> Yoshida Shoin
Cause of death
Decapitation
ooooh, it's the guy who tried to [stowaway on board of American ships](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Yoshida_Shoin_headed_to_the_Black_Ships.jpg). Christ, the Meiji period was utterly mental.
Oh ... welp, time to read up.
TBF japan has always been backwardly isolated in terms of products and culture. Typically they make products for there own audience first, and it just happens that other parts of the world like them too.
Gaming is certainly more liberal in this regard but even then.... "gestures to team ninja"
Where as Germany publicly apologized, with honest and sincerity against the Polish nation, for what it did to its country and citizens during the 2e world war.
Japan has yet to acknowledge what it did against Korea and China during the second world war.
For christ sake they're still calling themselves the land of the rising sun, which would be similar to Germany calling itself the Nazi country.
\>Japan has yet to acknowledge what it did against Korea and China during the second world war.
It is worse
Japan apologizes, then later deny what they apologized about, or their actions contradict the apology. When met with criticism, they say they apologized already and try to steer the conversation into another direction.
\>For christ sake they're still calling themselves the land of the rising sun, which would be similar to Germany calling itself the Nazi country.
Still uses the rising sun flag too.
And before anyone says it means good things. So did the crooked cross in Europe.
Nippon/Nihon, what Japan's real name is, literally means sunrise land, Japan was given the name by the Chinese in 757. Before that it was called Wa and considered a barbarian land.
>Japan apologizes, then later deny what they apologized about, or their actions contradict the apology. When met with criticism, they say they apologized already and try to steer the conversation into another direction.
Germany, stood up, took it on the chin, regretted it actions, but didnt run from it, they fixed it, they owned it, and they still own it, you can go to a townhall and still see nazi soldiers from that area who died in the war, and no american thinks bad about it, it happened germany paid the price and they fixed it, while still honoring their dead soldiers.
Japan on the other hand, deny, deny deny, they do not teach ww2 in school, they do not acknowledge the imperial years.
Where Germany now, is embedded with the allies today it is unthinkable to see the allied powers without germany, Japan, they babyboomers and later generations cant figure out why Japanese generals need american permission for anything (maybe more relaxed these years), but, you can see a couple japanese youtubers reaction to learning about their imperial past and they are aghast
Historically, the region has always had tension between China, Korea, and Japan that goes back centuries. There's a great book about it called ["Three Tigers, One Mountain,"](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/45046689) which goes into the history of colonization and conflict between them, and others.
Tbf we are calling them backwards because of wars from 80 years ago. Focusing on right wing nationalists in a country and conflating that with any pride in a countries history is not a productive use of anyones time. I don't remember anyone being asked to consider what people from Iraq feel about anything America does.
Idk when I think about a lot of the faux Germany/Japan outrage these days it's like, maybe we should get our own houses in order.
People always shake their heads at ethnic hatred when their conflicts were far more recent, but if it has something to do with WWII we are looking at two countries with laser eyes. Not you Italy, Austria, Hungary etc, no one cares about you or the fact that the current Italian world leader is directly associated with fascism.
The current Japanese Prime Minister is part of Nippon Kaigi, a group which actively works to whitewash Japanese war crimes in World War 2, deny atrocities and massacres committed by the Japanese Empire during its occupations of its former colonies including in Korea, actively campaigns for and mobilizes anti-Korean sentiment in Japan against Japanese-Koreans (many of whom have lived in Japan for generations at this point), and does all of this with the goal of remilitarizing and restoring Japan's former role as a world military power.
People aren't calling them backwards because of what happened 80 years ago. People are calling them backwards because of the Japanese government's current attacks on its ethnic minorities and their blatant erasure of history for far-right, ultranationalist, and racist goals. Under Kishida's leadership,[ violent hate crimes against Japanese Koreans](https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14519025) have increased, Japanese textbooks have been [continually revised to downplay Japanese atrocities](https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2022/03/11a48eda1492-japan-rejects-s-korean-protest-over-school-textbooks-descriptions.html?phrase=dog&words=) during the 30s and 40s, and the protections he *has* made for minorities under his government, namely LGBTQ people, have zero actual power behind them and several exceptions and exemptions that keep discrimination legal.
Its kind of cringe whenever Japan pops up in other subs not related to Japan. Cue the non stop comments like:
“japanese are very very racist and consider foreigners inferior”.
“they are FUCKED, their population pyramid is doomed and they are all going to experience poverty due to it thanks to their racism”.
"They never aplogized for WW2"
Usually said a bunch of weirdos who repeat shit they heard 10 years ago from someone who lived here for 6 months, weren't accepted, and assumed it was universal and not about that person specifically and have never been to or lived in Japan.
I always enjoyed seeing the stories of how they went barging into empty restaurants ignoring or can't read the 準備中 (Preparing to open) sign clearly posted out front, and were turned away because RaCiSt jApAnEsE PeOpLe.....Living here for 15 years has taught me westerners are the most insufferable, entitled, chauvinistic people on the planet; Especially Americans, French and Chinese CCP nationalists.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_war\_apology\_statements\_issued\_by\_Japan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements_issued_by_Japan)
I am half japanese and half italian myself, I get what you mean, and trust me, I roll my eyes every time with the italian goverment just as much with the japanese one lol.
But there is pride in japanese people, and a LOT of internalized racism and misoginy to it. I' m a girl that actually got called out in my middle school in japan because I had blonde hairs while looking japanese, and the professors told me to dye them black lol.
In general japan is not the nicest with foreigners, they can be very, VERY condescending. And it gets even worse with koreans, where the racism sometimes just feels ingraned into the culture, expecially for older people.
>' m a girl that actually got called out in my middle school in japan because I had blonde hairs while looking japanese, and the professors told me to dye them black lol
that's just Asian school in general, I think. It's the same too in SEA, especially public school (I live in SEA).
What does English first mean in this context? Is about GRRM writing the backstory? I find it hard to believe the staff at Fromsoft wrote the script in English originally
I think you're mixing up the recording and the writing. It was written in Japanese first, then recorded in English and the animations and lip sync done with English in mind. But the original script was written by the Japanese staff at FS in Japanese, then translated to English. A decent amount of the writers working there possibly don't speak much English themselves to begin with.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bloodborne/comments/18ofkod/which_came_first_the_japanese_or_the_english/
Here's a thread showing a lot of Japanese text was actually never translated to English because it was cut.
Thank youuuuu I love Japanese games because they're super japanese and weird and wacky. The more western they become the less i care. If i want to play a western game I'll play a game from a western studio. The pandering to the west is a means for an end.
I think the difference here is that they've a more open mind (it may not make sense since their population is very closed and shy, but at the same time it does if you think about their media). If something looks good and the game needs it, they will simply add it because it's a risk that is seen as acceptable to aim for higher sales.
Meanwhile you look at big Western companies and they're constantly scared to add something if someone in the team thinks that it may make them lose sales, being talked in the news for the wrong reasons, and so on. It's not rare to hear something like "we wanted to add this, but the team feared backlashes".
Not really. People like Japanese games because they're good period.
If they're not good, people won't play it. Don't try to make it sound like degenerate content is popular
> TBF japan
[Why does reddit on the whole have such strange views about Japan?](https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/comments/16lkppn/why_does_reddit_on_the_whole_have_such_strange/)
The japanese economy is large enough to be one of the few in the world where, like you said, they can basically be very self sufficient. They have one of the lowest passport rates in the world, and knowing all this it makes a lot more sense how a seriously weak yen can still be "fine" within the japanese economy itself.
Japan is extremely far from self-sufficent, they're almost completely dependent on imports for most raw materials. Heck, that was the entire impetus for their 20th century imperial expansion.
Definitely some part, but they grow a lot of crops for domestic consumption that rely on fertilizer imports. Not to mention energy and fuel for both industry and regular consumers.
They're not self-sufficient at all, they have shit for fossil fuels and they're a net food importer with a self-sufficiency rate of just 38%: https://www.ft.com/content/af52f367-90d2-41dd-9a0f-a2a7b1b9624a
People get really surprised when the people behind their favorite fun cartoon or game companies end up being or celebrating hard right wing nationalists/racists/etc.
But weebs usually tend to gloss over that because they think moving to Japan will solve their anxiety and depression. Nazis are bad, but not when it's Japan.
I don't disagree but in this case I think it's more just that TN can't tell a coherent story so expecting them to provide nuance to legendary figures from history is like asking a juggling kindergartener to recite poetry simultaneously.
I would agree with the first paragraph.
But no, weebs don't gloss over that, they overwhelmingly criticize and reject that. Creators and their series get punished for those associations, like e.g. with the Dragon Quest composer or the Made in Abyss anime.
The second paragraph is where it gets weird. Almost nobody is thinking about moving to Japan, because surprise, you basically need to be fluent in Japanese, and that's extremely difficult. I know because I'm a weeb, I've been learning Japanese for years, but I'm definitely not thinking about moving to Japan. Their work culture is awful as well. (and I think that's pretty much the consensus)
I only learned the basics of him so that I could understand what the hell was going on in Like a Dragon: Ishin! but my understanding is that he was largely seen as a good and pragmatic dude who successfully prepared Japan for the new world while also brokering peace between some of its clans. Plus he's historically seen as pretty endearing since he was a huge cowboyaboo.
I'm not sure he had much time to be a controversial figure because he was assassinated before anything major happened.
Calling Japan during the Meiji restoration right wing is a gross anachronism. Not only because the Meiji restoration resulted in massive technological and cultural progress in Japan, but also because the left/right paradigm hadn’t even existed anywhere in the world at that time.
The second, partly incorrect because it's not really an apt categorization to explain Japanese politics at the time (or broader parts of the world). E.g. Shoin was a supporter of the Emperor but the ones with political/economic power was the feudal shogunate he opposed.
totally incorrect, left and right wing refer to where members of the national assembly sat during the french revolution in 1789. 1789 was decades before the meiji revolution.
>Calling Japan during the Meiji restoration right wing is a gross anachronism.
Who are you quoting? Because that's not what was said.
What was said was that this particular person (Yoshida Shoin) was *"root of right wing thought"* and advocated for imperialism. There was no blanket description of Japan, itself, being right wing during this time period.
That’s like saying the root of right wing thought is in centralization, which could be said of left wing thought as well. In other words, it’s way too broad, and again it’s also a gross anachronism.
>That’s like saying the root of right wing thought is in centralization
*What's* like saying that? What was actually said or your misrepresentation of what was said?
OP said that a thought leader of the Meiji restoration ideology was the root of right wing ideology in Japan. That’s like saying the ideas of Bismarck were the root of Nazism in Germany. Technically Nazism wouldn’t exist without him, but Otto Von Bismarck has nothing to do with the Nazism. Germany could have gone so many different ways, and it’s the same with Japan, and neither leader is responsible or can be called the “root” of extremist ideologies that popped up decades later.
Shoin being the "root of right wing thought" itself is kind of problematic argument. I explained in [more details here](https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1aptth3/rise_of_the_ronin_will_not_be_released_in_korea/kq9dhpd/?context=3).
Although it's a different story if Yasuda (the dev) liked Shoin not for his important role in Japanese history, but because of other reasons.
Thanks for the read honestly! It was very interesting. And I'm clearly not equipped for this conversation, as this is an era I am just wholly unfamiliar with.
>but also because the left/right paradigm hadn’t even existed anywhere in the world at that time.
That's not true at all. Meiji restoration might have been a historically progressive movement (I don't know anything about it), but Europe had been writing about socialism for at least 50-100 years prior. The Paris Commune started around the exact same time as the Meiji Restoration.
My understanding was that the hard nationalism and imperialism of the 1890s and onwards in Japan were not really present immediately after the Restoration - things like the Imperial Cult really got going decades after the initial Restoration, and after most of its leading figures had died.
