striking. The synopsis from the History Channel's website exhibits these two epistemic positionings:

"A mega factory is a modern invention--wrong--the ancients were the first to build these thousands of years ago. What was the incredible 16 wheel Roman automated factory in the south of France which could feed 12,500 people a day? How did the ancient Egyptians produce hundreds of vehicles of war every month? How did the Romans forge enough iron to equip an army, and mine enough gold to keep an economy afloat? With today's technology, this would be achievable, but how did the ancients do this thousands of years ago? We reveal the impossible ingenuity and techniques that made it possible for the ancients to have "Mega Factories" of their own" (Synopsis).

First, the rhetorical question about a 'modern invention' plays with conceptions of modernity and our supposed sense of superiority over previous generations of humans. The hidden interrogative of the first line and subsequent questions also serve as distracting clickbait - a genre for drawing attention by hiding pertinent facts from the reader. What is hidden is a false dichotomy - that a 'mega factory' in a primitive society is a sign of genius, instead of the mundane mark of scientific progress filtered through capitalism that it is today. This depiction ignores two things - first, it obfuscates the objectivity of science, wherein the materials and principles for these inventions and indeed any scientific breakthrough have always been hidden in plain sight, but are too often smothered by our obsession with earthly power acquisition or divine favour. It also ignores the destructive use to which the factory is put, but the reader cannot fail to notice that the subsequent examples are drawn from military industrialization, the very definition of scientific progress turned to destruction for political ends. War is not a wonder, but an aspect of human nature as 'achievable' now as it ever was, if society is willing to embrace its appetite for destruction and the waste of human potential it entails.

Second and more troubling, the programme erases from history the individuals dominated by the wasteful and unethical practices that lead to the creation of these 'wonders'. The narrator himself is ebullient about cathedrals and underground waterwheels, skipping over the excess spending on symbolic buildings of politicized religion and the hard reality of wheel-turning slaves dying in the dark. On a moral level, these advanced 'wonders' hardly seem worth the ethical costs they demand, considering their flimsiness when compared to modern buildings, and the inequality between those who created the cathedral or water wheel and those who carried bricks or walked in the dark should force us to question the 'wondrous' nature of these constructs.

This dichotomy leads to the major motif of the show - that these buildings and their creators were ahead of their time. This dangerously gets the reality backwards. These ancient societies, who turned their production to the destructive enterprise of war, who kept slaves, and whose genius inventors came from a small elite portion of the population, were in fact centuries behind where they should have been had they embraced democratic education for all, and the allocation of resources towards human progress. Pushing this narrative of 'wonders' puts forth what Foucault (2003) called an elite scientific discourse of war (50), one that uses the rightness of war, in this case symbolized by the 'wonders' which were no more than proto-capitalist mechanisms of war, and that silences the voices of those it dominates.

Put bluntly, when we look back wistfully at the 'ancients', we should see that it was precisely their moral retardation that held them back and prevented them from advancing themselves, and consequently us, further. Only educated elites could see where they should be and make 'wonders' that we surpass everyday in our more educated and equal world.

On the other hand, we in advanced countries have stopped making the wonders that came at breakneck pace since the Enlightenment, trading an inward-looking, comfortable post-scarcity lifestyle for resource exploitation of other parts and peoples of the planet, all enforced by unending wars. As futurist William Gibson (1995) famously quipped, "The future is here, it is just distributed unevenly" (Science, 11:55). What does this say about us and our moral advancement? Or more importantly, how will humans of the future see it?


Sources


Ancient Impossibles show site
http://www.history.com/shows/ancient-impossible

Ancient Impossibles episode synopsis
http://www.history.com/shows/ancient-impossible/season-1/episode-8

"The Science in Science Fiction" on Talk of the Nation, NPR (30 November 1999), Timecode 11:55.

Foucault, Michel. (2003). Society Must Be Defended. New York: Picador.

Gender and Dreams: Japanese Payday Loans

See this picture?

These billboards are visible on my way to work every morning, when I walk from the Japanese Railway Osaka Station to switch trains at the Umeda Hankyu Railway Station. Both billboards are advertising Mobit, a payday loans company here in Kansai.

Both boards are variations on the same themes and images.

There is the face of actor Naoto Takenaka, best known for the smash hit film Shall We Dance? that inspired a remake starring Richard Gere. Takenaka's enlarged head stares wistfully out of the board, eyes piercing through circular-rimmed glasses, a fedora on his head, stubble on his chin and looking tanned and vigorous. Next to the Moa-like bust of Takenaka is a reduced halfshot of actress Natsuna in a red silk dress playing violin. Natsuna became an actress after being scouted for her beauty and became star of several TV dramas.

