The White Peril 白禍

More about the very brief Japan-DPRK meeting last weekend (this may have been available from other news outlets earlier this week, but I tend to read the Nikkei thoroughly and half-pay attention to NHK on television while cooking, so this is the first I've seen it): Koizumi actually met with Charles Jenkins. Were the whole situation ("Hi! Your wife was kidnapped from her free, prosperous home country to teach its culture to spies in a bankrupt and eventually starving hell-hole of a dystopia, and now that she's finally home after two decades, she'd kind of like to have her children with her, so we'll do our damnedest to keep your country from prosecuting you as an Army deserter!") not so appalling, it would be like a spy thriller. And even as it is, it can be darkly amusing. The report is that, to underscore the message that Japan would "make its utmost efforts" to assure that the US doesn't push for extradition--meaning that Jenkins can live with his wife and daughters in Japan--a Foreign Ministry official with Koizumi wrote, "I guarantee it [私が保証する is the way the story renders it; paradoxically enough, that means I can't be sure what the English wording was]" on a slip of paper and passed it across the table. Make a great movie scene.

Jenkins has, of course, ultimately agreed to meet in Beijing. Beijing is friendly to the DPRK, so Japan initially indicated that it wouldn't accept a reunion between Jenkins and Soga there, but it's changed its mind and is now pushing in that direction. Soga expressed anxiety about meeting in Beijing and averred that there's no way in hell she's going back to North Korea (I should say not!). So we'll see who moves. I imagine the first meeting probably will, ultimately, be in China. This is an Asian mother with two unmarried daughters in their late teens and early 20's, so odds are she'll decide it's worth putting aside her concerns about traveling to a DPRK ally and do what needs to be done to get her family back together. My pruriently-curious side (is there any other?) wonders what the first night of pillow talk is going to be like in that reformed household.

Paul Varnell's newest article at IGF notes something I was kind of wondering about, too: People are taking longer than I expected to freak the hell out over gay marriage in Massachusetts. Not that I'm relishing the prospect, or anything. I trust it's not surprising that, while I'm troubled by the methods that are being used to bring these changes about and not at all confident in the motives of some of their loudest proponents...well, seeing the pictures and reading the accounts from Massachusetts makes my heart leap. How could it not? My deepest hope (read: it's the Lagavulin talking) is that obsessive activists on our team will see this as a sign that, while we still face a lot of opposition, there's a real fund of goodwill out there that we don't have to get hysterical to tap into, and that anti-gay types will at least recognize something familiar and human in seeing people want to make the relationships that sustain them official. Then maybe (wait--there's a little Scotch left...not anymore!) we could start talking in terms of how we're going to treat behaviors as a society and not screeching past each other about what constitutes "approval" of this or that.

I was vaguely bemused, though, by this paragraph in Varnell's article:

And not just legally wed, but welcomed with religious marriage ceremonies by the venerable and influential Unitarian church, whose ministers almost to a man � and woman � have made themselves available to same-sex couples wishing a blessing in the religious tradition.

Oh, my. In the sense that today's Unitarianism evolved from challenges to the concept that God is a trinity, sure, it's...um...old. But I have to say, my first boyfriend took me to a service in Lower Manhattan ten years ago, and I just didn't get it. My idea of a religion is the church I was brought up in: two-hour services every week, during which you looked up every cited scripture and took notes, no work allowed on the Sabbath, and a kind, accessible Christ balanced by a God the Father whose attitude ran more toward, ARE YOU PEOPLE GOING TO LISTEN TO ME ALREADY OR DO I HAVE TO SMITE YOU WITH A BLEEDING CURSE?!

The idea at the Unitarian place--and I understand that it may have been somewhat extreme in this regard, but from what I've read of Unitarian beliefs it wasn't way, way on the fringes--seemed to be that you do whatever you felt like doing anyway, and God loves you for it. In fact, the atmosphere of strident, you're-special! good cheer was so irritating that by the time I left the building, I just wanted to go kick puppies. This is America, and people are, of course, fundamentally free to worship whatever God they choose. I also understand why gays who don't believe our lives are sinful don't have a whole lot of choices of denomination. I just can't help thinking that it doesn't profit us much to be leaning on a sect with (what appears to me to be--I'd love to be proven wrong) quite that degree of an I'm-okay-you're-okay approach to life.

So Prime Minister Koizumi went to Pyongyang, where Kim Jong-il has said he was welcome, most welcome. The meeting apparently ended in less than two hours--perhaps there was a spontaneous city-wide banquet in Kim's honor that he had to rush off to--but there was plenty to talk about. There's that little matter of nuclear disarmament, for one thing (the DPRK has been known to file missiles over our heads in Japan--just testing, you know).