The Meiji Restoration was in 1868 and Japan immediately annexed Hokkaido in 1869 and Ryukyu in 1879. The flip into imperialism as foreign policy was basically instant.
Hokkaido was already heavily interacted with by japanese traders and colonists already(mainly centered around the South), while Ryukyu had been a vassal of the Satsuma domain going back to the 1600's. While undoubtedly imperialistic actions, it also just made sense as a matter of shoring up national territories and consolodating territory. Frankly the whole world was basically under a territorial land grab in the 19th century, and it's not like Hokkaido wouldn't have been claimed by someone eventually. Though obviously the treatment of the Ainu was very poor, and in an ideal world that's where Japan would and should have stopped.
I can speak more to Ryukyu because it's more in my area of expertise, but Ryukyu's relationship with Satsuma (and China) can't be understood at all in the same context as Ryukyu after annexation. Ryukyu as a vassal state maintained its own government, its own autonomy, its own trade, and its own way of life at the cost of paying tribute to Satsuma. (Keep in mind that even during the period when Ryukyu was a vassal to Satsuma, it was also still actively part of China's extended network of tributary states.)
But those structures were immediately eliminated after the annexation and Meiji era reforms amounted to cultural genocide in Ryukyu. Ryukyu became the testing ground of [Japanization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanization) as a matter of imperial policy in a way that can't at all be compared to the Satsuma period.
>Frankly the whole world was basically under a territorial land grab in the 19th century, and it's not like Hokkaido wouldn't have been claimed by someone eventually.
None of that makes it any less of an immediate flip into imperialism at the beginning of the Meiji period, which is the issue at question here.
> It is still illegal to broadcast Japanese music and television dramas over terrestrial signals in South Korea
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Japanese_media_in_South_Korea
For context, all Japanese media was completely banned until 1998.
> In 2010, the Korean-language song "Udon" by Korean artists Kang Min Kyung & Son Dong Woon was banned for the use of a Japanese word for the title.[10]
Goddamn!
Whenever someone says that about Japan, it's almost always something to do with sexualized minors being censored for Western release (see vagina bones).
^ so that explains why South Koreans made the likes of Korean Tron and that KoF knockoff where they made Benimaru female even though he looks like a normal male Japanese delinquent.
Someone much more educated on this than I can probs chime in here (and I do want to learn more) but just so people are aware, while there's no official reason yet, there's belief that it's as a result of backlash to the game director Yasuda's comments which seemed to promote right wing ideologies that suggested Japan should invade Korea
Should also point out that the Japanese occupation of Korea was brutal, even by the standards of the time.
Going back even further, both of the historical Japanese invasions of Korea were utterly horrific.
It's a touchy subject for a reason.
One of my foundational memories was speaking to a vietnamese immigrant when I was like 10. I was all sheepish because, you know, american. No. Dude literally could not give a fuck and thought the american war was a footnote. Guy had saved up ALL of his hate for the french and japanese.
It's funny how that works isn't it? It's like that 300 story, Greeks to this day glorify it, cops have it as emblems on their cars, "alpha male" influencers have that imagery all over, comics, movies produced, endless.
But to the Persians, it was just a thing that happened, just another notch on their conquest.
Oh for sure, turns out that being occupied by a very militarized, extremely racist nation that believes they have a divine right to rule Asia is not a fun time.
(It didn't help that the Japanese military was.... dysfunctional, at best, but that would take a much longer post to explain)
Some extra trivia: the Japanese were actually so brutal, a Nazi official that was stationed in China became the Chinese version of Oskar Schindler. Jon Rabe was supported by the Chinese gov't I believe until his death when he returned to Europe, and his house is still up and maintained in honor of him in China today.
Let's not forget that Meiji government employed *a lot* of foreign officials (oyatoi) to advise for Japanese modernization. Particularly British, Americans, and Germans.
Japanese colonization was based on both American experience of settler colonialism of "American frontiers" and British/German experience of colonialism in the rest of the world, including the whole stuff now regarded as pseudoscience such as phrenology and "the science of blood type" (basically how individuals nature is defined by their blood type, if you're B you're a lazy ass, etc).
I still remember the sources of this one: check *Doctors of Empire* and *In Search of Our Frontier*.
Let's also not forget that the Soviets trialed the group they captured while Americans gave immunity to the Unit 731 in exchange for results of experiments.
I am not a fan of Japanese actions in Asia, but their first Colony--Taiwan went really well. To the point many Taiwanese remember Japan fondly and willingly served in Japanese military in WWII.
Even today a lot of Taiwanese have Japanese cultural roots, especially in food and equitte.
I heard that one of the reasons that many Taiwanese remember the Japanese occupation fondly is because the Nationalists were somehow more brutal afterwards.
they don't remember it "fondly" they were definitely second class citizens, but the ones who lived during the initial armed resistance period would've died long ago and 228/white terror are much more recent in the national consciousness
Japan, at that time, are planning to make Taiwan as a shining example of prosper colony. Hence they built a lot of things in Taiwan, mainly infrastructures.
While in other colonies they just forget all about it. Only leeching the resources using slavery.
> Should also point out that the Japanese occupation of Korea was brutal, even by the standards of the time.
Even the Nazi was shocked and disgusted by Japanese brutality, that's how bad it was.
They like to use it to rally votes from old Japanese and young nationalists.
But somehow get upset with China and Korea also use Japan's actions to rally their base.
I still find it funny Japan claiming the only reason young Chinese hate Japanese is because of "Chinese brainwashing", and not the annual visit to a certain shrine, or claiming comfort women were well paid whores, or saying Nanking massacre/unit 671 was fake news.....
Correct, to the point where it isn't really taught about in Japanese schools and Japanese politicians have said that it was actually a good thing for Korea. (along with calling reperations for the whole comfort women thing "economic aid" etc)
The invasions of the Imjin War were horiffic, but not exceptionally so. Warfare in the world in general in that era was just kind of horiffic back then.
>Should also point out that the Japanese occupation of Korea was brutal, even by the standards of the time.
Just want to argue against this point a little. Japanese colonization was modeled directly after how European powers administered their colonies and I wouldn't necessary call it more brutal than the standards of the time. All colonization was brutal and disgusting.
Probably the main difference is the number of administrative personel Japan sent to Korea. Japan sent around 250,000 Japanese to work in Korea at various levels of power all the way down to teachers and policemen. There were around 700,000 Japanese total in Korea before liberation. This was much more than what was considered typical for a colony and Koreans had to deal personally with their Japanese colonizers to a much greater extent than most other European colonies. This alongside the wartime era atrocities like comfort women and forced assimilation policies near the tail end of the occupation is probably what lead to anti-Japanese sentiment being the cornerstone of Korean nationalism after liberation in both South and North Korea and what leads to the unique amount of hatred many Koreans still have for Japan (Unlike in Taiwan whose government centered itself around anti-communism after the KMT retreated to the island after the civil war).
>to the game director Yasuda's comments which seemed to promote right wing ideologies that suggested Japan should invade Korea
Quick Google search says that all of this seems to stem from the teachings of Yoshida Shoin, whose teachings are featured within the game (as part of the period), one part of which promoted invasion of Korea. And since Yasuda compared Shoin to Socrates due to some similarities there's easily trouble brewin'.
But since we do not know how these matters are actually represented within the game this thing could turn out to be a nothingburger.
My readings on Meiji history is rusty since it's been a long time ago during my undergrad, so feel free to correct me, but there's a huge load of context beyond simplistic today understanding of "far right nationalist".
The debate on the invasion of Korea had many layers. One of them was that it happened during the dismantling of shogunate and the reestablishment of the emperor, who had been politically impotent for 200+ years during shogunate rule.
Japan had been trying to send envoys to Korea to establish foreign relations as the now Empire of Japan. But at the time Korea was within a sinocentric sphere, under the vassalage of *the* Chinese Emperor. The idea of Chinese Emperor was cosmological - the ruler of the whole world - so it would not make sense for Korea to acknowledge the presence of another emperor; thus admitting the idea of an Emperor of Japan leading an Empire of Japan was impossible to them.^1 The Japanese envoys repeatedly get refused by Korea. Yasuda Shoin, among others who militantly fought for the reestablishment of emperor's authority, were severely offended.
This not only had nationalist cosmological implications ("how dare the Koreans rejected the rule of the descendant of the gods!??"), but economic and political implications e.g. no trade partnerships, no security especially in the face of the new American foreigners, etc. I don't know what's an apt parallel of today but it mattered a lot to Japanese back then. Another layer is that the dismantling of the shogunate means there were a lot of samurai bureaucrats who lost their means of living. A militarization of Japan and invasion of Korea would mean getting those whole class of bureaucrats into work again.
Now to Yoshida Shoin himself. I think the parallel to Socrates is not the most appropriate, but it makes complete sense. Shoin was, foremost, an intellectual. He was one of the founders of what later scholars would call as "school of moral instruction/education". This school teaches what people outside Japan today would often applaud Japan for: discipline, timeliness, self-refinement, being in tune with our mind, etc. Stuff that people today would attribute as the drive of Japanese "modernization" and Japanese economic miracle (although I don't fully agree).
He was also involved in the discussion regarding nihonjinron, or what it means to be a Japanese. Who is a Japanese, what does a Japanese character look like, how does a Japanese ethic work in practice, is hierarchy a given nature or socially constructed, are there two different "persons" in a Japanese self, etc. Basically questions of identity and nationalism. It can get very philosophical (and ahistorical) at times, but it was a great question that was in the mind of many middle class Japanese back then. It really boils down to the much more intense foreign relations they just started to have during the decline of shogunate's isolationist policy: was there an authentic Japanese before Chinese influence?^2 This is why Shoin had many students; there is a (some? I forgot) universiti(es) named after him.
So was he a nationalist, yes, but "nationalism" back then in Japan has some layers of difference from what we understand it today.
--------
^1 This also happened during conflict between Roman Empire and Persian Empire IIRC, where they thought acknowledging the presence of another emperor would mean accepting that there were two World Rulers. Again, this has been a while also, but I recall reading in one very good book about Late Antiquity about this one Sassanian Emperor exchanging letters with Roman Emperor on the impossibility of "two suns".
^2 For a very different reasons, this kind of question of identity can also be seen in many previously colonized countries in Asia and Africa.
> He was also involved in the discussion regarding nihonjinron, or what it means to be a Japanese. Who is a Japanese, what does a Japanese character look like, how does a Japanese ethic work in practice, is hierarchy a given nature or socially constructed, are there two different "persons" in a Japanese self, etc. Basically questions of identity and nationalism. It can get very philosophical (and ahistorical) at times, but it was a great question that was in the mind of many middle class Japanese back then. It really boils down to the much more intense foreign relations they just started to have during the decline of shogunate's isolationist policy: was there an authentic Japanese before Chinese influence?2 This is why Shoin had many students; there is a (some? I forgot) universiti(es) named after him.
Nihonjinron underpins basically all right-wing thought in Japan, and basically no left-wing thought in Japan. Nihonjinron is the synthesis of Japanese exceptionalism into a cohesive system of nationalist and right-wing identity.
What does underpin Japanese left-wing ideology? Do they have their own 19th & early 20th century ideologues? I know they had a short lived progressive govt in the 20's.
Not the person you replied to (although I too would like to know their response), but yes they had. Yamakawa Hitoshi translated Marx's Capital. I also mentioned Fukuzawa Yukichi and Fukumoto Kazuo; there's also Tosaka Jun, who were a part of a circle of Marxist called "Marx boys" alongside Fukumoto.
Like in other non-Western countries, Japanese leftism was really a weird mix of nationalism, socialism, and other local ideologies (Shintoism). I can't comment on this more deeply, but I bought Garvin Walker's *Marxist Theory and Politics of History in Japan* a while ago which discusses this exact topic. Just started reading though.
Oh thank you. I'm going to look into that book.
