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| 1510102086
| 9781510102088
| 1510102086
| 4.04
| 1,228
| Jun 01, 2017
| Jun 01, 2017
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really liked it
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More or less perfectly pitched, this book starts off with an intelligently rendered depiction of being in a police state and the sense of constant fea
More or less perfectly pitched, this book starts off with an intelligently rendered depiction of being in a police state and the sense of constant fear. Cultural information is added in a trickle so that it doesn't seem that you are being beaten around the head with facts (in fact I know this stuff and can cook one of the dishes mentioned, but for a child unfamiliar with any of the content of this novel, it really looks like Butterworth has the pace and pitch right.) Adeline Yen Mah could learn a thing or two from this. A zainichi friend of mine used to work in Dharamsala, and through travel, adult fiction and biography I am well aware of how things stand in Tibet, but one thing I never really got the impression of is the all-pervasive presence of a Chinese Gestapo / kempeitai who are responsible for the usual: random detainments and the four o'clock knock on the door etc. They sound like charmers. The atmosphere of uncertainty and random injustice is very real from the first page. A particular strength of this book is the fact that we do not find out the identity of the oppressors until we are quite a way into the novel. This, I am sure, has been done deliberately: the point is not the CCP being awful (which they are,) but that regimes conducting themselves this way are terrible no matter who they are. Tashi's trauma at seeing a man's self-immolation is similarly not portrayed in a heavy-handed manner. We know she is having flashbacks, but they are not shown in a manner which would terrify a young reader. She eventually finds closure when an adult is able to speak to her about spiritual matters. For me, this was culturally respectful as it indicated how a Buddhist would think about the man's act. On a related note, the strength of mental and emotional power versus the brute force of torture, snitching and gunfire is evident through this story, culminating in what Tashi initially sees as a glib remark from the Dalai Lama himself, before she realises its significance. My only real quibble about this novel is about realism: a Dramatic Haircut (TM.) A young person or adult, especially a girl (but not always: see Michelle Magorian's Back Home, and Robin Jarvis' The Alchemist's Cat, in both of which an antagonist cuts a boy's hair) having their hair cut is a general literary trope and indicates some kind of break in the character's life. This is because it usually symbolises that in real life as well, hence the tendency of foul regimes to use it as a punishment. The only time I've had short hair as an adult is just after my grandmother died. Having someone else randomly cut your hair without telling you what they are going to do would be a really traumatic experience, especially if you live in a small community culture where all the women have a traditional plait and that plait has some kind of cultural meaning of being part of the group. Yet it goes without mention here. I know that at this point in the novel, Tashi is afraid because her parents have been taken away by the police, but in reality she would likely have been upset by this event and cried. Don't be afraid of spooking the kids! It's ok to show the heroine becoming sad. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 29, 2019
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Aug 29, 2019
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Aug 29, 2019
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Paperback
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| 1409044114
| 9781409044116
| 1409044114
| 3.38
| 2,014
| Oct 01, 2009
| Jan 2012
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really liked it
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**spoiler alert** This book - which is published in Hong Kong, though who knows how long that will be true for, and in Taiwan - should, in my view, be
**spoiler alert** This book - which is published in Hong Kong, though who knows how long that will be true for, and in Taiwan - should, in my view, be more commonly read in Japan. Why? Simply because it is the clearest observation and admission from the inside that in the wild fantasies of certain members of the Chinese elite, Japanese people have to look forward to a future of direct genocide; or stealth-ethnocide, enforced bootlicking and colonialism by China as a less bad second option. Chan Koonchung knows absolutely what this is all about and that we've been here before; it's just that it was Japan doing it last time it was practised for real. And he does not sympathise with those who favour such an idea. He resurrects the phrase Asia for Asians to describe it (the translator has written it as East Asia for East Asians but I'm not sure that's what Chan will have said.) 'The Fat Years' was written and published when Noda was still in power and before Article 9 (of the Japanese constitution - not the Taiwanese Article 9, which is about birth control and family planning, haha) was revised. Noda was, indeed, very accommodating of China. But the book talks about the CCP trying to ensure that nothing happens to Article 9, which now appears to be, if not a horse that's bolted, definitely a horse that is idling in the paddock OUTSIDE the barn. Towards the start of the novel, we see things briefly through the eyes of a young fascist Chinese thug, highly intelligent, the illegitimate child of a Tiananmen protester and a Chinese chief of staff, with aims to be at the top of the Politburo. You may have encountered someone like this online or in real life. They exist everywhere, it's just they can get further in autocracies. They rarely look as nice as this one is depicted, no matter how disgustingly expensive their clothing is - evil has a physical manifestation and nobody like that is ever