Boy, you'd think that the guy's father might be more bothered by the fact that his son's shop uses the Imperial Japanese battle flag as its logo, than that he works on Japanese cars.

The lingering resentment doesn't surprise me. I'm not saying I approve of it, but it doesn't surprise me.

Both my father (WWII generation) and my father-in-law ("silent generation") still harbor some resentment toward the Japanese, and are slightly irked that my wife and I drive a Honda.

It takes a long time for people to get over things like wars. US leadership really should have reflected on this fact before launching into our most recent military misadventure. Even if our next president manages to clean up the mess made by the current one, America will be hated by some Iraqis for the next hundred years - at least.

You'd think a lot of things about this guy. Racism: still dead!

Heh. That shop is about a 20 minute drive from here.

These weren't Jewish American Princesses? Huh.

When I moved, I hired Polish Movers because I thought it was a funny name. A black guy and a Hispanic guy showed up. The black guy explained that he had named the company "polish" as in "spic-and-span clean", but since everyone mispronounces it Polish, he's adopted it.

Maybe Happy Jap's is out in the boondocks.

5: That's awesome. I love when people just roll with shit like that.

I used to work for a guy named Glance; on the phone, I would always say "like a quick look" to clarify the spelling. When he wanted to start a company newsletter, I convinced him to use "A Quick Look" as the title.

I'm so glad 6 was not a link to some explanation that "boondocks" is a racially-charged term.

I remember reading somewhere about that shop, and much worse ones. I'll try to find the link...

Oh, and I want to note that, in the comments to the original LGM post, I was Weiner-pwned by Weiner himself!

Apparently he's too good for us here, and hangs out there now. Ever since he found out he's leaving Lubbock, he's getting all uppity....

Goodbye Darkness, what a great country. I think lingering resentment fetishes are quite common. Also, the speed with which Germany and Japan recovered after the war, with our sponsorship and assistance, left considerable resentment among people whose various pyschic wounds had not healed. I think the Marshall Plan et al were great statesmanship, met the needs of the cold war and would have been unthinkable w/o, and make a very good contrast to the Treaty of Versailles, which was the point. But the resentments can't be helped, and will just have to die out.

You know who really holds a grudge? Korea. And it doesn't seem to be generational.

They do have a good reputation, from what I heard. What I find funniest is that the "detailed map" on their directions page includes - in the lower-right corner - this ominous red text: Race Factory.

In Taiwan in 1983 the Hiroshima mushroom cloud was a laughline in comedy films. No joke.

I think that this is a function mostly of state nationalism. The individual Taiwan Chinese I met had a range of opinions, but suspicion or worse of Japan seemed institutionalized. (Same for Taiwan attitudes toward Mainland China, though people were very discreet about that.)

Gosh, when I heard people talking about "the racial grievance industry" I didn't realise it was an actual industry.

I don't think my co-worker was much kidding about this.

In my limited experience on mainland China I also found widespread resentment toward the Japanese. This has gotten play in the Western media, too, of course.

The thing is that the Japanese were never shamed for their war crimes the way the Germans were. In terms of resentment, it is actually pretty amazing that the EU was able to form basically around Germany and France. Could you imagine something similar happening in Asia? Never.

'Cause those Asians, you know -- they're grudge holders.

Korea has something of a national inferiority complex, which manifests itself in Japan-bashing. In China, on the other hand, the government actively promotes Japan hatred from time to time, to distract attention from its own shortcomings. But complicating matters is the fact that such anger is pretty much warranted, given the Japanese government's pathological inability to issue unqualified, unhedged, official apologies for the various nasty things it did during the war. The tragedy of it all is that the vast majority of Japanese couldn't give two hoots about nationalism, but are paying the price for the inflexible and unjustifiable positions of their more jingoistic politicians.

18: In my experience, men with small penises do tend to hold a grudge.

(I hereby ban myself.)