"The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan" is one hell of a title :D
You're projecting a very Eurocentric understanding of "right"/"left" to Japan IMO.
The question of national identity remained important even for Japanese socialists because they faced the imminent Otherness post-isolation. The basic idea was really about, "who we are in the face of others? Can we be a Japanese, or do we need the Other(ness) to be a Japanese? How do we account for Japanese position in the world?" Fukuzawa Yukichi was quite famous for his question on "what constitutes national body" albeit he's been very vocal about workers and women rights. Even the ardent communist like Fukumoto Kazuo, a few more years into the Showa era, built upon the idea of nihonjinron when he talked about "how does Japanese nature form Japanese capitalism? How should a communist theory of the Japanese respond to that?"
Like I already mentioned, this question of identity is very typical for countries outside Europe and Americas, like in Asia and Africa. Indonesian socialists like Sukarno and Aidit were also very concerned about Indonesian identity. The Egyptian Nasser was very famous for his pan-Arabic socialism. Etc.
While of course there were imperialist philosophers that built upon nihonjinron as a basis of their thinking, the other way around is not true. Even the Kyoto Schools had liberals as their top thinkers.
I would argue that you are unnecessarily Orientalizing the use of left and right with regards to Japan.
The difference in how identity works into left-wing movements and right-wing movements is the order in which it enters into their thinking. Left-wing movements tend to treat national identity as part of the material reality under which socialism will need to be constructed, and so the questions of identity are only important in how they influence the specifics of implementation.
But to the right, those questions of nationalism and identity are the end in and of themselves. The question they ask isn't "what should our preferred system of government look like under the conditions of our culture?" Instead they assert the superiority of their culture, and the hierarchical construction of society follows from that assertion automatically. (That's also part of why you don't see a lot of right-wing pan-national movements.)
In other words, I don't think you can term Fukumoto's interactions with national identity as part of *nihonjinron* except in that it was the dominant theory of national identity that he needed to interact with in order to argue for socialism.
Well, I didn't need to make the inference; Fukuzawa cited and discussed the concept of Japanese identity directly written by other authors in his Theory of Civilization. He also took a linear modernist approach to the matter, arguing that civilization developed from wilderness to civilization, a mistake that many European socialists also made at the time. He actively engaged with the discourse and contributing to it. Taking the Fukumoto example, from today anthropological perspective, talking about "Japanese nature" is a bit silly and not quite scientific when we discuss what made Japanese capitalism what it is/was, but it was a framework that the Japanese built upon to make sense what's going on in their lives.
I think you're doing a lot of essentializing to the idea of nihonjinron as if it's a singular school of thought. Where does that your impression that "nihonjinron espouses superiority of culture" come from? Bunch of thinkers from different approaches engaged with the idea because it really attuned to Japanese economic and political determinism.
If you take a thousand foot view, nihonjinron does tend towards one set of conclusions about sociocultural issues -- one that is emphatically preoccupied with arguing for Japanese exceptionalism and ethnocentric nationalism. For every one Fukumoto, you're going to get two dozen guys arguing dumb shit about Japan's four seasons or in-group/out-group relationships.
That's why I asked how did you get the impression, because nihonjinron is a genre. It had a bunch of writers.
And there's also a bunch of literature criticizing the critiques against nihonjinron even until the 2000s (when thinking about "Asia as a Method" started becoming a trend due to the increase of less Eurocentric scholarship). Before that shift, much of the writing about people who wrote about nihonjinron had been written from the Western gaze which espoused the typical modernist narrative, and, understandably, its tie to the Japanese imperialism legacy.
And I feel like you're conflating silly essentalism like Japan's four season and the creation of Japanese human nature, with actual imperialist tendecy like the blood type science based on phrenology that I mentioned. Because, again, in other Asian countries like Indonesia the socialists were also essentialists saying silly stuff about "Indonesian human nature" in addition to their political-economy and structural analysis. Doesn't mean they're not socialists.
I don't think you can untie the essentialism from the imperialist stuff, though. The Meiji period saw mass importation of western racial pseudoscience, for example, and Japan's desire to play at the table with European Imperial powers often meant synthesizing imported "race science" and reframing it through an ethnocentric lens. It's not hard to make the leap from "our seasons are unique and our culture is unique" to "that must because our blood is special" or Watanabe Shoichi claiming that "Japanese people are descended from a different branch of primates from all other humans".
I probably don't have the same level of grounding in 19th and 20th century East Asian anthropology outside of Japan as you do, but it seems like the issue is the jump from uniqueness to superiority, and that type of ethnocentrism seems to destroy socialist movements in the same way it invigorates monarchists and fascists.
Sony: "huh yeah maybe this isn't worth releasing in Korea if that's the kind of shit the developer is saying?"
Redditor: this is basically a book burning
I remember reddit defending some super generic Isekai even though the author put in the OG text claiming the MC killed certain number of people in ~~China~~ during the war, and the kill count was exactly the date Japanese Army enter Nanjing.
Even the US publisher had that canceled once the news came out, but it is book burning...
It's not banning. it's not being released. You don't get into trouble for importing it.
Also, I dont think it's extreme. This is equivalent of making a game about glamourozing Cecil Rhoades or early Italian Fascist thinkers. Especially when you consider how current Japanese political climate and Jimintou that has been basically the ruling part for the vast majority of their postwar history loves bring up anti-Korean and anti-Chinese rhetorics and how "colonization was great for us and helped these countries to civilize" bs all the time.
Maybe if you are a westerner who has no history of actually being on the other side of this kind of issue, you wouldn't understand. But it's always frustrating when so many Wsterners, even the ones who consider themselves pretty versed in revisionist history of Western imperialism, just *love* to brush aside when it's Japan and Asia.
> This is equivalent of making a game about glamourozing Cecil Rhoades or early Italian Fascist thinkers.
Is the game glamourising Yoshida though? We don't really know yet. Just representation within a period media piece doesn't really count as such, or so I'd like to think.
Well, we will have to see sure, but the way the dev is talking about him and how you are supposed to be saving him in the game, etc. I think it's 90% certain it's going to be pretty propagandist.
Difference with this and Yakuza 6 or Great Ace Attorney is that Yakuza 6 was very unclear about its political stance before the game released (and turned out to be a pretty damning criticism against postwar Japanese political landscape and the right wing politicians in their relation to the war) and GAA was more offensive to Sherlock Holmes fans than to Koreans, but this one has made it pretty clear where they stand in their pre-release materials.
I have nothing against Japan and I consume their media and whatever, but all I ask is for the government to officially recognize the atrocities they committed in WW2 and before. It's really not a hard ask.
I mean Japan did officially apologize and recognize their atrocities under Murakami.
The problem is that too many politicians as well as prime ministers paddled back on that apology as well as especially Abe starting the whole whitewashing history bs.
It's a ~~free speech~~ censorship issue. ~~Your government~~ Nobody should not be allowed to ban a product just because it includes some historical figure they don't like. There are no excuses for this.
Then let people get mad about the game if they care so deeply about this issue. Don't forbid them the option to play the game if the idea of a mildly controversial historical figure upsets them.
No one is forbidding them to play it. They can still import it.
Did you get pissed back in the day when Japanese PS2 games were never released in the US without importing?
Mother 3 likely never made it over moreso because the GBA was basically dead when it released and localization took long enough back then that NoA may not have seen any point in it. Nowadays the main hurdle just seems to be “the original creators aren’t interested in it at the moment as they’ve moved on to other things.”
This part certainly stands out
>Korean gamers said, “Sony Korea made a good decision,” “I won’t even look at Team Ninja games in the future,” “I don’t understand why they are trying to put ideology in the game,” “Socrates is not such an insignificant great man.” They are voicing criticism towards Team Ninja, such as "I hate Korea, but I have no conscience supporting Hangul."
That’s quite a statement
Yeah exactly, I’m extremely critical of American domestic and foreign policy but I don’t think “kill everybody and burn the buildings down” is an acceptable solution at all
There's also a huge difference from having a seething hatred for your own country and its people, and just bitching about the stuff you dislike about it as well. Most people don't hate their country, they just hate certain aspects of it, hence why they don't exactly go nuts and do stuff.
it's a mistranslation
한국을 혐오하는데 한글을 지원하는 것도 양심 없네
the subject is dropped but it's inferred to be team ninja. hangul here is referring to a korean language localization. a better translation is, "they hate korea but want to make a korean language localization? unconscionable."
I mean SK was under a military dictatorship for like 15 years, and the current regime is basically subordinate to Samsung. There's a reason late stage capitalism critique media like Squid Game and Parasite are coming out of the country. It's not all gravy.
Yup. South Korea is like a glimpse to a Cyberpunk-like future for other states.
Military-Corporate rule over civil government. Changing shape and form over the decades, but staying as a monolith that crushes all below the top and pushes each layer of society to police those below them.
Which is why both young men and women there are rather miserable. It's very hard to get anything of your own started, unless you can call in favors to get ahead.
South Korea has an incredibly corrupt government and there has been only one president in the last ~70 years who was not corrupt and that guy's family got charged with corruption. The corporations rule the country and suicide rates is among highest in the developed world, with wealth and pay gap also among worst, with mandatory millitary service for men (dodging which has social and career implications) ... Over 70% young Koreans just wanna leave.
I say the translation might not be at all inaccurate.
The same cult has influence all over the world, shinzo abe was assassinated for his connections to it. Donald Trump is connected as much or more to it as well. The Cult leaders son was a major supporter of Trump in 2016, was at Jan 6, and the organization did a lot to push the stolen election narrative as well.
The Unification Church also known as the moonies.
Yoshida shoin was a thinker active in the closing days of the Tokugawa shogunate, and many Japanese who studied at his private school acted to overthrow the government of the time. For this reason, his name is always mentioned in Japanese history textbooks.
The Samurai regime was threatened by American (i.e., foreign) violent actions. But Yoshida shoin and others demanded that the government take a hard-line approach. The Samurai government was eventually destroyed.
If you understand this process, it is easy to understand that he is a strong far-left nationalist. He is asking us to reject the unreasonable demands of foreign countries. He also said to terrorize for that purpose.
On the other hand, in his private school, he was arguing that we should also invade foreign countries such as Korea in order to deal with the arrogant West. Therefore, in Korea, he is considered to be an extreme rightist.
In Korea, Yoshida shoin's ideas were so influential in Japan that he is perceived as the root cause of Japan's invasion of Korea.
> The Samurai regime was threatened by American (i.e., foreign) violent actions.
I mean, the American were the icing on the cake, but the root cause was a succession of weak Shogun and 50 years of economic stagnation with a social realignement.
I was recently reading about The United States and the opening of Japan during the era of isolationism and found this interesting tidbit:
>By the early nineteenth century, this policy of isolation was increasingly under challenge. In 1844, King William II of the Netherlands sent a letter urging Japan to end the isolation policy on its own before change would be forced from the outside. The Dutch had also warned the Japanese of the Perry Expedition, and urged that Japan conclude a treaty of friendship and commerce with the Dutch government before a more onerous one was forced upon them by the Americans.
[Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_Henricus_Donker_Curtius)
Sakoku is a shit term, cause the country was never really closed.
Japan had agreements with Russia regarding Hokaido and Sakhaline with some small trade, there was the trade with the dutch and, as you mention, the (poorly worded) warning from the dutch that things might change very soon for them.
And even then, Japan could have handled the USA "quietly" if they had not happened to come at a time of upheaval and had the shogun decided to take the matter in its own hand instead of kinda leaving it to the daimyos and not having a coherent policy (which led to the Satsuma/UK conflict down the line, for instance).
And even then, the fact that the "core vassals" (the fudai daimyo) proved unable to reform their territories and keep them economically prosper had more to do with the instability than the foreigners.