happy, nor do they really want to be (as Chan demonstrates, and that is interesting: is the thug resistant to the chemically induced happiness that has swamped everyone else?) The section of the novel is chilling, especially when the cadre gets together a group of university students (whom he secretly despises) and tries to increase their hatred by back-to-backing footage of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force hitting Nanking with Nazi Holocaust footage. The character then encourages his droogs to imagine how they will systematically massacre all the 'little Japanese devils.' The reason for the Shoah / Porajmos footage is, cleverly, never directly given, but it is clear that Chan did not mean this because Japan and Germany were allied together (and anyhow, in 1937, Hitler had not wholly decided whether to side with Chiang Kai Shek or Hirohito) - he is portraying what he perceives as the desire of people like this man, who do exist in the real world, to commit a Holocaust against the Japanese if they ever get the chance. The actual situation of forced submission and population replacement is portrayed as a favourable outcome, given the circumstances. 'They used to look down on us, or even despise us, but now they fear us.' In Chan's dystopia, the Japanese willingly submit themselves to this so they can see America suffer and wipe away the 'shame' of defeat. To tell the truth, as a Japanophile, I found this terrifying. The main thing I have some immediate massive doubts about, and find implausible, in Chan's regional analysis is his CCP official's stereotypical summary of what is going on with the Koreas. Yes, many people know there is a rather elderly stereotype that 'South Koreans are stubborn,' and it's true that some South Koreans have no desire at all for reunification, but ethnic nationalism is strong in both Koreas and it's not likely that a massive regional power rebalancing would have happened without SK demanding China pave the way to the country reuniting. In addition, this bit of analysis ignores the fact that Korea's various kingdoms (a lot of which didn't even see themselves as 'Korean'... that's part of that modern ethnonationalism again, see my last point) existed by playing Japan and China off against one another historically. It also ignores the fact that there are tonnes of Koreans in China by nature and that a massive fascist powerful China would be as likely to just absorb both Koreas as a province, especially since the upper class in Korea are sometime Sinophiles who regard themselves as the guardians of Confucianism. 'The Fat Years' can now no longer be regarded as a dystopia of the near future, because events have taken a very different course from what it predicted. Ma Ying-Jiou's humiliation by the Sunflower Revolutionaries in Taiwan, who rejected Chinese neo-colonialism in a trade agreement, is not part of the world of this novel, in which Taiwan seems to have been turned into just another SAR (chillingly, we are not told how that happened, just as we're not told how China took all of Mongolia.) The US trade war against China was similarly not predicted. Nor was the trend towards nationalism in China which has left an MMA fighter as a state pariah for beating a fake kung fu grand master up in the ring - he has been condemned as 'invading China with foreign forces.' Nor were the current protests in Hong Kong, which, when Chan wrote and the Lannister-like Leung family were in control, was the portfolio of a little-known Party hardliner called Xi Jinping. In 2008-2009 there was rampant racist discrimination against the Uighurs, reflected in this book, something you'd often be told to shut up about if you raised it in the west: now, ten years down the line, there are camps. The frightening social credit system now exists in China, meaning that in fact, leisure time IS controlled now: Xi succeeded where Mao failed. The book doesn't predict Trump trying other approaches with North Korea and the election of Moon in South Korea, who, to be frank, is probably the leader SK have had who would most like them to be a province of China. Most of all, it doesn't predict Abe Shinzo being elected in Japan, his pivot to the South-East, his trade deals with Western countries or his pro-Taiwanese stance. At this point Abe and Xi are nice to one another, but anyone who thinks that is genuine politeness must be nuts. Does that mean it's an irrelevant book? No, it should be read because it's a vision of how things might become if literally everything goes wrong (or further wrong, in some cases) AND how we got where we are. It shows you who the wumao web trolls you can encounter online are. It also has a lot to say about denialism, fascism, statism and the like. A lot of people have had some nasty things to say about it, but I found it chilling, a 1984 for the modern day - the state cannot be beaten, and nobody knows what a post-CCP Chinese state would look like. I suppose it is because of knowing the region. (Incidentally, Want Want corp from Taiwan are mentioned as pro-CCP in the first two pages. I find it bizarre that just recently everyone was 'shocked' to find they gave biased media coverage.) This book was interesting to me for another reason - it was the first I have ever read that had a Taiwanese KMT supporter as a protagonist. Lao Chen immediately got my back up. He was rich, self-satisfied, sexist (unwanted comments about whether women should dye their hair were absolutely included for a reason,) politically lazy, and yet felt he could lecture a Chinese woman about how great her government were, despite being a Waishengren Taiwanese. His behaviour so offends the young guitarist Zhang Dou, Zhang deliberately knocks Lao Chen off his chair. A lot of people in Taiwan would want to follow suit. Yet Chan manages to make Lao Chen likeable in the end, and is very clear from the start that his strange hysterical jingoism for China is not natural. As a character, Lao Chen progresses to eventually let Xiao Xi guide the way ideologically, and to care for her. In a way, this real and non-chemically induced love - which also snaps him out of his trance - is