A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan
(Placing the People)
Handbook of Oriental Studies
Handbuch der Orientalistik [HdO]
Section Five, Japan, Volume 13
Leiden: Brill, 2007
xii, 292 pages, hardcover

Doak 2007 and an earlier book and some articles are reviewed on an independent page as John Dower on "race" and "nationality".

War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
New York: Pantheon Books, 1986
xii, 398 pages, hardcover

Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, The New Press, 1999
676 pages, hardcover

Dower 1986 and Dower 1999 are reviewed on an independent page as John Dower on "race" and "nationality".

Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan
[Studies of the East Asian Institute, Columbia University]
New York: Columbia University Press, 1999
xi, 295 pages, hardcover

Yukiko Koshiro, as a college student in Japan, studied immigration in the United States, where she later did her graduate work, and otherwise fell under the influence of trends in American academia to stress race, culture, and ideology pretty much in this order. Trans-Pacific Racisms is the result of "improving" what began as a doctoral dissertation for a PhD she received at Columbia University in 1992.

Koshiro's advisor at Columbia University was Carol Gluck. The book is dedicated to Carol Gluck. The book in one of a series of works, published under Gluck's direction, by the Studies of East Asian Institute at Columbia.

John Dower is thanked for having "read an early version of the manuscript and offered invaluable comments" in "the process of improving the book" (page ix). Though Gluck herself has contributed to the racialization of Japan in American-style Japanese studies, Dower appears to be Koshiro's principle mentor on "race" as a metaphor for understanding US-Japan relations.

To be continued.

Biographical note

Yukiko Koshiro (小代有希子 Koshiro Yukiko) is a professor in the Department of Global Exchange Studies, College of International Relations, Nihon University (日本大学、国際関係学部、国際交流学科).

Articles

Japan's World and World War II, Diplomatic History, Volume 25, Number 3, Summer 2001, 425-441. Also published in Michael Cox and R. Gerald Hughes, editors, Twentieth Century International Relations, Sage Publications, 2007, Volume VI, "Whatever Happened to the Pacific Century?"

Beyond an Alliance of Color: The African American Impact on Modern Japan, positions: east asia culture critique, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2003, pages 183-215. Also published in Hazel McFerson, editor, Blacks and Asians: Crossings, Conflict and Commonality, Carolina Academic Press, 2005.

Race as International Identity? 'Miscegenation' in the U.S. Occupation of Japan and Beyond, Amerikastudien/American Studies (Heidelberg), Volume 48, Number 1, 2003, pages 61-77. This article is largely inspired by the final chapter of Trans-Pacific Racisms (Chapter 5, The Problem of Miscegenation, pages 159-200.

Eurasian Eclipse: Japan's End Game in World War II, American Historical Review, Volume 109, Number 2, April 2004 (online). This article inspsired a report in Japanese called ユーラシアン・ルーレット−第二次世界大戦下の日本の終戦工作, 近代日本史料研究会, 伊藤隆科研費研究会総括班, 第６回研究会, 於政策研究大学院大学, 平成19年2月6日 (Yuurashian ruuretto: Dai-ni-ji Sekai Taisen ka noNihon no shusen kosaku, 2007). Both of these earlier reports were finger exercises for a forthcoming publication to be entitled "Eurasian Roulette: Japan's End Game in World War II". In this cycle of reports, Koshiro extends her "race" conflict thesis to Japan-Russian relations.

Book Reviews

Parallax of the Asia-Pacific War: Review of Gerald Horne's Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire, Diplomatic History, Volume 30, Number 1, January 2006.

Review of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan, Journal of Japanese Studies, Volume 33, Number 1, Winter 2007, pages 211-216. See also Hasegawa's "Response to Yukiko Koshiro's Review" and Koshiro's "Reply to Hasegawa's Comment" in the Opinion and Comment section of the Journal of Japanese Studies, Volume 33, Number 2, Summer 2007, pages 585-588.