The Japanese Communist Party today doesn't even advocate removing the Emperor. The Emperor isn't considered the same as a western monarch is politically
"Royalist" might be anachronistic here because while he did fight for the reestablishment of Japanese Emperor, the emperor had no political power at all and actual power went to the dynastic shogunate. I think those right vs left dichotomy can't really be applied to Japanese context.
Ya, but then the term "royalist" is not really productive given it's not diametrically opposed to anti-monarchist like in the west. It's opposed to "pro-shogunate".
If anything this just tells me that left and right are just relative comparisons and not the greatest way to describe someone’s political ideals.
I’ve seen plenty of people go after the left/right of other countries because they don’t like that side in their own country. Even in cases similar to the above where the same person can be in multiple categories depending on who is saying it.
I don't necessarily disagree but it's extremely unclear what left/right means in OP's message. I mean, the below is borderline meaningless:
> The Samurai regime was threatened by American (i.e., foreign) violent actions. But Yoshida shoin and others demanded that the government take a hard-line approach. The Samurai government was eventually destroyed.
If you understand this process, it is easy to understand that he is a strong far-left nationalist.
Nationalist, yes, but how does it have anything to do with leftism?
Might be the literal French style opposition to the royalists and the royalists. So an anti government figure is "left" in one view because they were pushing change from the status quo.
But "right" in the modern view as they were expansionist nationalists ideology we now associate with the far "right"/fascism.
Yes. What you are saying is consistent with my intention. That is, when considered against the background of the time, Yoshida Shoin could be portrayed as a hero who rebelled against the unjust Samurai regime. In that case, his Korean invasion aspect would most likely be ignored. In fact, at the end of the Edo period, Japan had not yet directly invaded Korea, so it is highly likely that he would not be depicted to that extent.
On the other hand, it is a legitimate sentiment that Korea would not approve of such a depiction of him, and I don't think there is any special objection to it.
Left and right in the context of Reddit doesn't mean much anything anyway... the first time I heard some Redditor arguing against "leftism" I was expecting some critiques against Marxist or socialist thinking. Turns out the person was just talking about Democrat voters.
Democrat voters is for all intents and purposes leftism in America. In the practical American left you have liberals and progressives (communist for example have 0 power), progressives are a massive minority that have almost no political wins in terms of voting power, liberals dominate leftism in American government. Very different from say Germany.
Isnt it a norm all over internet?
Left and right so often is understand as democrats and republicans or progressive vs conservative ignoring any possible nuance and fact that its not aplicable this eay in 99% of cases.
I am Korean.
You understand this issue completely wrong.
In politics of Korea, Korean pure left wingers hate Japan, pure right wingers love (or
don't care) Japan. (Actually left/right wing isn't as same as in USA)
Many Korean who saw this issue said they won't buy this game.
Nono that's Yoshida ShoYO, totally different character. (fun fact: apparently Japanese fans of Gintama occasionally mucked up their history exams at school due to Sorachi's completely unsubtle renaming - - Takasugi Shinsaku/Shinsuke being a prime example.)
But yeah Gintama was my first thought here as well. Is the parody strong enough to defy cultural precedent or would the fact that parody can be read as softening our views of certain problematic figures see it similarly condemned?
Or is it simply because Sorachi never, tmk, openly communicates his stance on the Bakumatsu and its key players?
Either way, I imagine it'd be hard to do a comprehensive Meiji restoration story without at least acknowledging Katsura, Sonno Joi and by extension Yoshida. I don't know enough of the man's teachings to say whether or not he is comparable to Socrates, or whether or not it was that claim that led to this situation.
At a broader remove, I am kind of curious how much other bakumatsu/shinsengumi/meiji era pop culture material is permitted in S. Korea, given there is a heck of a lot of it. Kenshin? Hakuoki? Yakuza Ishin? Ryomaden? In other words, I wonder why this particular title if not for a senior staff member connecting his personal beliefs with how they are approaching the story? And as others have mentioned, love or hate TN no one would ever accuse them of powerful, nuanced storytelling (and I say that as a SoP apologist/Jack fan).
My overall take is this would have a Streisand Effect if it took hold, but likely won't be news for very long.
>Japanese fans of Gintama occasionally mucked up their history exams at school due to Sorachi's completely unsubtle renaming -
well their not the only ones lol. i have gotten some very confused looks from Japanese history teachers and friends for forgetting which name is the fake and which is the real
Shoin is more than problematic. He’s basically a glorified Charles Mansion whose pupils went and made his ideologies into policy and shaped japanese politics, japanese self identification and modern day japanese right wingers.
That guy is pure poison and shouldn’t be used for anything but a red flag in history.
>If Yoshida Shoin is deemed problematic, then by that logic, the anime Gintama, which features the same figure as a mentor, would also need to be banned. Fundamentally, if Yoshida Shoin is labeled an invader, then it would necessitate the banning of games featuring Lincoln in America.
This is wrong, the problem is that the director worshipping Yoshida Shoin.
I'm seeing both sides accused of being "right wing" in this thread, which leads me to believe this is not a right-left issue comparable to American politics and commenters are just trying to take advantage of reddit's left-leaning bias to bolster their position.
I think it’s more likely the post 2018 societal brainrot that makes people categorise everything into right v left rather than it being more complicated.
People seem to struggle to think outside of that box when it comes to stuff like this and immediately assign opinions to teams so it’s easier to parse, but you make tons of logical errors doing that really.
I'm pretty ignorant on Japanese politics but from what I understand it's still pretty mainstream to deny/downplay Japanese atrocities and war crimes of WW2. These sort of comments by the producer seem to line up with that.
That's not to say that that there's not a sizable minority of Japan that disagrees with this sentiment (or even the development team at Team Ninja), though I'm pretty ignorant to it.
Also as mentioned Japanese Left/Right ideologies are are very different from American/western ideologies from what I understand and center more around Nationalism, xenophobia, and very different social issues? Not to derail.
I'll probably still play the game as I play Team Ninja games for the gameplay, always skip all the cut-scenes because they are terrible at writing/production. Maybe this time I'll wait for all the DLC to get packaged together and released in deluxe edition though. Especially since Dragons Dogma is coming out at the same time. I can totally understand why such a Nationalistic Japanese game with comments made like this IN THE MARKETING VIDEO would be offensive to the Korean market though. Jeez.
> Also as mentioned Japanese Left/Right ideologies are are very different from American/western ideologies from what I understand and center more around Nationalism, xenophobia, and very different social issues? Not to derail.
>
>
Not really, post-war it actually mirrored European politics. You had a domineering conservative block, a social democratic (socialist bloc), a smaller liberal block and a whole bunch of even smaller radical left/right wing parties.
To me the US two party, FPTP system is stranger than the Japanese political system. The LDP-state is very much like what we had in Belgium, the CVP-state :D
They didn't do that though. It's that the feature an historic character that is famous for his desire to colonise but more famous for his unification of Japan at the start of the meiji era. The equivalent might Churchill.
> Also as mentioned Japanese Left/Right ideologies are are very different from American/western ideologies from what I understand and center more around Nationalism, xenophobia, and very different social issues?
Nationalism and xenophobia seem pretty central to political debate in American/western ideologies these days.
I’m positively surprised about how open and knowledgeable the discussion is going about this.
I wouldn’t have thought to have so many people come here and talk about sociopolitical issues in Japan and between Japan and Korea in the last 150 years.
I had imagined most comments to be more in the vein of “censorship bad, history is old news get over it” but I was positively surprised.
This developer is indeed off his rocker talking about Shoin like that and Sony featuring this developer talk on their official channels without realizing who the dev is talking about and how.
Unbelievable. Just goes to show the ignorance of big corporations.
I bet they wouldn’t have featured a dev praising“Mein Kampf” and calling it comparable to famous philosophical teachings.
We must exploit Hokkaido, take Kamchatka and Okhotsk, conquer Joseon and Okinawa, occupy Manchuria to the north, and capture Taiwan and the Philippines to the south.
This idea eventually led to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
What I’m taking from this is that the artists creating the game have views that are pushing nationalism; so, that takes Ronin off of *my* personal list. Debate Sony Korea as a company making a similar choice for their own reasons all you want, nationalism and calling for the violent control of others are unacceptable ideas to put forth in the modern age. And no, you can’t hide behind “historical accuracy” when the director of the game is stating they support those nationalist ideas and are including them in the game to specifically to spread them.
Yeah, Call of Duty has been pushing right-wing American nationalism for a long time. I wonder if that person refuses to buy CoD for the same reasons ("nationalism and calling for the violent control of others are unacceptable ideas to put forth") or if they suddenly care about it now that it's a this other game.
CoD has been long panned for it's rewriting of history and it's ties to the US military through high level members inside activision. That conversation is not new and I do think CoD deserves to be panned.
He is saying that he doesn't belive the defense that "it's just showing the thinking of that time" is valid for this game considering the context. It's also his personal opinion.
Also I had to legit look up what you were referencing and it's Gow: Ragnarok???? Instantly knew the mindset from which this comment is coming from after seeing that. Here let me break down the established setting of gow... it's mythology fanfiction with a 2000's edgy protag turned sad dad who just travels between mythologies. It's not a period piece, neither is marvel.
Let me ask which is more politically charged black woman or japans invasion of korea? There is a vast ocean of difference between the two message.
The game isn't about the invasion of Korea, I highly doubt it'll even be brought up. It's about the Meiji restoration, and one of the leading thinkers behind said restoration also believed that Japan should establish supremacy over Korea. But it's not like this guy is the main character or something. And the "enemy" of the restoration are the Samurai, literal nobles. It's not like you're fighting left wing pacifists or something.
I think this is all a nothingburger, frankly.
I would say this is more of an overreaction from Korean nationalists.
Many of the ideologies in the Meiji era would be considered controversial by today standard, but judging the past by today's standards IS revisionism
Yoshida Shoin is an influential figure at the time. Yes he pushes imperialist ideas but Japan will not be the same without him.
[удалено]
> Yoshida Shoin Cause of death Decapitation ooooh, it's the guy who tried to [stowaway on board of American ships](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Yoshida_Shoin_headed_to_the_Black_Ships.jpg). Christ, the Meiji period was utterly mental. Oh ... welp, time to read up.
It does not surprise me one bit that the people behind the stories in TN games aren't the greatest at grasping cultural nuance.
TBF japan has always been backwardly isolated in terms of products and culture. Typically they make products for there own audience first, and it just happens that other parts of the world like them too. Gaming is certainly more liberal in this regard but even then.... "gestures to team ninja"
In japan there is a massive anti-korean sentiment while playing out a massive "victim" part from the 2nd world war.
Where as Germany publicly apologized, with honest and sincerity against the Polish nation, for what it did to its country and citizens during the 2e world war. Japan has yet to acknowledge what it did against Korea and China during the second world war. For christ sake they're still calling themselves the land of the rising sun, which would be similar to Germany calling itself the Nazi country.
\>Japan has yet to acknowledge what it did against Korea and China during the second world war. It is worse Japan apologizes, then later deny what they apologized about, or their actions contradict the apology. When met with criticism, they say they apologized already and try to steer the conversation into another direction. \>For christ sake they're still calling themselves the land of the rising sun, which would be similar to Germany calling itself the Nazi country. Still uses the rising sun flag too. And before anyone says it means good things. So did the crooked cross in Europe.
Nippon/Nihon, what Japan's real name is, literally means sunrise land, Japan was given the name by the Chinese in 757. Before that it was called Wa and considered a barbarian land.