his redemption. One final point and criticism I would make is that the online worlds of Taiwanese and Chinese netizens are not linked in the way that Chan seems to think. These countries' populations have immensely different online behaviours. This is absolutely the perspective of a Chinese writer trying to observe from the outside and I think Chan could have stood to do a bit more research on it. Source: I have written a published article on political activism online in Taiwan, which is in itself now very dated, but is still more on the ball than the idea that Taiwanese are using Chinese fora and Sina Weibo. Yes, I am aware he has lived in Taiwan before, but I'm not clear how common internet use was, generational differences mean that he will have been an outsider to the netizens' subculture within that nation, and as a Chinese novelist in Taiwan, I also don't know if his social circle would have included such people. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 17, 2019
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Aug 20, 2019
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Aug 19, 2019
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ebook
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| 0060567368
| 9780060567361
| 0060567368
| 3.80
| 2,307
| Aug 04, 2004
| Nov 21, 2006
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really liked it
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I need to start this with a piece of incredibly fulsome praise. This is the only historical novel I have ever encountered which mentions the existence
I need to start this with a piece of incredibly fulsome praise. This is the only historical novel I have ever encountered which mentions the existence of white kempeitai, who very much did exist and lived in Manchuria. It doesn't explore their reasons for working for Japan, which are complicated indeed (most were displaced White Russians, so stateless people whom even the modern Russian government doesn't seem to care about, and Manchurian society could be massively racist to whites, so that should shed some light on it) but it does state very early on that they existed. It also refers to a loving mixed-race relationship between a Russian woman and a Japanese settler-colonist in Manchuria, which produces one of our tiny heroes, so props to Adeline Yen Ma for acknowledging the ethnic makeup of Manchuria and portraying that AM/WW relationships exist in the world. For teen / young adult fiction, this is pretty good. I know most of the Chinese cultural detail to start with and, unfortunately, the history behind the story, which impressively features one of the Japanese's lesser-known brutal massacres in China. Yen Ma spares the child audience the fine details of Japanese torture and the IJA's antics while making it clear how incredibly violent they could be. I do have one nitpicking point to make here: Unit 731 (again, well done, I have never seen them mentioned in teen fiction before) were not a 'notorious' unit of the Kwantung Army - they were a secret unit; that was the whole point. It would have been utterly impossible for even the most skilled propagandist to put a decent light on the kind of things they were up to, which included infecting Russian women with diseases and vivisecting them, as well as all kind of biological warfare. If the general public in Japan had known what was going on in their name, at least some of them would likely have rioted. One of the Chinese cultural details I didn't know, because I don't hang out with a load of bigots, is the meaning of the Mandarin zha zheng, which a Chinese wumao web troll called one of my friends yesterday for correctly stating Taiwan is a country and not a so-called 'province of China.' It is an insult for a Eurasian, apparently, but also can mean SOB. Charming. Getting down to the actual story now - this has it all, and if you love wuxia films or any old war movies, you will love it as much as any teenager would. A wise old woman? A network of secret resistance fighters? A classic 'acrobatics in a Chinese market' sequence? The obligatory scene where someone has to dress up as a nazi in a mysteriously fitting uniform to get away from Axis soldiers, and a pursuing Japanese soldier falls on his a**e? A panda sidekick, as well as cetacean assault? Noble American airmen? Check and triple check. Since British children do not typically know about the Doolittle raid on Japan, they may especially find the book gripping and surprising. It also has important morals about peace between East and West, the importance of a blended identity, tolerance, and tells you how you use the I Ching. A particularly solid point here is that Yen Ma doesn't try to be cute about the POW camp system or try to play down what the Japanese did to westerners, as an increasing number of novelists and historians seem to be trying to do. She calls them what they were: concentration camps. The parallels between what happened in Shanghai and what was done to socially disliked people in Germany are drawn by the Jewish-Chinese character. A nice friendly IJAAF man who doesn't really want to be fighting guides the four kids at one point, presumably earning this book an instant perma-banning in the People's Republic of China for 'sympathetic portrayals of enemies of the state.' I now need to come to the inaccuracies. Firstly, it isn't really OK to belittle British scientists' work on the first computers. The UK is mentioned as an afterthought, when the Enigma code was cracked here as a result of the work of Alan Turing and what appears to have been his small army of highly skilled female mathematicians. My grandmother worked on some of the first civilian computers and I just found this omission to be pretty ridiculous. Secondly, there have been a couple of people raising questions about why the Jewish and Muslim kid are eating pork. In both religions, you can break the food rules in a desperate situation, but it would have been better if Yen Ma had directly made a reference to this, or just said all the dumplings they were eating were chicken (though the chicken still wouldn't have been halal or kosher...) Lastly, the concept that Japan only has one religion is wrong (it's also nationalist propaganda,) and there have been Christians there since the time of the daimyos. In fact, Nestorian Christianity had a big influence on how Zen Buddhism developed. One of the major centres of Christianity in Japan was Nagasaki. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 12, 2019