Review of Eiichiro Azuma's Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, May 2007.

Review of Sadao Asada's Culture Shock and Japanese-American Relations: Historical Essays, American Historical Review, Volume 113, Number 3, June 2008.

Modern Peoplehood
Cambrdige (MT): Harvard University Press, 2004
x, 384 pages, hardcover

The meat of this book, barely 250 pages, is cut into the following six chunks, which will choke the reader with detail that required 100 pages of References.

1. In Search of Foundations
2. Naturalizing Differences
3. Modern State / Modern Peoplehood
4. The Paradoxes of Peoplehood
5. Genocide
6. Identity

These chapters are bracketed by a Preface and Prelude, and a Postlude, the References, and an Index.

Blurb inside front flap

The blurb on the front flap of the dust jacket promotes the book in a manner that essentially defines "peoplehood".

The equation of "peoplehood" with "race, ethnicity, and nationality" -- and with "race, ethnicity, and nation" -- is why this book is being reviewed under the "Race" section of the Bibliography. "Race" in fact colors the meanings that many people impute to words like "ethnicity" and "nationality" or "nation" (and "national origin"). Words like "culture" and "heritage" are also likely to be carry nuances of "race".

This is, of course Lie's point -- and why he introduces "peoplehood" as a term to embrace the essentially "racialism" of "ethnic" and "national" identity today. Racism, genocide, and a host of other problems are by-products, he says, of modern nationalism, which credits nationalism regards nationalism today as something which fosters racism and genocide Review Lie's objective is to treat a series of large topics that he sees as related but that are usually treated separately: the social construction of identities, the origins and nature of modern nationalism, the explanation of genocide, and racism. These multiple themes are for him aspects of something he calls "modern peoplehood." His mode of demonstration is to review all the alternative explanations for each phenomenon, and to show why each successively is inadequate. His own theses are controversial but he makes a strong case for them. This book should renew debate. --Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University and author of The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World In discussing what are usually termed race, ethnicity, and nationalism, here rendered felicitously by the general term "peoplehood," Lie has produced an original, erudite work that will appeal to sociologists, political scientists, and historians, as well as a wider public interested in race, ethnicity, and nationalism. It is a groundbreaking contribution that will recast our understanding of some of the core issues of our day. --Kevin Anderson, Purdue University and co-author of Foucault, Gender and the Iranian Revolution: The Seductions of Islamism Modern Peoplehood is a most impressive achievement by an extraordinarily intelligent, courageous, and--that goes without saying--"well-read" mind. The scope of this work is enormous: it provides no less than a comprehensive historically-grounded theory of "modern peoplehood," which is Lie's felicitous umbrella term for everything that goes under the names "race," "ethnicity," and 'nationality." --Christian Joppke (American Journal of Sociology ) Product Description

Conclusion

Lie states the most political half of his conclusion in the penultimate graph of the Postlude (pages 272-273).

The pen many ways a warmup essentially a , in which the word "peoplehood" does not appear. and his later endorsement of the racialism of "Zainichi" peoplehood while at the same time pointing out its essential hollowness.

Lie to write (Multiethnic Japan (Lie 2001) -- before he pursued the idea of "peoplehood". The 2001 work, completed in 1998, includes this paragraph in its conclusion (Lie 2001:171).

A Descent into the Past:
The Frontier in the Construction of Japanese Identity
Pages 81-94 (Chapter 5) in:
Donald Denoon, Mark Hudson, Gavan McCormack, and Tessa Morris-Suzuki (editors)
Multicultural Japan: Paleolithic to Postmodern
Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press, 1996 (2001)
viii, 302 pages, hardcover (softcover)

Multicultural Japan is a bit of a hodge-podge, as are most multi-authored books. All contributors touch upon "identity" from one or another viewpoint, and "ethnicity" also appears in many articles. But Morris-Suzuki's "A Descent into the Past" delves especially into "jinshu" and "minzoku", which she differentiates as "race" and "Volk" -- hence my review of her article here.