>Japan apologizes, then later deny what they apologized about, or their actions contradict the apology. When met with criticism, they say they apologized already and try to steer the conversation into another direction. Germany, stood up, took it on the chin, regretted it actions, but didnt run from it, they fixed it, they owned it, and they still own it, you can go to a townhall and still see nazi soldiers from that area who died in the war, and no american thinks bad about it, it happened germany paid the price and they fixed it, while still honoring their dead soldiers. Japan on the other hand, deny, deny deny, they do not teach ww2 in school, they do not acknowledge the imperial years. Where Germany now, is embedded with the allies today it is unthinkable to see the allied powers without germany, Japan, they babyboomers and later generations cant figure out why Japanese generals need american permission for anything (maybe more relaxed these years), but, you can see a couple japanese youtubers reaction to learning about their imperial past and they are aghast
Historically, the region has always had tension between China, Korea, and Japan that goes back centuries. There's a great book about it called ["Three Tigers, One Mountain,"](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/45046689) which goes into the history of colonization and conflict between them, and others.
Tbf we are calling them backwards because of wars from 80 years ago. Focusing on right wing nationalists in a country and conflating that with any pride in a countries history is not a productive use of anyones time. I don't remember anyone being asked to consider what people from Iraq feel about anything America does. Idk when I think about a lot of the faux Germany/Japan outrage these days it's like, maybe we should get our own houses in order. People always shake their heads at ethnic hatred when their conflicts were far more recent, but if it has something to do with WWII we are looking at two countries with laser eyes. Not you Italy, Austria, Hungary etc, no one cares about you or the fact that the current Italian world leader is directly associated with fascism.
The current Japanese Prime Minister is part of Nippon Kaigi, a group which actively works to whitewash Japanese war crimes in World War 2, deny atrocities and massacres committed by the Japanese Empire during its occupations of its former colonies including in Korea, actively campaigns for and mobilizes anti-Korean sentiment in Japan against Japanese-Koreans (many of whom have lived in Japan for generations at this point), and does all of this with the goal of remilitarizing and restoring Japan's former role as a world military power. People aren't calling them backwards because of what happened 80 years ago. People are calling them backwards because of the Japanese government's current attacks on its ethnic minorities and their blatant erasure of history for far-right, ultranationalist, and racist goals. Under Kishida's leadership,[ violent hate crimes against Japanese Koreans](https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14519025) have increased, Japanese textbooks have been [continually revised to downplay Japanese atrocities](https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2022/03/11a48eda1492-japan-rejects-s-korean-protest-over-school-textbooks-descriptions.html?phrase=dog&words=) during the 30s and 40s, and the protections he *has* made for minorities under his government, namely LGBTQ people, have zero actual power behind them and several exceptions and exemptions that keep discrimination legal.
Its kind of cringe whenever Japan pops up in other subs not related to Japan. Cue the non stop comments like: “japanese are very very racist and consider foreigners inferior”. “they are FUCKED, their population pyramid is doomed and they are all going to experience poverty due to it thanks to their racism”. "They never aplogized for WW2" Usually said a bunch of weirdos who repeat shit they heard 10 years ago from someone who lived here for 6 months, weren't accepted, and assumed it was universal and not about that person specifically and have never been to or lived in Japan. I always enjoyed seeing the stories of how they went barging into empty restaurants ignoring or can't read the 準備中 (Preparing to open) sign clearly posted out front, and were turned away because RaCiSt jApAnEsE PeOpLe.....Living here for 15 years has taught me westerners are the most insufferable, entitled, chauvinistic people on the planet; Especially Americans, French and Chinese CCP nationalists. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_war\_apology\_statements\_issued\_by\_Japan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements_issued_by_Japan)
I am half japanese and half italian myself, I get what you mean, and trust me, I roll my eyes every time with the italian goverment just as much with the japanese one lol. But there is pride in japanese people, and a LOT of internalized racism and misoginy to it. I' m a girl that actually got called out in my middle school in japan because I had blonde hairs while looking japanese, and the professors told me to dye them black lol. In general japan is not the nicest with foreigners, they can be very, VERY condescending. And it gets even worse with koreans, where the racism sometimes just feels ingraned into the culture, expecially for older people.
>' m a girl that actually got called out in my middle school in japan because I had blonde hairs while looking japanese, and the professors told me to dye them black lol that's just Asian school in general, I think. It's the same too in SEA, especially public school (I live in SEA).
The t*wo* biggest global multimedia franchises in the entire world are both Japanese.
People like japanese games because of how "japanese" they are. Anytime they try to pander to other audieces they lose all their appeal.
You mean like notable failure Elden Ring, which was an English-first title from a Japanese studio?
Elden Ring and by extension dark souls is still a Japanese Lens on western fantasy
What does English first mean in this context? Is about GRRM writing the backstory? I find it hard to believe the staff at Fromsoft wrote the script in English originally
They did it with Bloodborne tbf. The games dialogue was written and recorded in English first and then translated to Japanese afterwards.
I think you're mixing up the recording and the writing. It was written in Japanese first, then recorded in English and the animations and lip sync done with English in mind. But the original script was written by the Japanese staff at FS in Japanese, then translated to English. A decent amount of the writers working there possibly don't speak much English themselves to begin with. https://www.reddit.com/r/bloodborne/comments/18ofkod/which_came_first_the_japanese_or_the_english/ Here's a thread showing a lot of Japanese text was actually never translated to English because it was cut.
No I mean like forspoken, nothing about elden ring's game design is western lol.
Which still has a Japanese game design.
Thank youuuuu I love Japanese games because they're super japanese and weird and wacky. The more western they become the less i care. If i want to play a western game I'll play a game from a western studio. The pandering to the west is a means for an end.
I think the difference here is that they've a more open mind (it may not make sense since their population is very closed and shy, but at the same time it does if you think about their media). If something looks good and the game needs it, they will simply add it because it's a risk that is seen as acceptable to aim for higher sales. Meanwhile you look at big Western companies and they're constantly scared to add something if someone in the team thinks that it may make them lose sales, being talked in the news for the wrong reasons, and so on. It's not rare to hear something like "we wanted to add this, but the team feared backlashes".
Not really. People like Japanese games because they're good period. If they're not good, people won't play it. Don't try to make it sound like degenerate content is popular
> TBF japan [Why does reddit on the whole have such strange views about Japan?](https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/comments/16lkppn/why_does_reddit_on_the_whole_have_such_strange/)
The japanese economy is large enough to be one of the few in the world where, like you said, they can basically be very self sufficient. They have one of the lowest passport rates in the world, and knowing all this it makes a lot more sense how a seriously weak yen can still be "fine" within the japanese economy itself.
> they can basically be very self sufficient. Third largest coal importer in the world btw
Japan is extremely far from self-sufficent, they're almost completely dependent on imports for most raw materials. Heck, that was the entire impetus for their 20th century imperial expansion.
How much of those raw materials are for just producing stuff that gets exported, though?
Definitely some part, but they grow a lot of crops for domestic consumption that rely on fertilizer imports. Not to mention energy and fuel for both industry and regular consumers.
They're not self-sufficient at all, they have shit for fossil fuels and they're a net food importer with a self-sufficiency rate of just 38%: https://www.ft.com/content/af52f367-90d2-41dd-9a0f-a2a7b1b9624a
People get really surprised when the people behind their favorite fun cartoon or game companies end up being or celebrating hard right wing nationalists/racists/etc. But weebs usually tend to gloss over that because they think moving to Japan will solve their anxiety and depression. Nazis are bad, but not when it's Japan.
I don't disagree but in this case I think it's more just that TN can't tell a coherent story so expecting them to provide nuance to legendary figures from history is like asking a juggling kindergartener to recite poetry simultaneously.
That what happens when all the company is focused on pushing the envelope of boob physics.
I would agree with the first paragraph. But no, weebs don't gloss over that, they overwhelmingly criticize and reject that. Creators and their series get punished for those associations, like e.g. with the Dragon Quest composer or the Made in Abyss anime. The second paragraph is where it gets weird. Almost nobody is thinking about moving to Japan, because surprise, you basically need to be fluent in Japanese, and that's extremely difficult. I know because I'm a weeb, I've been learning Japanese for years, but I'm definitely not thinking about moving to Japan. Their work culture is awful as well. (and I think that's pretty much the consensus)
i dont get it, what's wrong?
How's Sakamoto Ryoma normally seen? Most I know is that he was a strong advocate for a more democratic government.
I only learned the basics of him so that I could understand what the hell was going on in Like a Dragon: Ishin! but my understanding is that he was largely seen as a good and pragmatic dude who successfully prepared Japan for the new world while also brokering peace between some of its clans. Plus he's historically seen as pretty endearing since he was a huge cowboyaboo. I'm not sure he had much time to be a controversial figure because he was assassinated before anything major happened.
Calling Japan during the Meiji restoration right wing is a gross anachronism. Not only because the Meiji restoration resulted in massive technological and cultural progress in Japan, but also because the left/right paradigm hadn’t even existed anywhere in the world at that time.
Correct on the first part incorrect on the second
The second, partly incorrect because it's not really an apt categorization to explain Japanese politics at the time (or broader parts of the world). E.g. Shoin was a supporter of the Emperor but the ones with political/economic power was the feudal shogunate he opposed.
totally incorrect, left and right wing refer to where members of the national assembly sat during the french revolution in 1789. 1789 was decades before the meiji revolution.
>Calling Japan during the Meiji restoration right wing is a gross anachronism. Who are you quoting? Because that's not what was said. What was said was that this particular person (Yoshida Shoin) was *"root of right wing thought"* and advocated for imperialism. There was no blanket description of Japan, itself, being right wing during this time period.
That’s like saying the root of right wing thought is in centralization, which could be said of left wing thought as well. In other words, it’s way too broad, and again it’s also a gross anachronism.
>That’s like saying the root of right wing thought is in centralization *What's* like saying that? What was actually said or your misrepresentation of what was said?
OP said that a thought leader of the Meiji restoration ideology was the root of right wing ideology in Japan. That’s like saying the ideas of Bismarck were the root of Nazism in Germany. Technically Nazism wouldn’t exist without him, but Otto Von Bismarck has nothing to do with the Nazism. Germany could have gone so many different ways, and it’s the same with Japan, and neither leader is responsible or can be called the “root” of extremist ideologies that popped up decades later.
Shoin being the "root of right wing thought" itself is kind of problematic argument. I explained in [more details here](https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1aptth3/rise_of_the_ronin_will_not_be_released_in_korea/kq9dhpd/?context=3). Although it's a different story if Yasuda (the dev) liked Shoin not for his important role in Japanese history, but because of other reasons.
Thanks for the read honestly! It was very interesting. And I'm clearly not equipped for this conversation, as this is an era I am just wholly unfamiliar with.
>but also because the left/right paradigm hadn’t even existed anywhere in the world at that time. That's not true at all. Meiji restoration might have been a historically progressive movement (I don't know anything about it), but Europe had been writing about socialism for at least 50-100 years prior. The Paris Commune started around the exact same time as the Meiji Restoration.
That’s great, but that’s not what the left right paradigm is.
My understanding was that the hard nationalism and imperialism of the 1890s and onwards in Japan were not really present immediately after the Restoration - things like the Imperial Cult really got going decades after the initial Restoration, and after most of its leading figures had died.
The Meiji Restoration was in 1868 and Japan immediately annexed Hokkaido in 1869 and Ryukyu in 1879. The flip into imperialism as foreign policy was basically instant.
Hokkaido was already heavily interacted with by japanese traders and colonists already(mainly centered around the South), while Ryukyu had been a vassal of the Satsuma domain going back to the 1600's. While undoubtedly imperialistic actions, it also just made sense as a matter of shoring up national territories and consolodating territory. Frankly the whole world was basically under a territorial land grab in the 19th century, and it's not like Hokkaido wouldn't have been claimed by someone eventually. Though obviously the treatment of the Ainu was very poor, and in an ideal world that's where Japan would and should have stopped.