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Aug 12, 2019
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Aug 12, 2019
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Paperback
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| 1933633913
| 9781933633916
| 1933633913
| 3.90
| 2,053
| Jan 26, 2010
| Jan 26, 2010
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really liked it
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This book has a crossover with The Aquariums of Pyeongyang, and it isn't the passing mention of the hellhole Yodeok. The starlet of a propaganda movie
This book has a crossover with The Aquariums of Pyeongyang, and it isn't the passing mention of the hellhole Yodeok. The starlet of a propaganda movie it mentions (Myers and indeed Kang described her as very attractive - I think she's average, but that's just my opinion - or maybe not, as we are about to see) WAS, without any doubt, the girl who was in love with Kang Cheol-Hwan in school and whom he describes as being whisked away to become a film actress, but never ceasing to ask about him. The world is small, even when you are in a police state! I agree with another commentator that this book could have done with some historical context added. This wasn't a problem for me, because I was already reacting with shock to the accidental discovery that South Korean nationalistic propaganda was just rehashed Yamato Race propaganda when I was in Korea and this book hadn't come out. In a truly breathtaking example, a list of the differences between 'western' culture and Korean culture (I got hold of the speech notes and it originally said American culture and Korean culture) that my friends and I had to sit through and pretend to care about when we got to Korea was literally taken from Japanese 1945 post-defeat propaganda as they waited for the American occupation - for the most part, verbatim in translation. Prof. Myers' statement that Koreans fighting for Japan were in on some pretty heinous war crimes is just history for me, not controversial, and it used to be common knowledge in the UK too, even being discussed in Parliament before we committed troops to the Korean War. However, we as a nation have chosen to have a collective amnesia about it, a kind of Great Forgetting, and now I have difficulty arguing to my compatriots the truth that any Korean in the IJA before the autumn of 1943 wanted to be there. I hear similar from the USA. This is another reason that more context was needed; because we are propagandised. I know what Japanese fascist imagery looks like and the main ideas behind it. I also know what happened in WW2 and the Korean War. Not everyone does. Myers skilfully sticks to his actual topic, but it wouldn't have made the book onerous if he had explained slightly more. This is why I have given the book 4 stars and not 5. Anyhow, on to the rest of the review. A key strength of this book is the clarity of its layout and its runthrough of history, and the myths that have arisen surrounding history. Illustrations of Myers' points are included at appropriate intervals and not just in the colour section in the book's centre. The historiography included is one of the biggest gutpunches and I imagine must have really upset some people who are overly invested in a partial interpretation of Korean history. It is clear, meticulously referenced, and goes through legend after legend, illustrating how they arose and demolishing them. The Taegukgi was never banned. The North was a haven, not a hostile zone, for former Japanese colonial propagandists and soldiers. Intermarriage with Japanese was rife. The anti-Christian attitude of the North is traceable back to Japanese times (Korean Christians will tell you that; but it's become trendy to ignore them.) Korea did not see itself as a totally separate entity to China until it was colonised, and this arose firstly due to opposition to colonisation, then because of colonisation. One thing I would have liked to have seen is an analysis of Korean presentations of the Sam-Il uprising. Sam-Il (1919) was a violent anti-colonial uprising in which a myeon house was trashed, a large number of IJA, Japanese police, kempeitai and thought police as well as some civilians were murdered, and an unknown number of Koreans who were close to or working for the Japanese were also killed. Myers naturally makes reference to it in passing, as it was pretty important. But so is the way people misremember it. The 'Gusts of Popular Feeling' blog has already explored how there is an attempt to portray the uprising as non-violent in history. Further, the immense number of Koreans who were tortured or brutally executed in reprisal, most of whom were fully-grown adults with families to care for, and many of whom inevitably didn't have anything to do with the revolt, are symbolised in popular culture (North and South, I believe) by one single sixteen-year-old girl who was presumably a virgin, and her torture by Japanese police is shown in a semi-pornographic way in a Korean museum with one of her breasts hanging out. This is so in keeping with Myers' observations of the North Korean 'child race' propaganda that I wish he had spent some time discussing it. Myers is immensely good at showing the reasons why North Korea cannot, at all, be thought of as Confucian (anyone who knows the South would find some of the language about mothers truly weird outside specific Christian minority sects who worship a female version of God,) and the links to the 'holy war' of Tojo etc. The propaganda for internal consumption is peculiar-looking, I've always thought it played strangely with ideas of gender, and it is impossible to think of any other reason for the observations he has made, which have