Stardate 20031207.1641

(Captain's log): Yesterday, I wrote (in part):

Part of the fun I'm having in watching all these anime shows has been the way it has revealed things to me about the Japanese, about the ways in which we're the same (because we're all human) and different (because of drastic cultural differences).

From Australia, Darvin writes:

You hit the nail on the head there. After living eleven months in Japan at age 16, that was the conclusion I came to. The biggest lesson I learned was that there is more than one way to skin a cat - that many people tackle a problem different ways (culturally), but if they arrive at the same end, what difference does it make? Culture is just a set of rules that are socially acceptable in a given context, and it pays to learn them so that you can use those rules to your advantage.

I mentioned this to a leftist girlfriend of a few years ago, and hilarity ensued. Although her own experience outside the US was very limited, I was told that this was the wrong way to look at other cultures. I can understand why she believed this - in schools we get indoctrinated with multiculturalism - a kind of Michael Jackson view of friendly kids with different colored skin holding hands, and a viewpoint that implies that white Australians (or Americans) are the only perpetrators of racism. My experience in Japan showed me that Japanese are at least as racist as we are, if not more! I fear that people who have been indoctrinated this way will not understand the dangers of radical Islam until a nuke arrives in Seattle, London or Melbourne.

The Japanese are very racist, but not generally towards whites, especially Americans and Aussies. To some extent that's a cultural thing; we defeated them in WWII (both of us) and thus according to the old culture we proved our superiority. But there's more to it than that; English as a language and the culture of the English-speaking nations has become hip, fashionable. (Which is one of the reasons why so many English words have crept into common usage in Japan.)

On the other hand, the Japanese really look down on Koreans. And non-Oriental foreign workers from Indonesia and the Philippines are generally not treated very well, as I understand it. (I believe I've read that women from all three nations work in Japan as maids or nannies.)

Their own society is also not as egalitarian as many think. Japan is racially far less diverse than the US (with Okinawans probably being the biggest minority group), but there are still divisions which are apparent to them while not really being apparent to outsiders. The old caste system was officially dismantled at the time of Meiji restoration, and a lot of the caste lines have been blurred, but the bottom caste has not really benefited from that.

In the original system, the top caste was the samurai. Before the establishment of the Shogunate, only the Samurai could carry two swords (daisho); others were only permitted to carry one. The longer blade, the katana, was normally used two-handed in combat. The shorter one, the wakizashi, was usually reserved for seppuku. However, there were certain schools of kendo where both were used one-handed. Legend has it that Miyamoto Musashi, author of "The Five Rings", fought that way. (Or at least some legends have it. There's no question that there was a Musashi, but the legends about him are as fantastic as those about Paul Bunyan, and probably about as true.) After the founding of the Shogunate, it became illegal for anyone besides the Samurai to carry weapons.

The next caste down was for peasants, and the one below that was for merchants and artisans living in the towns. And at the bottom rung was a caste, or perhaps "outcaste", which used to be called Eta ("extreme filth"), but whose members are now referred to as Buraku.

The Burakumin ("Hamlet people") are Japan's equivalent of India's "untouchables". Their ancestors were the butchers, the handlers of dead bodies and rotting animal carcasses, the ones who collected human sewage and animal manure to put on the fields, those who did the most unpleasant jobs, the ones everyone else looked down on.

In modern Japan the other caste-lines have pretty well vanished, but the Buraku have not been so lucky. No one else wants their daughter or son to marry one; they're ostracized and discriminated against and many are physically isolated and live in what amount to ghettos. At least some Buraku "pass", but a 1993 survey found that nearly 20% of young Japanese said that if they learned that their spouse was Buraku, they'd leave them.

Estimates of their numbers vary somewhere in the range of 1-3 million. In a nation of 127 million people that's small enough so that there probably aren't any significant economic consequences caused by discrimination against them. (Unlike, for instance, the nontrivial economic consequences of French discrimination against their proportionally far-larger Arab minority.)

But it's still wrong. And I would argu