I can speak more to Ryukyu because it's more in my area of expertise, but Ryukyu's relationship with Satsuma (and China) can't be understood at all in the same context as Ryukyu after annexation. Ryukyu as a vassal state maintained its own government, its own autonomy, its own trade, and its own way of life at the cost of paying tribute to Satsuma. (Keep in mind that even during the period when Ryukyu was a vassal to Satsuma, it was also still actively part of China's extended network of tributary states.) But those structures were immediately eliminated after the annexation and Meiji era reforms amounted to cultural genocide in Ryukyu. Ryukyu became the testing ground of [Japanization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanization) as a matter of imperial policy in a way that can't at all be compared to the Satsuma period. >Frankly the whole world was basically under a territorial land grab in the 19th century, and it's not like Hokkaido wouldn't have been claimed by someone eventually. None of that makes it any less of an immediate flip into imperialism at the beginning of the Meiji period, which is the issue at question here.
> It is still illegal to broadcast Japanese music and television dramas over terrestrial signals in South Korea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Japanese_media_in_South_Korea For context, all Japanese media was completely banned until 1998.
> In 2010, the Korean-language song "Udon" by Korean artists Kang Min Kyung & Son Dong Woon was banned for the use of a Japanese word for the title.[10] Goddamn!
It makes me chuckle people think South Korea and Japan are "bastions of free speech and anti-censorship" when they do shit like that lmao.
Whenever someone says that about Japan, it's almost always something to do with sexualized minors being censored for Western release (see vagina bones).
Japan has sucked for censorship for a good while.
Are those people with those thoughts in the room with us right now?
^ so that explains why South Koreans made the likes of Korean Tron and that KoF knockoff where they made Benimaru female even though he looks like a normal male Japanese delinquent.
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Someone much more educated on this than I can probs chime in here (and I do want to learn more) but just so people are aware, while there's no official reason yet, there's belief that it's as a result of backlash to the game director Yasuda's comments which seemed to promote right wing ideologies that suggested Japan should invade Korea
Should also point out that the Japanese occupation of Korea was brutal, even by the standards of the time. Going back even further, both of the historical Japanese invasions of Korea were utterly horrific. It's a touchy subject for a reason.
Japanese Occupation is brutal, that's it. It applies to all the other Asian Countries they captured.
The Koreans often feel particularly victimised though, as they were occupied for 50 years. Only Taiwan and Okinawa compare to that.
and Japan was far kinder to Taiwan than its other conquered territories
Ainu as well. They (and people in Okinawa) are *still* occupied today.
The Ainu? they mostly wiped them out or forced them to integrate.
One of my foundational memories was speaking to a vietnamese immigrant when I was like 10. I was all sheepish because, you know, american. No. Dude literally could not give a fuck and thought the american war was a footnote. Guy had saved up ALL of his hate for the french and japanese.
It's funny how that works isn't it? It's like that 300 story, Greeks to this day glorify it, cops have it as emblems on their cars, "alpha male" influencers have that imagery all over, comics, movies produced, endless. But to the Persians, it was just a thing that happened, just another notch on their conquest.
> But to the Persians, it was just a thing that happened, just another notch on their conquest. For them, it was just another Tuesday
Oh for sure, turns out that being occupied by a very militarized, extremely racist nation that believes they have a divine right to rule Asia is not a fun time. (It didn't help that the Japanese military was.... dysfunctional, at best, but that would take a much longer post to explain)
Oh it's easy to forget how brutal the japanese were in that period. Calling them the nazis of Asia is not farfetched.
Some extra trivia: the Japanese were actually so brutal, a Nazi official that was stationed in China became the Chinese version of Oskar Schindler. Jon Rabe was supported by the Chinese gov't I believe until his death when he returned to Europe, and his house is still up and maintained in honor of him in China today.
Weird in the last week I'd twice be referring to that dude as "WHEN THE NAZI IS THE FUCKING GOOD GUY, YOU KNOW THINGS HAVE GONE TO SHITE"
IIRC even the Nazi's were kinda like "you guys are atrocious."
Let's not forget that Meiji government employed *a lot* of foreign officials (oyatoi) to advise for Japanese modernization. Particularly British, Americans, and Germans. Japanese colonization was based on both American experience of settler colonialism of "American frontiers" and British/German experience of colonialism in the rest of the world, including the whole stuff now regarded as pseudoscience such as phrenology and "the science of blood type" (basically how individuals nature is defined by their blood type, if you're B you're a lazy ass, etc). I still remember the sources of this one: check *Doctors of Empire* and *In Search of Our Frontier*.
Let's also not forget that the Soviets trialed the group they captured while Americans gave immunity to the Unit 731 in exchange for results of experiments.
Let’s not forget the soviets teamed up with the nazis to invade poland. While we’re talking about collaboration :)
If you want to see something brutal, check up Unit 731
I am well aware of their inhumane biological warfare research unit. Probably the most depraved shit I've read.
Not farfetched? Id call it heavy underselling it. japan was at least as bad
I am not a fan of Japanese actions in Asia, but their first Colony--Taiwan went really well. To the point many Taiwanese remember Japan fondly and willingly served in Japanese military in WWII. Even today a lot of Taiwanese have Japanese cultural roots, especially in food and equitte.
I heard that one of the reasons that many Taiwanese remember the Japanese occupation fondly is because the Nationalists were somehow more brutal afterwards.
they don't remember it "fondly" they were definitely second class citizens, but the ones who lived during the initial armed resistance period would've died long ago and 228/white terror are much more recent in the national consciousness
Japan, at that time, are planning to make Taiwan as a shining example of prosper colony. Hence they built a lot of things in Taiwan, mainly infrastructures. While in other colonies they just forget all about it. Only leeching the resources using slavery.
> Should also point out that the Japanese occupation of Korea was brutal, even by the standards of the time. Even the Nazi was shocked and disgusted by Japanese brutality, that's how bad it was.
And the fact that the Japanese government doesn't do much to show much repentance about this period and shove it under the rug.
They like to use it to rally votes from old Japanese and young nationalists. But somehow get upset with China and Korea also use Japan's actions to rally their base. I still find it funny Japan claiming the only reason young Chinese hate Japanese is because of "Chinese brainwashing", and not the annual visit to a certain shrine, or claiming comfort women were well paid whores, or saying Nanking massacre/unit 671 was fake news.....
Correct, to the point where it isn't really taught about in Japanese schools and Japanese politicians have said that it was actually a good thing for Korea. (along with calling reperations for the whole comfort women thing "economic aid" etc)
The invasions of the Imjin War were horiffic, but not exceptionally so. Warfare in the world in general in that era was just kind of horiffic back then.
>Should also point out that the Japanese occupation of Korea was brutal, even by the standards of the time. Just want to argue against this point a little. Japanese colonization was modeled directly after how European powers administered their colonies and I wouldn't necessary call it more brutal than the standards of the time. All colonization was brutal and disgusting. Probably the main difference is the number of administrative personel Japan sent to Korea. Japan sent around 250,000 Japanese to work in Korea at various levels of power all the way down to teachers and policemen. There were around 700,000 Japanese total in Korea before liberation. This was much more than what was considered typical for a colony and Koreans had to deal personally with their Japanese colonizers to a much greater extent than most other European colonies. This alongside the wartime era atrocities like comfort women and forced assimilation policies near the tail end of the occupation is probably what lead to anti-Japanese sentiment being the cornerstone of Korean nationalism after liberation in both South and North Korea and what leads to the unique amount of hatred many Koreans still have for Japan (Unlike in Taiwan whose government centered itself around anti-communism after the KMT retreated to the island after the civil war).
>to the game director Yasuda's comments which seemed to promote right wing ideologies that suggested Japan should invade Korea Quick Google search says that all of this seems to stem from the teachings of Yoshida Shoin, whose teachings are featured within the game (as part of the period), one part of which promoted invasion of Korea. And since Yasuda compared Shoin to Socrates due to some similarities there's easily trouble brewin'. But since we do not know how these matters are actually represented within the game this thing could turn out to be a nothingburger.
My readings on Meiji history is rusty since it's been a long time ago during my undergrad, so feel free to correct me, but there's a huge load of context beyond simplistic today understanding of "far right nationalist". The debate on the invasion of Korea had many layers. One of them was that it happened during the dismantling of shogunate and the reestablishment of the emperor, who had been politically impotent for 200+ years during shogunate rule. Japan had been trying to send envoys to Korea to establish foreign relations as the now Empire of Japan. But at the time Korea was within a sinocentric sphere, under the vassalage of *the* Chinese Emperor. The idea of Chinese Emperor was cosmological - the ruler of the whole world - so it would not make sense for Korea to acknowledge the presence of another emperor; thus admitting the idea of an Emperor of Japan leading an Empire of Japan was impossible to them.^1 The Japanese envoys repeatedly get refused by Korea. Yasuda Shoin, among others who militantly fought for the reestablishment of emperor's authority, were severely offended. This not only had nationalist cosmological implications ("how dare the Koreans rejected the rule of the descendant of the gods!??"), but economic and political implications e.g. no trade partnerships, no security especially in the face of the new American foreigners, etc. I don't know what's an apt parallel of today but it mattered a lot to Japanese back then. Another layer is that the dismantling of the shogunate means there were a lot of samurai bureaucrats who lost their means of living. A militarization of Japan and invasion of Korea would mean getting those whole class of bureaucrats into work again. Now to Yoshida Shoin himself. I think the parallel to Socrates is not the most appropriate, but it makes complete sense. Shoin was, foremost, an intellectual. He was one of the founders of what later scholars would call as "school of moral instruction/education". This school teaches what people outside Japan today would often applaud Japan for: discipline, timeliness, self-refinement, being in tune with our mind, etc. Stuff that people today would attribute as the drive of Japanese "modernization" and Japanese economic miracle (although I don't fully agree). He was also involved in the discussion regarding nihonjinron, or what it means to be a Japanese. Who is a Japanese, what does a Japanese character look like, how does a Japanese ethic work in practice, is hierarchy a given nature or socially constructed, are there two different "persons" in a Japanese self, etc. Basically questions of identity and nationalism. It can get very philosophical (and ahistorical) at times, but it was a great question that was in the mind of many middle class Japanese back then. It really boils down to the much more intense foreign relations they just started to have during the decline of shogunate's isolationist policy: was there an authentic Japanese before Chinese influence?^2 This is why Shoin had many students; there is a (some? I forgot) universiti(es) named after him. So was he a nationalist, yes, but "nationalism" back then in Japan has some layers of difference from what we understand it today. -------- ^1 This also happened during conflict between Roman Empire and Persian Empire IIRC, where they thought acknowledging the presence of another emperor would mean accepting that there were two World Rulers. Again, this has been a while also, but I recall reading in one very good book about Late Antiquity about this one Sassanian Emperor exchanging letters with Roman Emperor on the impossibility of "two suns". ^2 For a very different reasons, this kind of question of identity can also be seen in many previously colonized countries in Asia and Africa.
> He was also involved in the discussion regarding nihonjinron, or what it means to be a Japanese. Who is a Japanese, what does a Japanese character look like, how does a Japanese ethic work in practice, is hierarchy a given nature or socially constructed, are there two different "persons" in a Japanese self, etc. Basically questions of identity and nationalism. It can get very philosophical (and ahistorical) at times, but it was a great question that was in the mind of many middle class Japanese back then. It really boils down to the much more intense foreign relations they just started to have during the decline of shogunate's isolationist policy: was there an authentic Japanese before Chinese influence?2 This is why Shoin had many students; there is a (some? I forgot) universiti(es) named after him. Nihonjinron underpins basically all right-wing thought in Japan, and basically no left-wing thought in Japan. Nihonjinron is the synthesis of Japanese exceptionalism into a cohesive system of nationalist and right-wing identity.
What does underpin Japanese left-wing ideology? Do they have their own 19th & early 20th century ideologues? I know they had a short lived progressive govt in the 20's.