But the focal point was clearly the Japanese abductees. Five have returned to Japan; that leaves eight that the DPRK says are dead (I can't remember all the cover stories, they're so lame; one involved graves being washed away in a mudslide and therefore unrecoverable--things like that) and two that it claims never entered North Korea. So from the Japanese viewpoint, there are five abductees repatriated and ten missing, of whom the DPRK acknowledges eight. That's a total of fifteen, which I'm pretty sure is lower than the number of cabinet ministers and party officials currently implicated in the non-payment-of-pension-premiums scandal, but I could be wrong.

The Japanese are trying to get abductees' family members (mostly children) in North Korea to Japan, which is why there's such a fuss over US Army deserter Charles Jenkins, who defected to North Korea in the '60's and is married to abductee Hitomi Soga. The US has indicated that it may, in fact, expect him to be handed over for court martial if he accompanies his daughters to Japan to see their mother. All of this making nice with the DPRK makes me sick, but I guess diplomacy wouldn't be a delicate business if it always involved dealing with good people.

Added at 1 a.m.: Predictably, the families of abductees are stomping mad that Koizumi didn't push more for information about those unaccounted for. One's heart goes out to them--most of these people were snatched off Japanese soil in their teens or early twenties, remember. But I have a hard time imagining what good a hard-line stance would do in this kind of case. The DPRK is run by whim-driven nut cases, unfortunately. In the meantime, children from two families came from North Korea and were reunited with their repatriated parents near Haneda Airport. It's been a year and seven months since they've seen each other. One of the parents, Kaoru Hasuike (beautiful name, that: Kaoru means "fragrance," and Hasuike means "lotus pond"), said, "My daughter has become so lovely....and my son has grown tall." The last sentence in this article reports, "With that, he broke into the smile of a proud father." Good for them. Let's hope the rest of the endings are as happy as they can be.

Are you nice enough to the Asian-Americans in your life? Really? Reallyreally? If not, you still have a week or two to straighten out:

May is Asian Pacific American (APA) Heritage Month�a celebration of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. Much like Black History and Women's History celebrations, APA Heritage Month originated in a congressional bill.

There's a whole lesson on the state of the US government in those two sentences. The site I've linked to is the children's encyclopedia infoplease, and on the basis of the prominent links to information about Japanese internment camps, Chinese Exclusion, and a biography of Liliuokalani on the front page, I feared it might be the usual poison PC dim sum cart serving up nature-loving yellow people beset by mean white people. Actually, it isn't that bad. If you take the quiz, it mentions the Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge. Sure, most of the information is about coolie labor and worker discrimination and Maxine Hong Kingston, but these days, anyone who recognizes that Asians are sometimes nasty to each other seems like a fearless truth-teller.

What most annoys me about every page I clicked through to is the unrelieved smile-button dullness of the information. How is it possible to make the largest continent and ocean on Earth, which house India, China, Japan, Thailand, the islands of Polynesia, and many other fascinating cultures and climes, seem so unstimulating? A children's website isn't the place for, say, the comfort women controversy, obviously, but still.

The pages on national cuisines are so content-free I could have written them on the toilet, and I'm no expert, believe me. Surely it's possible to explore, for example, the different things people consider delicacies, without necessarily making an entire people seem weird and gross. The Japanese love sea urchin and--in some regions--horse meat (I have a box of it in my refrigerator as a souvenir from Atsushi's new city). The influx of country people into Bangkok has made the raising of all manner of caterpillars and beetles for snack stands into a hugely profitable industry. And so on. American children's initial reactions would probably be negative, if not downright contemptuous, but is it really impossible to suggest, in simple but meaningful terms, that the major difference in which animals are considered edible is how we're brought up to think of them?

Anyway, hug an Asian-American; there's a history of pain behind those enviable math scores, you know.

I wonder whether I'm missing something. In today's edition, the Nikkei stories about the continuing sad Japan-DPRK struggle over the eight Japanese citizens kidnapped to North Korea in the 1970's quote a prominent Japanese politician:

On 16 May, Shozo Abe, head of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan (LDP), spoke on a Fuji Television program about the expected focus during Prime Minister Koizumi's next visit to the DPRK on a former member of the US armed forces, named Jenkins, who is the husband of abductee Hitomi Soga. Abe indicated that Jenkins must be brought to Japan even if against his will.

Abe said, "Had the DPRK been a country that placed any importance on the will of the individual, the issue of abductions wouldn't have arisen in the first place. It is in frank talks between the two countries, not according to Jenkins's will, that this must be decided, and we must get him to come to Japan and bring his and Ms. Soga's daughters."

I've read this about twelve times, and while I'm not a native speaker of Japanese, I'm pretty certain that's what it says. (Jenkins is a deserter--Army, I think--who's lived in North Korea since the mid-'60's. The issue that has been raised is that he's afraid of being arrested if he visits US-ally Japan; whether he really wants to stay in the DPRK has not been clear in anything I've read. In fact, I think that his refusal to come to Japan is still hypothetical at this stage.) Granted that being forcibly brought to Japan is not like being forcibly brought to the DPRK, in any sane person's evaluation...and also that the two girls have a lot more adulthood left than their father and might want to spend it here...the reasoning that Jenkins has lived under a dictatorship for almost 40 years, so we may as well dictate to him some more from a different country, makes my head spin. I could almost see it coming from one of Japan's unelected, society-manipulating ministry officials; but this guy's the head of a party that actually participates in the part of the Japanese political system that's responsible to voters. I certainly hope there's an angle to the story that I've just missed in my newsgathering.