a sound basis in evidence, other than the conclusion which he draws. Then he goes into the actual propaganda in entertainment. I hope you all have strong stomachs. - Anti-semitism is detected in NK books and films; I wonder if it is possible to have a paranoid bigoted dictatorship anywhere without someone deciding to start being racist to Jews. This must be a WW2 holdover. The Pax Japonica was always a bit ambivalent about Jewish people, since Imperial Japan was allied with Nazi Germany, which needs no further explanation, yet in places in the Empire there was a resident Jewish population - Manchuria and the East Coast of Japan spring to mind. But I can't think of other obvious sources for such material. Incidentally, it is worth noting that Kim Jong Eun gave out copies of Mein Kampf at his birthday party. - The most pornographically violent and stupid section from some novel, in which a North Korean is described as only able to open his heart when he sees 'Japs' blood' (and this is praised as good) and he murders an unarmed Japanese prisoner, is quoted. The sort of anti-sensory bald description that I tell teenagers off for combines with a gleeful description of someone's head being kicked in and their eyeballs shooting out. I'm going to throw it out there that having depicted violence plenty of times in writing myself, I only ever go into this kind of detail using less infantile and cartoonish language, and I would be trying to evoke an appropriate level of disgust for an act like this. You don't describe this kind of stuff positively in this way unless you are trying to desensitise your audience on purpose. I find it hard to convey what level of contempt for the writer and his intended audience I felt upon reading this, and I've sat through all manner of sh*tty propaganda films for academic purposes. - Myers is able to argue that the faces of the North Koreans in propaganda all look the same on purpose, even down to skin tone and so on, and he links this to the ideals expressed through the Arirang Mass Games. (This explains why I think that actress is boring-looking and plain. She hasn't been picked for her wonderful unique looks; she's been picked for her resemblance to an idealised Ur-Korean.) In the past, I've had someone rap me on the knuckles for comparing the Games to Riefenstahl's 'Triumph of the Will.' My comparison would hold in Myers' eyes because the Games are about racial unity and purity; again, I have no idea what communistic thing I can compare them to, except possibly the gangs of youths in Maoist China who used to do Mao dances, but that wasn't an organised thing. Myers is also bang to rights about the idea of dictatorship architecture like the gigantic statue of the Dear Leader often being to make you feel ten feet tall, not to overawe and oppress. The reason why the KMT went nuts in the 1970s on telling people to demolish the stunning old Japanese architecture in Taiwan, at the same time as trying to construct rival edifices (most of which were awful, though the CKS memorial hall, built when the old man died, is lovely,) wasn't because they were afraid someone's feelings were being hurt by it - they were suspicious that seeing a beautiful bloody great Shinto shrine in a state of mild disrepair was making people feel good about themselves in a rather Nipponified way that was against the regime. To this day, Taiwanese pose for photos in the ruins of the notorious shrine of Jinguashi, indicating it does have enduring power that has outlasted the men who ordered it to be torn down. - Descriptions of racial inferiority of western CHILDREN are given. The last time you will have seen anything like this said about a child will again have been if you've ever been unlucky enough to read any propaganda about Jewish and Romani (hi!) kids that was produced in Nazi Germany. Having an hourglass figure myself on a small frame, and having had some weird treatment in SK due to this, I was also interested to note that having large breasts is regarded in NK propaganda as a sign of evil. The female missionary thus depicted is also called a 'vixen' and her breasts are referred to as teats. In Korean, the word 'yeogateh,' meaning 'like a fox,' is used about women who use their sexual wiles to manipulate men, and since Myers has by that point proven that there is a NK obsession with children and virgins as representative of the race, this seems significant. In the South, with its diet culture, such women have to be skinny and flat-chested - which includes being physically weak, by the way, since female muscle and fat are equated as the same. Not in North Korea, apparently. - Racist tropes about smelly dirty foreigners are stretched to their furthest possible limits. I have very little to say about this except that North Korea doesn't supply soap to its concentration camps, so the prisoners stink, sanitary towels and other period protection did not use to be given out to female soldiers, and city-dwellers used to be limited in the number of showers they were allowed to take, which occurred in a public jjimjilbang on specific days. Filth vs accusation of filth vs denial of filth pervades the state and its ideology. The dirt vs hygiene fixation is another thing Myers identifies as being from Dai Nippon / Greater East Asia / Japanese Empire days. - There are many extracts from some totally crazy thrillers in which a fictionalisation of a North Korean official bullies a stammering Hans Blix, and this is regarded as good. Remember the shark tank bit in Team America? Imagine actually seeing your country in that way, outside of parody, and liking it. - A lot of NK thrillers and films feature one of the Kims in person. Be prepared for the schmaltz to make you retch. The links between the nationalism of the North and the nationalism of the South are nicely pointed out, including periodic bouts of xenophobia and worry about strange diseases carried by outsiders in the South by analogy with Northern paranoia and propaganda about germ warfare, and the muted reaction to the two murderous attacks for which I was present in 2010. I would say that kids in SK were not happy with the North, but