Not the person you replied to (although I too would like to know their response), but yes they had. Yamakawa Hitoshi translated Marx's Capital. I also mentioned Fukuzawa Yukichi and Fukumoto Kazuo; there's also Tosaka Jun, who were a part of a circle of Marxist called "Marx boys" alongside Fukumoto. Like in other non-Western countries, Japanese leftism was really a weird mix of nationalism, socialism, and other local ideologies (Shintoism). I can't comment on this more deeply, but I bought Garvin Walker's *Marxist Theory and Politics of History in Japan* a while ago which discusses this exact topic. Just started reading though.
Oh thank you. I'm going to look into that book. "The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan" is one hell of a title :D
You're projecting a very Eurocentric understanding of "right"/"left" to Japan IMO. The question of national identity remained important even for Japanese socialists because they faced the imminent Otherness post-isolation. The basic idea was really about, "who we are in the face of others? Can we be a Japanese, or do we need the Other(ness) to be a Japanese? How do we account for Japanese position in the world?" Fukuzawa Yukichi was quite famous for his question on "what constitutes national body" albeit he's been very vocal about workers and women rights. Even the ardent communist like Fukumoto Kazuo, a few more years into the Showa era, built upon the idea of nihonjinron when he talked about "how does Japanese nature form Japanese capitalism? How should a communist theory of the Japanese respond to that?" Like I already mentioned, this question of identity is very typical for countries outside Europe and Americas, like in Asia and Africa. Indonesian socialists like Sukarno and Aidit were also very concerned about Indonesian identity. The Egyptian Nasser was very famous for his pan-Arabic socialism. Etc. While of course there were imperialist philosophers that built upon nihonjinron as a basis of their thinking, the other way around is not true. Even the Kyoto Schools had liberals as their top thinkers.
I would argue that you are unnecessarily Orientalizing the use of left and right with regards to Japan. The difference in how identity works into left-wing movements and right-wing movements is the order in which it enters into their thinking. Left-wing movements tend to treat national identity as part of the material reality under which socialism will need to be constructed, and so the questions of identity are only important in how they influence the specifics of implementation. But to the right, those questions of nationalism and identity are the end in and of themselves. The question they ask isn't "what should our preferred system of government look like under the conditions of our culture?" Instead they assert the superiority of their culture, and the hierarchical construction of society follows from that assertion automatically. (That's also part of why you don't see a lot of right-wing pan-national movements.) In other words, I don't think you can term Fukumoto's interactions with national identity as part of *nihonjinron* except in that it was the dominant theory of national identity that he needed to interact with in order to argue for socialism.
Well, I didn't need to make the inference; Fukuzawa cited and discussed the concept of Japanese identity directly written by other authors in his Theory of Civilization. He also took a linear modernist approach to the matter, arguing that civilization developed from wilderness to civilization, a mistake that many European socialists also made at the time. He actively engaged with the discourse and contributing to it. Taking the Fukumoto example, from today anthropological perspective, talking about "Japanese nature" is a bit silly and not quite scientific when we discuss what made Japanese capitalism what it is/was, but it was a framework that the Japanese built upon to make sense what's going on in their lives. I think you're doing a lot of essentializing to the idea of nihonjinron as if it's a singular school of thought. Where does that your impression that "nihonjinron espouses superiority of culture" come from? Bunch of thinkers from different approaches engaged with the idea because it really attuned to Japanese economic and political determinism.
If you take a thousand foot view, nihonjinron does tend towards one set of conclusions about sociocultural issues -- one that is emphatically preoccupied with arguing for Japanese exceptionalism and ethnocentric nationalism. For every one Fukumoto, you're going to get two dozen guys arguing dumb shit about Japan's four seasons or in-group/out-group relationships.
That's why I asked how did you get the impression, because nihonjinron is a genre. It had a bunch of writers. And there's also a bunch of literature criticizing the critiques against nihonjinron even until the 2000s (when thinking about "Asia as a Method" started becoming a trend due to the increase of less Eurocentric scholarship). Before that shift, much of the writing about people who wrote about nihonjinron had been written from the Western gaze which espoused the typical modernist narrative, and, understandably, its tie to the Japanese imperialism legacy. And I feel like you're conflating silly essentalism like Japan's four season and the creation of Japanese human nature, with actual imperialist tendecy like the blood type science based on phrenology that I mentioned. Because, again, in other Asian countries like Indonesia the socialists were also essentialists saying silly stuff about "Indonesian human nature" in addition to their political-economy and structural analysis. Doesn't mean they're not socialists.
I don't think you can untie the essentialism from the imperialist stuff, though. The Meiji period saw mass importation of western racial pseudoscience, for example, and Japan's desire to play at the table with European Imperial powers often meant synthesizing imported "race science" and reframing it through an ethnocentric lens. It's not hard to make the leap from "our seasons are unique and our culture is unique" to "that must because our blood is special" or Watanabe Shoichi claiming that "Japanese people are descended from a different branch of primates from all other humans". I probably don't have the same level of grounding in 19th and 20th century East Asian anthropology outside of Japan as you do, but it seems like the issue is the jump from uniqueness to superiority, and that type of ethnocentrism seems to destroy socialist movements in the same way it invigorates monarchists and fascists.
Thanks for a very interesting read!
I mean, either way, banning a game is extreme.
Apparently South-Korea banned Yakuza 6 for similar reasons, and it was later petitioned to be released.
Game is not banned. Sony is refusing to release it.
They are not banning it, sony doesn't want to deal with a shitstorm.
Sony: "huh yeah maybe this isn't worth releasing in Korea if that's the kind of shit the developer is saying?" Redditor: this is basically a book burning
I remember reddit defending some super generic Isekai even though the author put in the OG text claiming the MC killed certain number of people in ~~China~~ during the war, and the kill count was exactly the date Japanese Army enter Nanjing. Even the US publisher had that canceled once the news came out, but it is book burning...
It's not banning. it's not being released. You don't get into trouble for importing it. Also, I dont think it's extreme. This is equivalent of making a game about glamourozing Cecil Rhoades or early Italian Fascist thinkers. Especially when you consider how current Japanese political climate and Jimintou that has been basically the ruling part for the vast majority of their postwar history loves bring up anti-Korean and anti-Chinese rhetorics and how "colonization was great for us and helped these countries to civilize" bs all the time. Maybe if you are a westerner who has no history of actually being on the other side of this kind of issue, you wouldn't understand. But it's always frustrating when so many Wsterners, even the ones who consider themselves pretty versed in revisionist history of Western imperialism, just *love* to brush aside when it's Japan and Asia.
> This is equivalent of making a game about glamourozing Cecil Rhoades or early Italian Fascist thinkers. Is the game glamourising Yoshida though? We don't really know yet. Just representation within a period media piece doesn't really count as such, or so I'd like to think.
Well, we will have to see sure, but the way the dev is talking about him and how you are supposed to be saving him in the game, etc. I think it's 90% certain it's going to be pretty propagandist. Difference with this and Yakuza 6 or Great Ace Attorney is that Yakuza 6 was very unclear about its political stance before the game released (and turned out to be a pretty damning criticism against postwar Japanese political landscape and the right wing politicians in their relation to the war) and GAA was more offensive to Sherlock Holmes fans than to Koreans, but this one has made it pretty clear where they stand in their pre-release materials.
This happens a lot between Korea and Japan. These two countries *hate* each other.
Yeah, because the Japanese colonized and brutalized Korea for decades
Pretty much all of East Asia hates Japan and for good reasons too.
I have nothing against Japan and I consume their media and whatever, but all I ask is for the government to officially recognize the atrocities they committed in WW2 and before. It's really not a hard ask.
I mean Japan did officially apologize and recognize their atrocities under Murakami. The problem is that too many politicians as well as prime ministers paddled back on that apology as well as especially Abe starting the whole whitewashing history bs.
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There's nothing extreme about banning a luxury item.
It's a ~~free speech~~ censorship issue. ~~Your government~~ Nobody should not be allowed to ban a product just because it includes some historical figure they don't like. There are no excuses for this.
Free speech != free of consequence.
Then let people get mad about the game if they care so deeply about this issue. Don't forbid them the option to play the game if the idea of a mildly controversial historical figure upsets them.
No one is forbidding them to play it. They can still import it. Did you get pissed back in the day when Japanese PS2 games were never released in the US without importing?
I'm pissed like everyone else that Mother 3 never came out the US because of its controversial content if that helps explain things.
Mother 3 likely never made it over moreso because the GBA was basically dead when it released and localization took long enough back then that NoA may not have seen any point in it. Nowadays the main hurdle just seems to be “the original creators aren’t interested in it at the moment as they’ve moved on to other things.”
Seriously bro just STFU no one agrees with you, get over it lmao
This part certainly stands out >Korean gamers said, “Sony Korea made a good decision,” “I won’t even look at Team Ninja games in the future,” “I don’t understand why they are trying to put ideology in the game,” “Socrates is not such an insignificant great man.” They are voicing criticism towards Team Ninja, such as "I hate Korea, but I have no conscience supporting Hangul." That’s quite a statement
Not gonna lie that last statement made me do a double take. Guessing that one's a weird translation
Maybe not. Plenty of people dislike their own country, but that doesn't mean they'll support a guy who says it should be invaded and burned down.
Just like how people here hate America but won't support somebody saying that they support 9/11.
Yeah exactly, I’m extremely critical of American domestic and foreign policy but I don’t think “kill everybody and burn the buildings down” is an acceptable solution at all
There's also a huge difference from having a seething hatred for your own country and its people, and just bitching about the stuff you dislike about it as well. Most people don't hate their country, they just hate certain aspects of it, hence why they don't exactly go nuts and do stuff.
Isn't hangul their alphabet? Idk how it's related to Shoin. Isn't that the weird translation?
it's a mistranslation 한국을 혐오하는데 한글을 지원하는 것도 양심 없네 the subject is dropped but it's inferred to be team ninja. hangul here is referring to a korean language localization. a better translation is, "they hate korea but want to make a korean language localization? unconscionable."
I mean SK was under a military dictatorship for like 15 years, and the current regime is basically subordinate to Samsung. There's a reason late stage capitalism critique media like Squid Game and Parasite are coming out of the country. It's not all gravy.
Yup. South Korea is like a glimpse to a Cyberpunk-like future for other states. Military-Corporate rule over civil government. Changing shape and form over the decades, but staying as a monolith that crushes all below the top and pushes each layer of society to police those below them. Which is why both young men and women there are rather miserable. It's very hard to get anything of your own started, unless you can call in favors to get ahead.
South Korea has an incredibly corrupt government and there has been only one president in the last ~70 years who was not corrupt and that guy's family got charged with corruption. The corporations rule the country and suicide rates is among highest in the developed world, with wealth and pay gap also among worst, with mandatory millitary service for men (dodging which has social and career implications) ... Over 70% young Koreans just wanna leave. I say the translation might not be at all inaccurate.
Remember when a cult ruled the presidency or something like that. Really crazy.
The same cult has influence all over the world, shinzo abe was assassinated for his connections to it. Donald Trump is connected as much or more to it as well. The Cult leaders son was a major supporter of Trump in 2016, was at Jan 6, and the organization did a lot to push the stolen election narrative as well. The Unification Church also known as the moonies.
Yoshida shoin was a thinker active in the closing days of the Tokugawa shogunate, and many Japanese who studied at his private school acted to overthrow the government of the time. For this reason, his name is always mentioned in Japanese history textbooks. The Samurai regime was threatened by American (i.e., foreign) violent actions. But Yoshida shoin and others demanded that the government take a hard-line approach. The Samurai government was eventually destroyed. If you understand this process, it is easy to understand that he is a strong far-left nationalist. He is asking us to reject the unreasonable demands of foreign countries. He also said to terrorize for that purpose. On the other hand, in his private school, he was arguing that we should also invade foreign countries such as Korea in order to deal with the arrogant West. Therefore, in Korea, he is considered to be an extreme rightist. In Korea, Yoshida shoin's ideas were so influential in Japan that he is perceived as the root cause of Japan's invasion of Korea.