Gavan McCormack's introduction

Gavan McCormack leads his introduction to this book with an overview of Nakasone Yasuhiro's understanding of Japan as a natural homogeneous state, in which "the Yamato race" has been living for at least two thousand years. McCormack's source for a citation from one of Nakasone's speeches is an article I wrote on Nakasone for the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1987.

Unfortunately, McCormack fails to report that, in my reportage, I clearly gloss Nakasone's remarks about "the Yamato race" and "the Japanese race" as reflecting "Yamato minzoku" and "Nippon minzoku" in Japanese. Nakasone and others who share his romantic nationalist sentiments do not speak of "race" in the sense Morris-Suzuki introduces the word as reflecting "jinshu" in Japanese.

"race" / "rice"

That the editors and proofreaders of the book had "race" on their brain is suggested by the confusion of rice for race in the title of Chapter 14 as listed in the table of contents (underscoring mine).

Contents

14. Emperor, Race, and Commoners Amino Yoshihiko

Chapter Fourteen

Emperor, Rice, and Commoners
Amino Yoshihiko
(translated by Gavan McCormack)

Chapter 14 begins Part 5, on Culture and Ideology, and indeed it is about rice and not race.

McCormack on Morris-Suzuki

McCormack introduces Morris-Suzuki's article like this (page 7.

Morris-Suzuki herself does not refer to "Japan" as having been a "state" until the late 19th century (page 82).

Her next reference to "state" supports this implication that Japan was not a "state" as such before the late 19th century (page 83).

The index glosses "Japanese state" as "Nihonkoku" and all three references are to McCormack's translation of Amino's article on "Emperor, Rice, and Commoners" (Chapter 14). In his article, Amino contends (according to McCormack's translation) that the "belief which lies at the origin of the state which first formalised 'Japan' as a country name and the appellation tennō (emperor) . . . gave rise to the . . . 'Japanese state' (Nihonkoku)" . . . also known as 'Yamato' (page 237).

Morris-Suzuki, however, does not appear to be using "state" as a translation tag for "koku" in reference to Japan before the late 19th century. Rather, she seems to associate "the Japanese state" with something "modern" such as the so-called "nation state" -- which, in any case, she does not define.

"Ainu" and "Ryūkyōans" are non-contemporary terms for inhabitants of the territories of "Ezo" and the "Ryōkyō" Morris-Suzuki refers to as "societies" -- whereas McCormack characterizes them as "countries".

The term Morris-Suzuki brackets as "'Japan proper'" is puzzling. The term does not reflect the realities of Japanese usage. The Japanese term for the prefectural jurisdiction of the sovereign empire was "Naichi" (内地), meaning "Interior" -- as distinct from the jurisdictions of Taiwan (from 1895), Karafuto (from 1905), and Korea as Chosen (from 1910). The term "Nihon (Nippon)" (日本) came to embrace all these exterior territories.

Karafuto was quickly embraced by the Interior, and Taiwan and Chosen were also groomed for inclusion in the Interior polity. The expression "Japan proper" reflects a contemporary English, not Japanese, bias as to the "boundaries" of "Japan". Not only does Morris-Suzuki impose misleading English terms on Japanese descriptions of Japan -- but she imposes such terms on periods before they would be possible even in English.

"jinshu" and "minzoku"

In a section titled "Civilisation, Race and the Frontier", Morris-Suzuki presents a fairly conventional summary of how words like "jinshu" and "minzoku" came into use in Japan.

"jinshu"

The term "jinshu" appeared as early as 1853 in terms like "Oranda jinshu" or "the Dutch race" (page 87, and note 16). By 1869 it was being used by "the great westernise" Fukuzawa Yukichi to mean "race" in the sense of "color" classifications (white, yellow, black, brown, red) -- that, she fails to clarify, were then common in countries like the United States.