Ignorant world history question: my impression is that, at least among Japan, China, & Korea, there is less of a history of ongoing warfare than among, say, England France & Germany. Not that there haven't been wars, invasions, etc. But that there were much longer periods of cross-border stability.

What I'm suggesting - and it may be stupid, even if the premise is right - is that Europeans went hundreds of years without periods of peace lasting longer than a few decades, but that allegiances tended to shift over time, and so there was less intransigient nationalism. So Flanders, for instance, was at various points allied with and at war with practically everyone else, so grudges were a bit less settled. Like, do we hate the Germans for WWI, or the French for Napoleon, or the Spanish for the 30 Years? Ah, hell with it, let's have a huge joint bureaucracy!

18, 19: Taking the issue seriously, I was blaming Japanese nationalism and the absence of the serious soul searching that went on in Germany. But I think Gaijin B has a very good point about the exploitative behavior of politicians all around. European leaders post WWII showed the sort of foresight you don't normally see in politicians.

When the MSM tries to explain the Chinese support for the N. Korean government, they usually either take the line that a collapse in N. Korea would create a refugee problem for China, or they simply rely on the readers false intuition that nominally communist authoriatarian regimes hang together. I've been wondering if the CCP isn't really motivated by fear of a united Korea as a regional rival.

I think a basic error is to project onto the past the kind of mobilized-society nationalism that characterized the World Wars. Most people even in Flanders were mostly indifferent to battles between what were by modern standards small armies of professionals, often mercenaries.

The question of Japanese memory, particularly for the events of WWII, is wonderfully explored in Norma Fields' In the Realm of a Dying Emperor
/Farber>

European leaders post WWII showed the sort of foresight you don't normally see in politicians.

Well, I wouldn't go that far.... I think that there were 3 main factors. Obviously, the Iron Curtain was the biggest motivator - hang together or hang separately - but I also think that the destruction was so massive that everyone kind of focused on getting their shit together first; by the time nationalism-baiting would have been valuable, things had moved on a bit. Finally, the partition of Germany changed its relationship to the rest of Europe.

I would note that the Economist ran a clever cover after reunification: "Germany: Malign or Benign?" Held up one way, it was a smiling Tyroler; the other way, it looked more like the Kaiser. point being, a reunited Germany evoked the old fears that lay semi-dormant during partition.

Most people even in Flanders were mostly indifferent to battles between what were by modern standards small armies of professionals, often mercenaries.

Yeah, I thought of that, too. I'm reading a book on the Spanish Empire, and it's bizarre how actually ineffectual it was on the ground, whether you were a Mexica or a Fleming. Spasms of violence, like massacring besieged cities, would be followed by years of salutary neglect.

I've been wondering if the CCP isn't really motivated by fear of a united Korea as a regional rival.

I'm no expert in geopolitics but a huge military + a huge, highly technological economy would create an instant regional* super-power, wouldn't it? I imagine a lot of people outside the Korean peninsula find that bothersome out of concern for which factions would wind up in control.

There's a pretty well-done film called 2009 Lost Memories that's basically a time-travel intrigue that has as its central historical focus the Japanese invasion & occupation of Korea; the near-future portion is set in a Korea still under Japanese control and insurgents/rebels/freedom-fighters who want to go back and alter history to match the real world.

--
* at least regional, possibly more global?

I was envisioning Korean unification happening the way German reunification did: the corrupt dictatorial regime collapses under the weight of its own inefficiency, and gets sucked into the prosperous democracy by sheer force of tradition. It seems like the only thing that prevents this from happening on the Korean peninsula is that China supports the tottering dictatorship. So why do they do this? What's in it for them? I think the big factor is that a divided Korea is not a threat.

17: >The thing is that the Japanese were never shamed for their war crimes the way the Germans were.

Tony Judt's Postwar indicates ordinary Germans indulged in some massive forgetting until decades after the war while their officials did the public sack-cloth and ashes bit.