that is a generation who have only just reached voting age and it is with the adult public that Myers is concerned. I've never understood members of the foreigner community who get invested in SK party politics - not only is it technically illegal, but as Myers super-briefly points out, the main parties are all nationalists, whether left or right. The political left in SK does not make sense to outside observers as normal leftist politics (by contrast, in Taiwan, the centrist DPP, the left TSU and centre-left NPP are the parties most likely to stick up for migrant workers, like in literally every other country I can think of.) The centre-right can often be very warm to foreigners, Lee Myeung-Bak in particular being an outward-looking president who was like this and whom I had a big soft spot for, but that can actually be a vote-loser. A conclusion: If you've been to South Korea, read this afterwards. And just don't bother going to the North. Most of this is enough to make you want to cut off or limit food aid and just focus on helping kkot-jebi and trafficked girls. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 30, 2019
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Jul 31, 2019
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Jul 30, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0834802740
| 9780834802742
| 0834802740
| unknown
| 3.73
| 26
| Sep 01, 1993
| Jan 01, 1993
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it was amazing
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This book comes off as a pretty important historical document. A lot of literature about post-defeat Japan is overly focused on the experience of peop
This book comes off as a pretty important historical document. A lot of literature about post-defeat Japan is overly focused on the experience of people in Tokyo and its environs, also incorrectly presenting Japan as the Asians-only world its ultra-militarists dreamed of, and it's difficult to find anything about Kansai province. This latter point is bizarre considering the importance of Osaka and Kobe as cities within Japan both then and now. If you know Kobe now, this fills in blanks and colours in between the lines. Saito's sketches of the people he knew whilst staying at a dockside hotel, and then later in a crumbling requisitioned house at the foot of Mt Rokko, bring the city to life as well as making points about the country. It is really difficult for me to work out what a casual reader would think of this book, because I already know a ton about the time and its culture, including the accounts of Americans stationed there in Kobe, as well as being able to infer from Saito's information from life experience (the GIs were probably breaking the flushes on plumbed squat toilets by stamping on them hard; I've seen it done.) However, Saito's ability to evoke personality and conjure up a visual image despite bare description is masterful and as my mate who was reading the 'Taiwanese' story with me said, it is reminiscent of Turgenev or another Russian writer. (Russian writing was popular post-war and there was a Russian community in Kobe for ages, so there might be something in that.) The chapter telling the story of the Brave Sailor and the Taiwanese illuminates something that seems to be little understood, that is the presence of non-Japanese in Japan's criminal underworld in relatively recent times. It also directly contradicts later western and, I suspect, Chinese historians, who claim Taiwanese in Japan were Chiang Kai Shekists, by showing how 'Keelung' was more Japanese than the Japanese in ways I shan't spoil the tale by explaining - and using the KMT flag as a symbol of Taiwan did not preclude that. This story ironically indicates that Saito understood the nuance and complexity of Taiwanese identity a lot better than modern commentators who have declassified files from dictatorship days at their fingertips! The one thing I would say is that the Hiroshima section isn't really that long and the blurb kind of insinuates that it is. My honest view is this is to get casual readers, who don't know what kind of hellscape post-defeat Japan was, to find the book exciting and read it, because they only know about the nukes. If you come to this with an open mind and the desire to find out about the demi-monde of those days, you'll find out it there is a lot more to say than only things about nuclear warfare. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 29, 2019
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Jul 29, 2019
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Jul 30, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0465011047
| 9780465011049
| 0465011047
| 4.11
| 10,823
| 2000
| Aug 24, 2005
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really liked it
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An emotional re-read for me, not just because the story is moving (especially the Dalian bit) but because supergrass and celebrity defector Hwang Jang
An emotional re-read for me, not just because the story is moving (especially the Dalian bit) but because supergrass and celebrity defector Hwang Jang Yop - referenced in this book positively - is now dead and I remember it happening. Kang's story is a very readable narrative account of what was done to his family over an obscure Party intrigue. It also avoids being unnecessarily gross. Generally, I judge these kinds of stories by whether or not they manage to depict deplorable conditions in gulags / concentration camps / whatever accurately while avoiding JG Ballard-like scatological levels of detail and unnecessary focus on body fluids to create an edgy effect or unsettle. Kang has done it, and even manages to add humour to the story too. His depictions of characters within the camp are impressive and evocative, as are his links of his experience to the outside world, including the 1966 World Cup (the team ended up in a concentration camp.) This should be a compulsory read for anyone studying Chosen Soren and zainichi Korean life in general. The edition I have is full of annoying typos but they hardly distract from the story.