"minzoku"

The term "minzoku" comes into vogue somewhat later (page 88).

Morris-Suzuki does not elaborate on why she thinks the people who reportedly translated "nationale" as "minzoku" used the word in "a quite different sense". However, she cannot possibly know in what sense the translators thought they were using the word. She can only project the sense that she herself imputes to "nationale" in "Assemblée Nationale" circa the late 19th century.

"national" as "kokumin" and "minzoku"

Let me digress a bit here by way of amplifying on the "sense" of "minzoku" as a translation of "nationale" in late 19th century Japan. Today, over a century later, French "nationale" is generally translated in two ways -- 国民 (kokumin) and 民族 (minzoku) -- as in the following examples.

Assemblée Nationale (France)
National Assembly
国民議会

FLN (Algeria)
Parti du Front de Libération Nationale
National Liberation Front
民族解放戦線

FLNC (Corsica)
Front de Libération Nationale de la Corse
Corsican National Liberation Front
コルシカ民族解放戦線

LNKS (New Caledonia)
Front de Libéeration Nationale Kanak et Socialiste
Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front
カナク社会主義民族解放戦線

un bon instrument de culture nationale
民族文化を伝えるよい道具

Varities of "national" in English and Afrikaans are similarly translated as "kokumin" or "minzoku" depending on their context.

Nasionale Vergadering (South Africa)
National Assembly
国民議会

ANC (South Africa)
African National Congress
アフリカ民族会議

Scottish National Assembly
スコットランド民族議会

Iraqi Kurdistan National Assembly (Iraq)
クルド民族議会

Morris-Suzuki knows that "nation" and "race" and "Volk" and "ethnos" and the like seriously overlap in the minds of some people -- and, to some extent, she is trying to make this point. Yet she is certain that "kokumin" should be "nation" if it is part of "kokumin kokka" and "citizen" if just "kokumin".

One of the points I made when talking about Nakasone Yasuharu is his propensity to conflate "kokumin kokka" with "minzoku kokka" in the same speech. And there are scholars of "nationalism" today who insist that "minzoku" should be translated "nation" or "national" because "race" or "racial" sound too "biological" and, well, "racist".

So what did the publishers of the journal 民族衛生 (Minzoku eisei) have in mind when they assigned it the English title "Race hygiene"? What do they have in mind when, today, they assign successor of this journal, still called 民族衛生 in Japanese, the English title "Journal of Health and Human Ecology"?

Obviously there are shifts in thinking about the "sense" of key words, especially when translating from one language to the other. But where is the locus of meaning? Not in the words themselves.

As for Yun Kŏn Ch'a, the article cited by Morris-Suzuki was a preview of material that appeared the following year in a book of the same title, published by Iwanami Shoten, which publishes the journal Shisō. See my review of this book as Yun 1994 in the "Race" section of this bibliography.

"minzoku" and "kokumin"

Morris-Suzuki continues her story about the emergence of "minzoku" in Japan like this (page 88).

The "focus" can be seen, she says, in a 1908 work by Haga Yaichi called "Kokuminsei jūron" -- which she translates "Ten Theses on National Character" -- though she has just told us that "Kokumin" means "citizen". Haga, she says, explained that each minzoku differs not only in terms of physical traits like hair and skin color, but also "minzokuteki seishitsu" -- which she translates "ethnic qualitities" -- refering to language, customs, history the like -- though she has just said aptest translation of "minzoku" is "Volk".

The next page explores the development in the early 20th century of "Yamato minzoku" as an expression with "strong nationalist overtones" -- using the term "nationalist". Then comes the idea of "national self-determination" -- which she says figures in the "rising tide of the debate on minzoku -- though she doesn't tell us how "minzoku" (which she is discussing as a Japanese term) is linked with "national" (as an English term).

"names" and "interrmarriage"

Morris-Suzuki winds up her disucssion of minzoku like this (pages 89-90).