I think 24 is right. The scale of the damage in Europe after WW2 was too great for much other than serious problem-solving 'tho the French apparently initially tried to set the stage for WW3 as a repeat of 2.

So do I, but I am tremendously naive about these things. The East German government was already well and truly fucked (if I remember that class correctly) and was in no way seen as being likely to hold onto any degree of power. My impression is that N. Korea's regime is much more solid within the cultural mindset and in actuality.

The thing is that the Japanese were never shamed for their war crimes the way the Germans were

I've seen it attributed to racism, to a set of expectations that the Germans, being very close to us culturally and having the same religion(s), should have known better.

The question of shaming the Japanese is an interesting one. I wonder what the influence of Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, written during the War specifically to address and educate Americans about the differences between ourselves and Japan, had on postwar policy.

Probably part racism, part just that we can't teach an old dog new tricks. All you guys are probably from amazingly enlightened families, but in mine it wasn't uncommon for a grandmother or great-grandmother to hold a horribly racist opinion which might have even been progressive, comparatively, for their times. No use arguing with someone whose opinions were formed in the 30s; just wait for them to die off.

That shop is about a 20 minute drive from here.

it's less than 3 miles from where i am right now.

26, 27: I'm not so sure about this. Reunification was enough to hobble Germany and keep it seriously busy for a number of years. To this day, unemployment and other economic factors show massive poverty in former East Germany. And that was the wealthiest of the communist states merging with a fully-developed nation 4 times its size (64 million people versus 16 million).

North Korea is a complete basket case economically (~$1,800 GDP per capita as measured by PPP, right there with Haiti, Zimbabwe and Kyrgyzstan) while South Korea is only middle class ($24,000 GDP per capita as measured by GDP, around Greece, Bahrain and Slovenia). Not only that, but South Korea is only twice the size of North Korea (49 million people versus 23 million). I think concerns about complete chaos on the China-North Korea border are far more valid than any short- or medium-term concerns about a unified Korea's ascendancy.

Gah, I meant: ($24,000 GDP per capita as measured by PPP, around Greece, Bahrain and Slovenia)

"No use arguing with someone whose opinions were formed in the 30s"

The middle aged neighbor of some friends of mine once remarked "The new Chinese family down the street seems nice, but I've never really forgiven them for what they did to us in WWII".

Still not worth arguing with, but the wait for the die-off might be longer than we were hoping.

Also, I doubt whether North Koreans can watch South Korean television.

21

"Ignorant world history question: my impression is that, at least among Japan, China, & Korea, there is less of a history of ongoing warfare than among, say, England France & Germany. Not that there haven't been wars, invasions, etc. But that there were much longer periods of cross-border stability. "

My impression is that the difference is there is little racial antagonism among England, France and Germany but there is among Japan, China and Korea.

French epithets for Germans include: "les schluhs" and "les bosches." These date back to the Franco-Prussian war.

And syphillis wasn't called the French disease because people had a high opinion of them.

In England, condoms are called "French letters."
In France, condoms are called "lettres anglaises."
I don't know what they are called in German.

Präservative

But these jeers at the foreign don't amount to dehumanization of the "enemy nation", of the bayoneted-babies kind that occured during WWI and after, and were revived without revision at the time of the first Gulf War.

There's an Orwell book review, somewhere in the complete papers, where he marvels at how Napoleanic Era literary and scientific journals reviewed the work of French writers completely without the kind of nationalism that infected ever aspect of wartime society in the 20th C., and which it shocked him to realize hadn't always been so.

37: The level of racial antagonism wouldn't seem to differ much from what I can tell, but the political situatioin in Asia is much more fractured and tense. (People love to whinge about the EU, but the truth is that level of normalized political and economic cohesion probably does a lot to diffuse tensions which otherwise would be much more on the surface.)

43

It seems to me there is more racial antagonism of the "would you want your sister to marry one" type among Japan, China and Korea.