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Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 23, 2019
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Jul 30, 2019
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Jun 23, 2019
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Paperback
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| 1784742023
| 9781784742027
| 1784742023
| 3.90
| 1,238
| Mar 19, 2019
| Jan 01, 2019
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it was amazing
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Are you British? Do you love Japan? Are you Japanese? Do you love Britain? Are you a person who likes stories about eccentricity and diversity versus
Are you British? Do you love Japan? Are you Japanese? Do you love Britain? Are you a person who likes stories about eccentricity and diversity versus conformity? Are you interested in nature? Perhaps you are a Taiwanophile who wants to see where the little yam nation's influence can be felt. Or maybe you just like demolishing both weeaboos and cultural purists. If any of these things apply, this book is for you. Collingwood Ingram was the mixed-race (one of his parents was the child of an Australian plantation owner and his mistress, a black woman who was freed from slavery: Naoko Abe pulls no punches on these issues) aristocrat whose early passion for all things Japanese, and not inaccurate vision of Japan as a kind of mirror country to the UK, led him to assemble a collection of diverse cherry trees in England, many of which were becoming extinct in their land of birth. By doing so, he saved them from destruction through neglect during the rise of militarism and the accompanying focus on the Somei-yoshino trees, pink clones which all shed their petals simultaneously. There is a lot more to the story Naoko Abe tells than this, but one of the key messages throughout the book is that the stifling and overbearing insistence on conformity and sameness that everyone seems to think is quintessentially Japanese, isn't. It has a pedigree of something like 150 years, if even that. The point used to be diversity in cherry blossoms and that goes back to the start of the Tokugawa shogunate. As a complete oddball who adores the oddball side of Japanese culture, and who is interested in the meanings in its small details, I welcomed this sociological exploration. Somei-yoshino leave me cold anyhow. I refused to go to the Jinhae cherry tree festival in the Korea days because it literally is just looking at a load of these, and they're very samey and saccharine-pink. It's like viewing a load of iced cakes. Ingram also developed new kinds of cherry. I was staggered to realise that my favourite cherry was created by him, and from what. He hybridised a Taiwanese cherry (they are red) with a cold-weather Hokkaido cherry to create the Kursar variety. So since I was a little girl, I have been admiring something English made from something Taiwanese and Japanese. He also didn't like those frou-frou Kanzan cherries that seem very 1980s and make such a mess in so many public parks. I sympathise. Abe's book goes beyond this story of Ingram and the cherries. She details the events of Black Christmas, at which Ingram's daughter-in-law was present, and following which she became a FEPOW. She talks about the use of militarist ideology about cherry blossoms in creating the cult of the kamikaze pilots (I'm sure the photo of a Zero she includes, with a sakura on its side, is from the museum behind the Yasukuni Shrine.) The secret letters of a kamikaze, angrily repudiating totalitarianism and praising liberalism, and expressing his admiration for the UK, both struck me as deeply sad and something that should be more widely seen. Abe also follows the trail of the cherries to Hokkaido, where one of the grimmest POW camps in the Japanese empire was based. To my eyes this looks to be even worse than the infamous network in Taiwan just because of the weather: Hokkaido is bloody cold. There, a Japanese cherry blossom enthusiast and historian (and teacher) started hunting down information about the FEPOWs held there and how they lived and died. He worked with people in Britain to try to mend the relationship between our countries. Sakura were important in this gesture, as they were in similar gestures by the Japanese widow of a British man. This is pretty important to me on a personal level. I used to live near one of the old camps in Taiwan and I also ran into a Japanese lad in the ruined shrine above one of the other camps, with the two Taiwanese girls he was friends with. We hung about talking for a bit, before a Taiwanese old guy came up and was moved to see us. You can ignore this stuff or not care if you live in the former Asia co-prosperity sphere, but ignoring it is just what you are doing: the history doesn't magically vanish. This kind of dark past can only be handled via some gestures of forgiveness, otherwise it can feel that everyone it touches is kind of stuck alone with it, which is unhealthy. For this reason and a number of others I think this book might become a favourite of mine. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 10, 2019
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Jun 23, 2019
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Jun 10, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 0393320278
| 9780393320275
| 0393320278
| 4.15
| 4,756
| Mar 01, 1999
| Jun 17, 2000
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it was amazing
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Great, and utterly distressing. Re-reading this in 2019 - with Japanese civilian casualties of the 228 Massacre in Taiwan now finally, officially conf