Commenting on Umehara Takeshi's contention that Jōmon culture contining to exist in its purest form in Ainu culture, Morris-Suzuki says Umehara's view "is not wrong in any simple factual sense". She questions, though, whether his view really contributes to "the contemporary cause of Ainu liberation" because it "presumes the existence of some eternal and absolute 'Japaneseness' in which people can be included or from which they can be excluded" (page 92).

The same could be said of Morris-Suzuki's overview of the development of "Yamato minzoku" as a standard of "assimilation" for subjects of the Empire of Japan. Most of her Japanese facts are right. The problem is that she misrepresents some of the Japanese facts with lazy if not incorrect English dubs -- nation state, citizen, ethnic -- and presses them into the service of a colonial critique that reduces complex legal and social matters to radical cliches.

There was no policy of "forcing Koreans to adopt 'Japanese' names". While elaborating on the introduction of Interior (prefectural) family laws in Chosen might have been outside the scope of her article, there is no foundation for this characterization the legal provisions that took effect from early 1940 concerning names. She could more objectively, and truthly, have written something like "imposing the Interior principle one family name per family on Chosen household registers".

Nor was there a policy of "encouraging intermarrige between Japanese and Koreans". There was no legal distinction between "Japanese" and "Koreans" at the time. There were only Japanese of various regional affiliations. Morris-Suzuki's "Jjapanese" were "Japanese affiliated with the Interior (prefectures)", and her "Koreans" were "Japanese affiliated with Chosen".

Morris-Suzuki's reference to Utsumi's article as being "a poignant account of this [marriage] policy and its tragic social consequences" is patently odd. While Utsumi states in passing that "Interior-Chosen marriages were encouraged" (page 141), she testifies only to the legal facilitation of such marriages in 1923, not to a "policy" of intermarriage circa 1940.

Utsumi prefaces her discussion of "Interior-Chosen marriages" with the statement that they "produced many tragedies" (page 139). Whatever she may have meant by "many" (多くの ookuno) or "tragedy" (悲劇 higeki)", she does not categorically regard the "consequences" of marriages between Interiorites and Chosenese per se as "tragic".

Utsumi discusses only a couple of court cases which involved nationality complications after Chosenese had lost their Japanese nationality in 1952, when the San Francisco Peace Treaty came into effect. The plaintiffs in these cases were undoubtedly distressed by postwar conditions and settlements, and by the fact that older status laws continued to operate until they were formally abrogated or otherwise lost their effectiveness. However, it is not clear why these cases should be characterized as "tragedies". Nor is it clear why they should be regarded as representative of "Interior-Chosen marraiges" generally.

For a review of Utsumi's article, see Utsumi 1984 in under the "Mixture" section of this bibliography.

Morris-Suzuki does succeed in giving a general idea of how words like "jinshu" and "minzoku" came to be used in Japan during the 19th and 20th centuries. However, as with many of her articles, the scholarship she brings to bear on her subjects -- in this case some of the most important metaphors of the recent past and present -- is compromised by a radical rhetoric that plays loose with historical facts.

In this book, though, she is in good company.

Japan, Race and Equality
(The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919)
[The Nissan Institute / Routledge Japanese Studies Series]
New York: Routledge (2009 Digital Printing Edition
xi, 255 pages, paper cover

This book get's a "A" for it attempt to collate a lot of interesting information and a "B" for its somewhat convoluted presentation, but in the end a "C" for its faulty analysis.

Forthcoming.

Two proposals

As a member of the commission responsibility for drafting the covenenant of the League of Nations, Japan made two attempts to introduce clauses that would have obligated member states to treat each other's nationals equally as aliens. The first proposal invoked the principle of "equality of nations" and would have prohibitted making distinctions between the alien nationals of other member states on account of race or nationality. The second proposal simplified this to a principle of "equality of all nationals", which meant only nationality as a raceless civil status.