The contrast between the two images is strong. The man is dressed conservatively, even his eyes are covered. The woman is in red silk dress, arms, legs and head bare. Her clothing exudes femininity, openess, approachability, a red of strength and sexuality in direct opposition to his detached watcher's face and muted tones.

The genderized message is clear. Women need loans to be sexy and alive, to be and make the art the man appreciates. The loan allows the woman to be watched. The man conversely is deepened by the loan, made wiser and stylish, and in the position of observer.

Men are targeted in another way - the billboards can also be read as inviting men to become 'sugar daddies', patrons of women who become works of art.

Does this approach match the population of users? Let us consider that the top three users of such loans are women 40 - 49 years old (25.8%), women 20-39 (20.9%), and men aged 40-59 (19.1%). This 'double targeting' of middle-aged men and elision of middle-aged women, who are both already a large customer base and not considered suitable for an ad based on female sex and youth, may thus be read as an attempt to enlarge the market share of middle-aged men, who will incur both their own costs and the women they support.

Public advertisements are texts that speak to all people, appealing to their hopes and fears in the attempt to create necessity for their product. In the case of payday loans, they appeal to culturally ingrained discourses of gender relations that require finanial capital to maintain. In the case of Japan especially, the cultural acceptance of 借金　(shakkin or borrowed money/debt) in novels, movies, films, as well as the 'life stories' of executives and entertainment district workers is huge and thus impacts the psyche of the average Japanese, who sometimes kill, die, or sell themselves to pay off their or other's debts.

This is a larger topic for another time.



Sources

Mobit homepage.
http://pc.mobit.ne.jp/web/pc/AP300S0000.do?pub=GOGPC_10011031_NA000001_8537&on=Z787764&df=1

Nippon Statistics Center. (2012). Shakingyou riyousha ni kansuru chousa kenkyuu [Research survey about payday loan users].
www.fsa.go


Yahoo talent informtion website, Natsuna.
http://talent.yahoo.co.jp/pf/detail/pp261230

Japanese Flinch Games

Riding Japanese transit (JR + Osaka subway) for five hours daily the past two years, I had lots of time for people watching.

One thing I observed on a daily basis was the Japanese 'flinch game.' Usually participants were two males, students from elementary to high school, although the occasional undergraduate pairing could be seen. One participant would take the role of 'attacker', the other 'defender.' Attacker would stand in a relaxed stance, hands weaving in front towards Defender. He would make taunts towards Defender, while saying words like "omae na" (this guy!) or "yaru zo" (here I come), if memory serves, before making feints and attacks in the form of pokes, prods, smacks, or light punches.

Defender would be clinging to overhead rack or strap, legs closed at knees to protect groin, free hand out front or across chest with elbow towards Attacker. Some would make protestations like "yamero" (cut it out), but most would be quietly twisting body or arm to deflect attacks.

On occasion, Defender would overtly block a feint, hit back, defend against a false attack, scream or otherwise do something that broke some unwritten rule. Defender would then lower defenses and submit to a punishment smack or pinch from Attacker.

Both Attacker and Defender would be laughing throughout the flinch game. As many of these games as I witnessed, I could never discern the rules to the interaction, nor did I ask questions as I so wanted. It reminded me of Fox's (1991) early 20th century anthropology of fights among Irish laborers, about which he commented, "it was not chaos and mayhem, but ritual in the simplest sense. It was entirely rules-governed, though no one could have told me what the rules were - in the same way that language is rules-governed" (153-154)

I estimate having seen near or over a hundred such interactions in my travels spanning 5 days a week for 30 weeks over two years. I wish I had had the energy and equipment to film or record these flinch games.

In terms of discourse, I suspect a few were in operation in the regulation of the game.

First would be the discourse of senpai-kohai, or superior-inferior that dominates so much interaction in Japan's vertical society. Although as mentioned I never talked to participants, I strongly suspect senpais were mostly Attacker, while Defender was a kohai role. The subjectification and reinforcement functions of these roles is clear.