It's weird. I understand there's no more important news to talk about right now than Torture Is Bad and Friends Just Went off the Air, but you'd think CNN or someone would be mentioning, at least, the fact that Yasuo Fukuda (the Chief Secretary of the Japanese cabinet) and Naoto Kan (the very attractive head of the Democratic Party of Japan) are resigning amid scandal: they didn't pay into the National Insurance pyramid pension scheme for stretches of time. Kickbacks, gladhanding, and revolving-door retirement are so woven into the fabric of Japanese government that maybe no one much notices something so restrained as a simple failure to pay a few months of bills.

But Fukuda was a very articulate spokesman for the Koizumi government's support of the US in the War on Terrorism, and there is, after all, an election coming up. That's the potentially serious part, though how it will play out is not apparent. The joke of the matter is that Kan's ten months of non-payment occurred while he was the Minister of Health and Welfare (back when that's what the ministry was). I have no doubt that, given his position, the gentleman was ideally placed to decide whether paying the premiums was a sound move in terms of his personal finances. But it does rather hilariously highlight the frequent gaps between the self-abnegating civil servant image that Japan-groupie social scientists get quivery over and the avoidance of personal accountability that goes on in reality. No, really, it's funny. You can start laughing any time.

My favorite fellow Asia-Pacific Island-based blogger, Amritas, responded to one of Joanne Jacobs's frequent commenters, one Stephen, who characteristically took the opportunity to use this thread about race relations at UCLA to talk about how wonderful his wife's traditional Asian femininity makes their domestic life. Joanne has already done her usual, wonderfully motherly throwing of cold water, and Amritas is great as always when he gets fired up.

And yet...Stephen's comments (he shows up a lot) always frustrate me because there's usually a very good point buried beneath the self-directed ego stroking: that gay promiscuity in urban areas has been very destructive and that lots of people who reject traditional femininity in a jeering way are insecure about their own life choices seem to be the major ones.

A point that no one in this conversation seems to make is that in a free society, traditional femininity requires both parties to be willing to hold up their ends of the bargain. Since I don't know the gentleman personally, I can only assume that his wife, like most American women, would quickly make her latent female power overt if he started treating her poorly--no matter to what degree she identifies with flowers. That's not always an option women have in countries in which sex roles haven't been liberalized as they have in America. Japan is politically one of the most free countries on Earth. (We just celebrated its Constitution Day yesterday, and while it's mostly treated as just a bank holiday, I found it very moving, as a proud American partial to constitutions.) But the status of women here, while it certainly facilitates "femininity," can be appalling. The median age for marriage has been pushed up to near 30 in the last 20 years. It's not just that women want to spend their free time shopping instead of taking care of children; they don't want to be forced to look after men whose idea of a "helpmeet" is a combination of maid and brood mare.

All of which means that if it adds frisson to a middle-aged couple's relationship to imagine a ring of vaginismus-afflicted harpies detesting them for their delight in tradition...well, good for them. But it'd be nice if students at a major research university, who are supposed to be in the process of forming their view of the world, could talk about their differences and assess why and in which contexts some attitudes work better than others.

BTW, the name I officially use in Japan is a transliteration of Sean:

紫苑 (shion)

It means "aster."

Japanese women's names sometimes do use flower kanji, but only occasionally does one see a name with a stem pronounced Yuri- ("lily") or Hana- ("blossom") or Fuji- ("wisteria"). Japanese women's names can have any number of kanji, but many pronunciations cluster around a handful of meanings: Mari- ("truth"), Nori- ("law," "order," "constancy"), and Aki- ("light," "clarity"). None of these seems to make their bearers more stern and sententious than those named after flowers or jewels.

The news programs keep talking about a Janis Karpinski who's a high muckety-muck in supervision of prisons in Iraq. The first time I heard her name, it rang a bell, and I wondered whether she was the woman Geraldine Brooks profiled as having trained the women in the Kuwaiti armed forces during the Gulf War. (Don't ask me why I remembered the name--there's a rational reason that's too personal to recount here.) I can't find a link that confirms that they are the same person, but there can't be that many Brigadier General Janis Karpinskis with a decade or so of service in the Gulf.

Added 05/04 13:25: Sheesh. You'd never know from this pixellated rag that I get paid, in part, for clear prose. Geraldine Brooks's book has a chapter on the training of Kuwaiti women in the armed forces, in which Janis Karpinski is quoted several times; the book overall is about the lives of women in Muslim countries, not Karpinski.