First proposal

The first proposal, presented on 13 February 1919, called for the following clause to be included in the League of Nations covenant as an amendment to Article 21, which had originally concerned only religious freedom (Shimazu 1998, pages 20, 83-84, underscoring mine).

The proposal is crystal clear. The "nations" which were to constitute the membership of the League of Nations were "states". And as states, the people each state recognized as members of its national population possessed its nationality, a civil status recognized in international law -- i.e., laws that govern relationships between states as well as between nationals of different states in private matters.

However, some states have laws that, in addition to differentiating between nationals (or subjects or citizens) and aliens, classify and differently treat people according to their putative "race" whether narrowly defined by skin color and other such biological traits, or broadly defined in some "ethnic" sense. Japan's proposal called for equal and just treatment irrespective of nationality or race.

Of course, states could differentiate (and discriminate) between aliens and nationals (subjects, citizens) -- which was, of course, the whole purpose of nationality. But if states A, B, and C were member states, then -- according to Japan's proposal -- state A would not be allowed to treat nationals of state B inferior to nationals of state C because of nationality or race -- ditto for states B and C regarding the nationals of the other two states.

Japan knew exactly what it was demanding -- an end to the sort of discrimination that was practiced under the domestic laws of, for example, the United States. For Japan, discrimination because of either "nationality" or "race" was very obviously a "state" issue -- given the nature of legal discrimination in the United States, which essentially equated "race" with "national origin", and "national origin" with "nationality".

This first proposal was the fruit of working together with delegates from some other countries, including the United States, since the convening of the peace conference on 18 January 1919. When formally submitted on 13 February, it met with a mixture of support and criticism. On that day, however, Article 21 was dropped from the draft of the covenant, not entirely because of Japan's amendment to the original article.

Some delegates felt that Japan was merely angling for a way to eliminate immigration restrictions in countries which had been discouraging or refusing immigration from Japan. Others had expressed reservations that the proposal would infringe on domestic sovereignty. Some thought that references in the covenant to matters like religion and race would be divisive at this stage, and were more properly left for future considerations by members of the League of Nations after its founding. France even argued that there was a close relationship between "race" and "religion".

Second proposal

On 22 March 1919, Japan's delegates began circulating a new proposal for the insertion of the following clause in the agreement statement preceding the articles of covenent (Shimazu 1998, pages 24 and 27, underscoring mine).

This clause very clearly refers to "nationals" as persons who are affiliated with the demographic nations of the "states" which would join the League of Nations. Being a "national" of a state as a matter of its domestic law, in the eyes of a recognizing state, implies only possession of the state's nationality -- a civil, not ethnic, status in international law.

Japanese versions

Shimazu does not present Japanese versions of the two proposals, though she does discuss how they were generally referred to in Japanese media (see below). The two proposals are usually represented in Japanese like this (romanization and structural translation mine).

At the time, Japan's state nationality embraced four territorial civil statuses based on membership in prefectural Interior (Naichi), Taiwan, Karafuto, and Chōsen registers. These four territories constituted Japan's sovereign dominion, and all people in their population registers were Japanese. If traveling outside Japan, inclusive of these territories, they carried Japanese passports, which gained them recognition in other countries as Japanese nationals.

This second proposal -- which thus implied the "equality of member nations" in the sense of the "equality of the populations affiliated with member states" -- drew the following response in a vote taken on 11 April 1919 (Shimazu 1998, pages 14 and 31, my interpretation and arrangement of data in Shimazu's verbal description).