Second, the changing Japanese definition of violence is another discourse on display here. Japanese popular culture has several instances of interaction that would be termed 'violence' from a western standpoint but are not considered such here. There is the 気合い入れ (kiaiire) or strong pat on the back with an open hand or even kendo sword to get one motivated for a contest or trial. There is also the binta, a face slap between friends that is met with laughter, as well as the many types of headslaps visible in Japanese manzai comedy routines. Rapidly disappearing is the genkotsu (knuckle to head) , a staple 'education technique' I witnessed in the countryside during my teaching days there in the 1990s, but which is rapidly coming under the heading of 'corporal punishment' in urban centres such as Osaka. Normalized or acceptable corporal punishment at schools is still a problem in Japan (Kobayashi 1997).

The question is, what role does the flinch game serve? How is it regulated, and what happens when the Attacker transgresses with too much real instead of ritual or symbolic violence? I think this last ambiguity is where power harassment and other forms of violence propagate in Japanese society, and need to be looked at in detail.


Resources

Fox, Robin. (1991). Encounter with Anthropology. London: Transaction.

Kobayashi, Noboru et al. (1997). Prevention of Childhood Injuries: Intentional and unintentional. 9th Asian Congress of Paediatrics
http://www.nospank.net/japan.htm

Looking at 'Die Japan'

[draft]

Today I’ll be taking a look at an infamous blog post in Japan, entitled “Preschool Failure, Die Japan!”

The post appeared February 15^th, in the season in which Japanese mothers search for schools to put their children for April start. It was brought up in government debates, but dismissed by PM Abe as an anonymous and unreliable source. This was met with protests of Japanese wearing signs saying “It was me!” expressing solidarity with the original poster. The Abe regime responded by launching a new day care plan and providing new funding, which was a factor in Japan’s largest postwar budget, despite poor economic performance.

Currently, I identify three ‘debates’ that dominate Japanese public discourse, as is evident by their appearance in media and public protests. There is the nuclear power discourse, in Japanese datsu-genpatsu (脱原発) involving such issues as government response to the Fukushima disaster, as well as Japanese use of nuclear issues. Second, there is the ‘Militarizing Japan’ discourse, centered around kennpo-kaizenn (憲法改善), which would allow collective self-defense and increase Japan’s role in foreign peace-keeping missions for the UN. Last, is the problem of what officials call Japan’s Aging Society Issue, or shoushika-mondai 少子化問題. Although the government uses this term from its viewpoint of having to pay for an increasing number of retirees with less tax income from working age people due to decline in births, the flip side of this is the popular discourse of lack of support for child-bearing families specifically, including lack of daycare, lack of support for mothers returning to the workforce, and virtual non-existence of paternity leave or support., This latter problem and its entailed viewpoint is the stance of the ‘Die Japan’ poster.

Yet neither of the previous two discourses have attained the change of the latter. First, both issues are too broad for popular support. The nuclear discourse especially stretches from Fukushima response to waste disposal, nuclear power regulation, and allowing US nuclear weapons into Japan. Next, both issues require specialist knowledge, which prevents many Japanese from commenting on them. Finally, both are separate from daily life for many Japanese, and thus are beyond topic of discussion. In this way, in the debates on nuclear power and Japanese military, the official discourse is dominant, and no organized or effective opposition can be raised against the status quo. This is not the case with the third debate, where the government discourse of supporting women is contradicted by the everyday experience of many Japanese, as the protests inspired by 'Die Japan' indicate.

In other words, ‘Die Japan’ is part of an anti-discourse, challenging and contesting the official discourse of adequate government support for women returning to work. There have been other responses to this problem, such as the appearance of companies that allow daycare on site, allow flexible working hours, and the rise of ikumen（育メン）or men who step outside the traditional work role to take a greater part in raising children. Although CDA is generally used to analyze official texts for examples of strategic domination, it works equally well for uncovering how anti-discourses challenge existing domination, and this is how I will use it to unpack ‘Die Japan.’

The ‘Die Japan!’ post is a polemic, a frenetic mix of tough talk and political rhetoric. Government ‘buzzwords’ from the Abe plans are thrown back at politicians, as well as their own scandals. In terms of genre, it is best classified as guchi 　(愚痴)、best translated as 'grumbling.' This is a uniquely Japanese form of communication, in which the calmness and objectivity that characterizes discussion which might be termed 'hot debate' in other cultures is utterly dropped in favour of a no-holds barred critique of the object. This critique is based on the subject's bitter personal experience and wry observation or even mocking of the object's discourse. 'Guchi' is usually limited to family or personal acquaintances. It is thus the very antithesis of the studied and serene speeches of PM Abe, both in tone and substance.

A word about genre of social messaging is also relevant here.