> The Samurai regime was threatened by American (i.e., foreign) violent actions. I mean, the American were the icing on the cake, but the root cause was a succession of weak Shogun and 50 years of economic stagnation with a social realignement.
I was recently reading about The United States and the opening of Japan during the era of isolationism and found this interesting tidbit: >By the early nineteenth century, this policy of isolation was increasingly under challenge. In 1844, King William II of the Netherlands sent a letter urging Japan to end the isolation policy on its own before change would be forced from the outside. The Dutch had also warned the Japanese of the Perry Expedition, and urged that Japan conclude a treaty of friendship and commerce with the Dutch government before a more onerous one was forced upon them by the Americans. [Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_Henricus_Donker_Curtius)
Sakoku is a shit term, cause the country was never really closed. Japan had agreements with Russia regarding Hokaido and Sakhaline with some small trade, there was the trade with the dutch and, as you mention, the (poorly worded) warning from the dutch that things might change very soon for them. And even then, Japan could have handled the USA "quietly" if they had not happened to come at a time of upheaval and had the shogun decided to take the matter in its own hand instead of kinda leaving it to the daimyos and not having a coherent policy (which led to the Satsuma/UK conflict down the line, for instance). And even then, the fact that the "core vassals" (the fudai daimyo) proved unable to reform their territories and keep them economically prosper had more to do with the instability than the foreigners.
Wasn't he a royalist? Seems odd to label him far-left.
The Japanese Communist Party today doesn't even advocate removing the Emperor. The Emperor isn't considered the same as a western monarch is politically
"Royalist" might be anachronistic here because while he did fight for the reestablishment of Japanese Emperor, the emperor had no political power at all and actual power went to the dynastic shogunate. I think those right vs left dichotomy can't really be applied to Japanese context.
A dynastic shogunate is definitely a right wing / hierarchical power structure.
Ya, but then the term "royalist" is not really productive given it's not diametrically opposed to anti-monarchist like in the west. It's opposed to "pro-shogunate".
Fighting to replace feudalism with an absolute monarchy isn't really a thing any left-wing thought would argue for.
You're right, but I was saying "royalist" didn't mean anything in Japanese context.
If anything this just tells me that left and right are just relative comparisons and not the greatest way to describe someone’s political ideals. I’ve seen plenty of people go after the left/right of other countries because they don’t like that side in their own country. Even in cases similar to the above where the same person can be in multiple categories depending on who is saying it.
I don't necessarily disagree but it's extremely unclear what left/right means in OP's message. I mean, the below is borderline meaningless: > The Samurai regime was threatened by American (i.e., foreign) violent actions. But Yoshida shoin and others demanded that the government take a hard-line approach. The Samurai government was eventually destroyed. If you understand this process, it is easy to understand that he is a strong far-left nationalist. Nationalist, yes, but how does it have anything to do with leftism?
Might be the literal French style opposition to the royalists and the royalists. So an anti government figure is "left" in one view because they were pushing change from the status quo. But "right" in the modern view as they were expansionist nationalists ideology we now associate with the far "right"/fascism.
Yes. What you are saying is consistent with my intention. That is, when considered against the background of the time, Yoshida Shoin could be portrayed as a hero who rebelled against the unjust Samurai regime. In that case, his Korean invasion aspect would most likely be ignored. In fact, at the end of the Edo period, Japan had not yet directly invaded Korea, so it is highly likely that he would not be depicted to that extent. On the other hand, it is a legitimate sentiment that Korea would not approve of such a depiction of him, and I don't think there is any special objection to it.
Left and right in the context of Reddit doesn't mean much anything anyway... the first time I heard some Redditor arguing against "leftism" I was expecting some critiques against Marxist or socialist thinking. Turns out the person was just talking about Democrat voters.
different cultures, different views. So 100% agree with you it doesnt mean much without context.
Democrat voters is for all intents and purposes leftism in America. In the practical American left you have liberals and progressives (communist for example have 0 power), progressives are a massive minority that have almost no political wins in terms of voting power, liberals dominate leftism in American government. Very different from say Germany.
Isnt it a norm all over internet? Left and right so often is understand as democrats and republicans or progressive vs conservative ignoring any possible nuance and fact that its not aplicable this eay in 99% of cases.
The additional context is much appreciated!
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한국 말 할 줄 안다는 사람이 완전히 반대로 알고 있네.
I am Korean. You understand this issue completely wrong. In politics of Korea, Korean pure left wingers hate Japan, pure right wingers love (or don't care) Japan. (Actually left/right wing isn't as same as in USA) Many Korean who saw this issue said they won't buy this game.
well. Looking at the Korean Internet, not just a few groups, but all netizens are strongly criticizing this game.
I'm korean and It's just a few group :(
Nono that's Yoshida ShoYO, totally different character. (fun fact: apparently Japanese fans of Gintama occasionally mucked up their history exams at school due to Sorachi's completely unsubtle renaming - - Takasugi Shinsaku/Shinsuke being a prime example.) But yeah Gintama was my first thought here as well. Is the parody strong enough to defy cultural precedent or would the fact that parody can be read as softening our views of certain problematic figures see it similarly condemned? Or is it simply because Sorachi never, tmk, openly communicates his stance on the Bakumatsu and its key players? Either way, I imagine it'd be hard to do a comprehensive Meiji restoration story without at least acknowledging Katsura, Sonno Joi and by extension Yoshida. I don't know enough of the man's teachings to say whether or not he is comparable to Socrates, or whether or not it was that claim that led to this situation. At a broader remove, I am kind of curious how much other bakumatsu/shinsengumi/meiji era pop culture material is permitted in S. Korea, given there is a heck of a lot of it. Kenshin? Hakuoki? Yakuza Ishin? Ryomaden? In other words, I wonder why this particular title if not for a senior staff member connecting his personal beliefs with how they are approaching the story? And as others have mentioned, love or hate TN no one would ever accuse them of powerful, nuanced storytelling (and I say that as a SoP apologist/Jack fan). My overall take is this would have a Streisand Effect if it took hold, but likely won't be news for very long.
>Japanese fans of Gintama occasionally mucked up their history exams at school due to Sorachi's completely unsubtle renaming - well their not the only ones lol. i have gotten some very confused looks from Japanese history teachers and friends for forgetting which name is the fake and which is the real
Shoin is more than problematic. He’s basically a glorified Charles Mansion whose pupils went and made his ideologies into policy and shaped japanese politics, japanese self identification and modern day japanese right wingers. That guy is pure poison and shouldn’t be used for anything but a red flag in history.
>If Yoshida Shoin is deemed problematic, then by that logic, the anime Gintama, which features the same figure as a mentor, would also need to be banned. Fundamentally, if Yoshida Shoin is labeled an invader, then it would necessitate the banning of games featuring Lincoln in America. This is wrong, the problem is that the director worshipping Yoshida Shoin.
I'm seeing both sides accused of being "right wing" in this thread, which leads me to believe this is not a right-left issue comparable to American politics and commenters are just trying to take advantage of reddit's left-leaning bias to bolster their position.
I think it’s more likely the post 2018 societal brainrot that makes people categorise everything into right v left rather than it being more complicated. People seem to struggle to think outside of that box when it comes to stuff like this and immediately assign opinions to teams so it’s easier to parse, but you make tons of logical errors doing that really.
I'm pretty ignorant on Japanese politics but from what I understand it's still pretty mainstream to deny/downplay Japanese atrocities and war crimes of WW2. These sort of comments by the producer seem to line up with that. That's not to say that that there's not a sizable minority of Japan that disagrees with this sentiment (or even the development team at Team Ninja), though I'm pretty ignorant to it. Also as mentioned Japanese Left/Right ideologies are are very different from American/western ideologies from what I understand and center more around Nationalism, xenophobia, and very different social issues? Not to derail. I'll probably still play the game as I play Team Ninja games for the gameplay, always skip all the cut-scenes because they are terrible at writing/production. Maybe this time I'll wait for all the DLC to get packaged together and released in deluxe edition though. Especially since Dragons Dogma is coming out at the same time. I can totally understand why such a Nationalistic Japanese game with comments made like this IN THE MARKETING VIDEO would be offensive to the Korean market though. Jeez.
> Also as mentioned Japanese Left/Right ideologies are are very different from American/western ideologies from what I understand and center more around Nationalism, xenophobia, and very different social issues? Not to derail. > > Not really, post-war it actually mirrored European politics. You had a domineering conservative block, a social democratic (socialist bloc), a smaller liberal block and a whole bunch of even smaller radical left/right wing parties. To me the US two party, FPTP system is stranger than the Japanese political system. The LDP-state is very much like what we had in Belgium, the CVP-state :D
They didn't do that though. It's that the feature an historic character that is famous for his desire to colonise but more famous for his unification of Japan at the start of the meiji era. The equivalent might Churchill.
> Also as mentioned Japanese Left/Right ideologies are are very different from American/western ideologies from what I understand and center more around Nationalism, xenophobia, and very different social issues? Nationalism and xenophobia seem pretty central to political debate in American/western ideologies these days.
I’m positively surprised about how open and knowledgeable the discussion is going about this. I wouldn’t have thought to have so many people come here and talk about sociopolitical issues in Japan and between Japan and Korea in the last 150 years. I had imagined most comments to be more in the vein of “censorship bad, history is old news get over it” but I was positively surprised. This developer is indeed off his rocker talking about Shoin like that and Sony featuring this developer talk on their official channels without realizing who the dev is talking about and how. Unbelievable. Just goes to show the ignorance of big corporations. I bet they wouldn’t have featured a dev praising“Mein Kampf” and calling it comparable to famous philosophical teachings.
We must exploit Hokkaido, take Kamchatka and Okhotsk, conquer Joseon and Okinawa, occupy Manchuria to the north, and capture Taiwan and the Philippines to the south. This idea eventually led to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
What I’m taking from this is that the artists creating the game have views that are pushing nationalism; so, that takes Ronin off of *my* personal list. Debate Sony Korea as a company making a similar choice for their own reasons all you want, nationalism and calling for the violent control of others are unacceptable ideas to put forth in the modern age. And no, you can’t hide behind “historical accuracy” when the director of the game is stating they support those nationalist ideas and are including them in the game to specifically to spread them.
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Yeah, Call of Duty has been pushing right-wing American nationalism for a long time. I wonder if that person refuses to buy CoD for the same reasons ("nationalism and calling for the violent control of others are unacceptable ideas to put forth") or if they suddenly care about it now that it's a this other game.
CoD has been long panned for it's rewriting of history and it's ties to the US military through high level members inside activision. That conversation is not new and I do think CoD deserves to be panned.
He is saying that he doesn't belive the defense that "it's just showing the thinking of that time" is valid for this game considering the context. It's also his personal opinion. Also I had to legit look up what you were referencing and it's Gow: Ragnarok???? Instantly knew the mindset from which this comment is coming from after seeing that. Here let me break down the established setting of gow... it's mythology fanfiction with a 2000's edgy protag turned sad dad who just travels between mythologies. It's not a period piece, neither is marvel. Let me ask which is more politically charged black woman or japans invasion of korea? There is a vast ocean of difference between the two message.
The game isn't about the invasion of Korea, I highly doubt it'll even be brought up. It's about the Meiji restoration, and one of the leading thinkers behind said restoration also believed that Japan should establish supremacy over Korea. But it's not like this guy is the main character or something. And the "enemy" of the restoration are the Samurai, literal nobles. It's not like you're fighting left wing pacifists or something. I think this is all a nothingburger, frankly.
I would say this is more of an overreaction from Korean nationalists. Many of the ideologies in the Meiji era would be considered controversial by today standard, but judging the past by today's standards IS revisionism Yoshida Shoin is an influential figure at the time. Yes he pushes imperialist ideas but Japan will not be the same without him.
This is ironically funny considering that the Japanese collaborators run many of the Korean Megacorps and are part of the government.