Breakdown of 11 April 1919 vote on
Japan's second proposal for equality clause by
members of League of Nations Commission at
Paris Peace Conference

Total

   15 states      19 delegates

Yes votes

   8 states       11 delegates

   Brazil          1
   Chechoslovakia  1
   China           1
   France          2
   Greece          1
   Italy           2
   Japan           2
   Serbia          1

No negative votes taken hence
following votes not registered

   5 states        6 delegates

 [ British Empire  1 (second delegate absent) ]
 [ Poland          1 (presumed) ]
   Portugal        1
   Romania         1
   United States   2

Absent

   1 state         2 delgates

 [ Belgium         1 (delegate absent) ]
 [ British Empire  1 (second delegate present) ]

The British Empire, which represented the British Dominions and India, was known to be against Japan's proposals, owing partly to strong opposition from Australia, which threatened confront Japan at the plenary cession if the draft of covenent submitted to it by the commission included Japan's proposal. As the chairman of the peace conference and commission, Woodrow Wilson used his discretionary powers to reject the vote on grounds that the issue remained divisive at a time when unanimity was in order. Apparently Wilson took this stance on the advice of the same American delegate who had helped Japan formulate the original proposal and then, when Britain objected, withdrew his own support for the proposal.

My reading of the political interplay between the parties was that, ultimately, Wilson was himself not predisposed to support Japan's proposals -- since, no matter how they were worded, they were targetting the sort of racial discrimination that existed in all manner of American federal and state laws against certain nationalities of immigrants on account of their putative race. Not only were immigrants from Japan and other "Oriental" countries considered racially less desireable than immigrants from Europe, but such immigrants who had settled in the United States were not allowed to naturalize because they were "ineligible to citizenship" on racial grounds. Japan was one of the few powerful states in the world whose laws did not concern race or otherwise racially discriminate.

Naoko Shimazu, in Japan, Race and Equality (Routeledge, 1998), argues that "The fact that the aim of the proposal was so specifically geared towards securing Japan's own position indicates that it could not have been intended to have the altruistic objective of seeking univsersal racial equality" -- and that the government of Japan "was much alarmed by the universalistic interpretation attached to its 'nationalistic' proposal" (page 114). She then says this (pages 114-115, underscoring mine).

"unknowingly and unwittingly"

Japan's delegates at the Paris Peace Conference were undoubtedly in the awkward position of having to navigate uncharted terrain -- without clear instructions from Tokyo, and in constantly shifting local political climates. However, they were seasoned diplomats. They were familiar with how the world worked. They knew how Japanese and others were being treated in countries like the United States, Canada, and Australia, to name just a few of the states that did not especially welcome Japanese as immigrants and classified them racailly.

But Japan's delegates clearly knew what they wanted. And they knew, with the help of some other delegates, how to phrase what they wanted in precise legal terms that any diplomat, and any legalist, would clearly understand in the context of international relations.

Moreover, Japan's delegates, having been in contentious diplomatic positions concerning racial discrimination against Japan's nationals, and being very much on the hot spot at the Paris Peace Conference, could not possibly have been unaware of the ripples their proposal would, and did, cause. I would allow, however, that at the beginning of the conference they may have been a bit naive -- or at least romantically wishful -- in thinking that the United States and Great Britain might actually support them. When both proposals were rejected, however, they most likely admitted to themselves "Well, what else could we have realistically expected?"

"racial equality . . . as a . . . principle of equality of status"

Japan was not asking for member states to endorse such a principle. It was asking only that member states agree a principle of equality of treatment of the nationals of other member states, as aliens, without respect to their nationality or putative race in the eyes of the state in which they were aliens.

"fundamental principle in the United Nations Charter"

The United Nations Charter most certainly does not incorporate the sort of "principle" that Shimazu describes. Item 3 of Article 1 of the charter provides that one of the purposes of the United Nations is "To achieve international co-operation . . . in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion" -- which is a very different matter. This is one of the "common ends" that the United Nations hopes to attain through "harmonizing the actions of nations" in such regards (Item 4).

Item 1 of Article 2 states that the United Nations, as an organization, "is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members" -- meaning that, in fact, each member state retains the right, as a sovereign state, to cooperate or not in the attainment the UN's goals. Or, to put it differently, each state has a right to define, or not, matters of "race, sex, language, or religion".