Great, and utterly distressing. Re-reading this in 2019 - with Japanese civilian casualties of the 228 Massacre in Taiwan now finally, officially confirmed AS I WAS READING - does however highlight the sole place it falls down, namely on the attitudes and actions of the Taiwanese in Japan at the time. It's way off, and way simplistic. This is not the author's fault. We all can only work with the information we have, and this is now a 20-year-old academic text: Dower researched this book through the 90s and it was published in 1999. Taiwan had only just become a democracy in those days and certainly information that might have added nuance to his portrayal was not freely available in the public eye, including interviews with ex-IJA / IJAAF / IJN service personnel of Taiwanese extraction, many of whom are still around and pretty sanguine about their involvement. The categorisation of Taiwanese immigrants by Japan into pro-Communist, pro-KMT and pro-independence that I know for a fact took place isn't mentioned here. I find it highly unlikely that all the Taiwanese in Japan were eager to accept Chiang Kai Shek's jackboot in the face, as the book claims - if they had been, they would simply have returned home. They almost certainly just said this so that they could avoid their families back on the island being murdered by KMT deathsquads. #blunt Regarding the rest of this, I think it should be compulsory reading for anyone above GCSE age studying WW2. Not only does it explain why modern Japan is the way it is, it torpedoes a number of modern myths about Japan which are spread both by its superfans (hello, weeaboos) and by its detractors. These include my total bugbears, the blaming of Americans for 'spreading ideas' about porn to the innocent Japanese, and for an interest in an hourglass-figure on a woman; and the origins of modern Japanese social unity and cooperation. The real reasons for the spread of strange erotica are dissected here very well, and regarding social unity... well, if I ever explain to people how society in Japan turned on itself after the war, and how they were with their returned service personnel, I tend to get a load of old hat chatted to me about 'face.' Ok, but not everything is to do with face. That's just a way of 'othering' people and protecting yourself by saying you'd never be in that situation. People are people, and it's easy to see how what happened over in Japan could have also been the case in other societies if they had gone through similar. You wouldn't talk about it openly later, not due to 'face,' but because your normal human feelings would make it too painful. But the echoes of those days are hardwired through Japanese literature and media as a whole, including (this isn't in the book, but it is true) as subtext in a ton of anime that otaku types obsess over for all the wrong reasons. A practical point about this book is how helpful Dower's exploration of censorship is. Writing a story about this time period, thanks to him I know why I can't get photos of many areas of certain cities (they were obviously so demolished that SCAP refused to let the reality be printed) and what may be missing from the photos that are extant. Pinterest is my friend in this regard, where many people have uploaded their GI grandpa's old Nikon or Canon camera reels and shown pictures of steps formed from wood and mud, shanties, children randomly wearing daddy's uniform, an ex-IJA guy with one leg and his daughter on his shoulder, or just fun stuff like little kids playing the 'pileup game' (also popular in Korea) but in a rough area. (These photos also sometimes show the thing that's often missing from 'official' Western images of the East - physically attractive Asian men - media bias much?) Basically, as a mate of mine put it, private archives are the answer when someone has been deliberately making sure the public ones are compromised. Dower's focus on Japanese women and their experience is also very welcome, especially the sexual curiosity and the desire for erotic fulfilment of many who became, even for a short while, prostitutes. I don't think the dominant sexist narrative that 'women don't like casual sex' is going to vanish any time soon, but here's the historical evidence of what utter guff it is - and the true independence of the Japanese female public who, in popular imagination back home and also in other countries (not just the West - I have repeatedly seen and heard this in Korea, for one example, too) are cast in the imagination of many men as being submissive. If I could have the author add anything to this book it wouldn't be more information on Taiwan. I already know about that. It would be about the Chinese minority in Japan. How was it for them after the war? There's a museum in Kobe but I can't read any Japanese script aside from some kanji, so its contents remain partially obscure aside from some photos of Nankin-machi looking decidedly destroyed. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 2019
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May 2019
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Mar 01, 2019
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Paperback
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| 0241275598
| 9780241275597
| 0241275598
| 3.97
| 147
| unknown
| Dec 01, 2017
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it was amazing
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I had to keep dipping in and out of this due to work, but it's fantastic. A wonderful insight into East Asia, the Northern Ireland peace process, the
I had to keep dipping in and out of this due to work, but it's fantastic. A wonderful insight into East Asia, the Northern Ireland peace process, the workings of parliament, why demagoguery and identity politics are tripe, and much more. Patten matriculated me to Oxford and is a good egg. I really wish that the Tory Party's nasty right, and a lot of 'with us or against us' socialists, would read this so they could get an idea of what conservatism is and what it isn't, or shouldn't be.
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Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 25, 2018
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Jan 15, 2019
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Oct 25, 2018
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Hardcover
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