I seem to recall my wife (who lived 2 years in Japan) telling me about Koreans who live in Japan. Something to the effect that they mever assimilate, and are still considered Koreans even after a few generations, and their names are written using furigana, the syllabary for transliteration.

I'm sure I've gotten the details wrong, but there's certainly some dynamic to that effect, and it's strikingly similar to the way 2nd generation Japanese were treated in the US in WW2 (not the internment, obv, but the presumption that native-born Americans were really Japanese).

Hey, DS, your buzzmachine comment is highlighted right now on the front page of Needlenose. You're famous!

10: Weiner's leaving Lubbock? Where's he going?

I know that you're kidding about the getting uppity bit, but it really is amazing how much of a time suck unfogged can be. Arthegall has said that unfogged is pretty much the only blog he consistently reads. I'm pretty much the same way. I think that it's possible for someone to read and comment at a number of other blogs and devote less time to blogs than someone else could spend reading just unfogged.

Back in the day I was a regular butterfly, flitting from blog to blog, maybe thirty or forty different blogs per day. Now, I mostly just read this and two or three others. Too much echo chamber elsewhere.

47: Vermont.

The announcement.

JRoth:

The syllabery you're thinking of is katakana, not furigana.

I have no statistics on this, but I knew a couple of families in high school who were of mixed Japanese/Korean descent, springing from native Japanese marrying Korean-Japanese (I mean, "people of Korean descent, living in Japan.") On the one hand, at least one of those families had a perfectly ordinary Japanese name (the other had a Korean name), and both were prosperous. On the other hand, they moved to America -- perhaps they found that there was a stigma to remaining in Japan.

On a random, tangential note, I had a prof in college who was an Okinawan woman, and she related that her mother hadn't wanted her to marry a "mainland" boy (meaning, someone from one of the four big islands, or presumably anyone other than another Okinawan).

Lubbock won't really be the same without its most publicly visible resident -- Weiner is in a way really the soul of west Texas.

Vermont? How funny. Two of my best friends are movign their for residency.

46: Cripes, I don't even remember saying that! Nifty, though.

Dammit! I'd typed out katakana, then edited to furigana. I was thinking the katakana were the tiny ones used to clarify kanji pronunciation - it's obviously the other way.

JRoth: Yep. For anyone who's curious: Hiragana are the ordinarily-used syllabics, katakana are the ones for foreign languages or sound effects or emphasis or what-have-you, and furigana are just hiragana written small above kanji (the ideograms) so that you know how to pronounce them.

The resentment towards the Japanese amongst the over 80s is pretty astonishing. My father-in-law fought his way up the Italian peninsula in WWII with Germans shooting at him and dropping shells on him for 2 straight years. But he really never had anything bad to say about Germans, he respected them and seemed actually pretty fond of them. But he hated the Japanese and refused all his life to allow anyone in the family to drive a Japanese car. It is clearly a racial thing, aggravated by the humiliation of Pearl Harbor. I suppose we hopefully less racially minded folk today probably can't really even appreciate just how humiliating that attack was to white men at the time. Although the crazed reactions towards Muslims after 9/11 seem sort of in the same vein.

I think there's also a perception that the Japanese treated those they fought against badly while the Germans did not. Lots of elderly Brits who were prisoners of war still feel very badly towards the Japanese, for example.

It's not a truly fair perception of course: the Germans may have generally fought fairly and treated Western European and American combatants reasonably, but they didn't extend the Soviets or Poles the same courtesy.

It is clearly a racial thing, aggravated by the humiliation of Pearl Harbor.

I don't think it's a racial thing in general (although whatever you father-in-law's particular feelings were, I obviously can't say). Rather, I think it has a lot to do with the Germans having largely the same attitudes toward warfare, and prisoners of war, that Americans did, being part of the same broad cultural tradition, while Japanese values and principles were strange and, quite often, horrifying.

For example, the Germans ran pretty decent POW camps, if my research on the subject (i.e., watching The Great Escape and Hogan's Heroes) is accurate. On the other hand, to the old-school hard-core Japanese military way of thinking, being captured in battle (as opposed to dying in battle) was so unspeakably shameful that prisoners of war were essentially less than human. Hence, mistreating prisoners was no big deal, and killing them was practically doing them a favor; at least you were putting them out of the misery of their shame.

This way of thinking obviously didn't cut much ice with American troops, who viewed it as a violation of the basic norms of warfare between civilized nations. It helped Americans view the Japanese as savages with no respect for the sanctity of life. The concept of kamikaze suicide bombers, deliberately intending to die as part of their mission, had a similar effect.

While there was certainly plenty of racism going around at the time, I suspect that the visible markers of race were more or less a convenient peg on which American troops could hang their shock and revulsion at certain elements of Japanese military culture. After all, the Chinese were our allies.

Cross-posted 59 with 58.

Lots of elderly Brits who were prisoners of war still feel very badly towards the Japanese, for example

The whole subject received fair literary treatment, although the most famous treatment in its day, David Lean's The Bridge Over the River Kwai, does not hold up at all well, in the way his Lawrence of Arabia does.

The literary critic Ian Watt wrote an essay in the sixties, much anthologized, contrasting what actually happened in the camps on the "Death Railway" with the story of the movie. An excellent reading in its day for the subject of historical accuracy and presentation of ideas in movies, it probably is less significant today when so many fewer people will have seen the movie or have formed their ideas from it. Look! Obi Wan is in it!

I have the impression that lingering resentment over World War 2-era events is much stronger in Asia than in Europe or the US. I have been surprised by disturbing racist remarks a young Chinese woman made about the Japanese. Later I learned that her family is from Nanjing, where apparently the memory of the massacre of 1937-38 is still very much alive.

re: 62

I think it's also fair to say that in much of Europe there is still lingering resentment. Just not in Western Europe. My wife's family really don't seem to like Germans much.

45: Basically, Koreans in Japan don't get citizenship from being born there. It's possible, but only after going through a long, humiliating process to demonstrate they've "passed." Most refuse. Result: third-generationers who aren't citizens.

They can assimilate in the sense that they take Japanese names (not official), speak perfect Japanese, and generally blend in if they choose. But more prestigious employers, schools, and class-conscious families are able to check their family and exclude them from jobs/admittance/marriage. So they sometimes huddle up in their own communities with their own schools anyway. The smarter ones become doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs, since those paths aren't closed to them. Also, a large proportion of entertainers are actually Korean - kind of like how Jews and Italians would change their names to get into show business.

61: But there are plenty of non-photoshopped pictures (not "movies") available.

No doubt there was some exaggeration morphing into myths but the Japanese really were (and still are) coming from a different planet.

They don't behead people so much anymore, though.

Or so the mullahs would have you believe.

The lingering prejudice against Japanese in the U.S., but not the Germans. might also be explained by the fact that so many American have German ancestry. Prejudice doesn't stand up as well when you have competing counterexamples.

Prejudice doesn't stand up as well when you have competing counterexamples

B-but what about homophobia?

On the other hand, I worked for a Jewish guy who spoke Japanese and married a Japanese woman, but refused to buy any German products.

66: No, but their politicians will say nasty things about Blacks in the US and then contend their words were "only for internal consumption" when that ignited a fire here. They anchor and give real meaning to "insular" and "xenophobic".

All true. (And there's more! A goverment official here recently got in trouble for calling women "baby-making machines".) Still, the importance of the no-more-beheadings thing can't be overlooked.

Also, it's important to keep in mind that the statements of elderly nationalist politicians are not necessarily representative of the sentiments of the Japanese people, especially the younger generations. It would be like assuming that Strom Thurmond was a good indicator of what American college students are all about.