Only after its creation did the United Nations create conventions for the elemination of various forms of discrimination, and states were free to join, or not join, such conventions, or join with reservations.

In fact, in the United States then, and still today, "race" is a classifiable personal attribute, and may be regarded as a "status" for purposes of some laws. In Japan, however, "race" has historically not been a legal status -- to the irritation of certain "racial equality" advocacy organizations in Japan, which petition relevant United Nations committees to pressure Japan to racialize "groups" the organizations regard as "racial" (usually conflated with "ethnic") minorities.

"the Japanese not only lacked the awareness
they were initiating such an important change . . .
but were themselves guilty of a racially discriminatory
attitude towards Chinese and Koreans"

This remark, concerning "Chinese and Koreans", compares with the following remark, regarding "Koreans and Chinese", which Shimazu made shortly before the above cited claims, which she attributes to an article by Ōnuma Yasuaki (Shimazu 1998, page 114, underscoring mine).

Shimazu is shifting from a story about Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials in Tokyo, and the ministry's delegates in Paris, to "the Japanese" -- which appears to be her own racialization. At the time of the Paris Peace Conference, "Korea" was the territory of Chōsen, and as it was part of Japan, "Koreans" or Chosenese were Japanese.

Taiwan (Formosa) was also a part of Japan at the time, and Taiwanese (Formosans) were also Japanese.

Chinese, of course, were not Japanese, so if they were in Japan (including Taiwan and Chōsen), they would have been aliens. Japan was certainly guilty of being territorially agressive in China, such as in its demands regarding China during World War I. Japan had to scale back its demands because of pressure from the United States, and even Great Britain, which Japan had supported in the war against Germany. And Japan's conflicts with China, and over China, continued during the Paris Peace Conference.

Why Shimazu claims that Japan was guilty of "racial discrimination" against Koreans and Chinese, though, is not clear. I do not een a copy of the book in which Ōnuma's article appears, so I haven't been able to confirm what he wrote -- whether he spoke of "Chōgokujin" (Chinese) or "Taiwanjin" (Taiwanese) or both -- and if he spoke of "discrimination" (which would be expected), whether he qualified it as "racial" (jinshu) or "ethnic" or "ethnonational" (minzoku).

"""

Japan's Foreign Ministry, Shimazu says, used the expression "jinshu sabetsu teppai, which literally means 'abolition of racial discrimination" -- and most official and unofficial debates [in Japanese] used this expression rather than "'racial equality' (jinshu byōdō)" (page 115). Assuming she is correct that Japan's delegation did not intend "racial equality" to be a universal principle, then one would have to imagine that its members did not understand the difference between the English term "race" and the English term "nation" -- which is not likely.

As of January 1919, Japan had been diplomatically embattled with the United over issues involving racial discrimination in the United States against its nationals and their US-born US-citizen descendants, and had accommodated a number of demands by the United States. In a "genteleman's agreement" between Japan and the United States in 1908, Japan agreed not issue passports to Japanese who sought to go to go to the United States for the purpose of work as laborers. And in 1914, Japan added renunciation provisions to its 1899 Nationality Law in response to pressure from the United States that it it facilitate US desires to minimize if not eliminate dual US-Japanese nationality.

So I would think that Japan's delgation clearly understood that it was seeking to establish a principle of "racial equality" at least among the league of nations. This also seems to have been understood by member states, who divided themselves in the vote -- understanding exactly what effects the acceptance of such a provision would have had on their domestic laws.

With regard to its domestic laws -- and its treatment of individuals under its domestic laws, in all its legal jurisdictions -- Japan would have had nothing to fear, since its laws did not codify either "jinshu" (race) or "minzoku" (ethnic nation). Japan would have had to admit that it differentiated between its nationals on the basis of their territorial affiliations -- whether affiliated with the prefectural Interior, Taiwan, Karafuto (regarded under the 1918 Common Law on a par with the Interior), and Chōsen (as Korea had become when annexed in 1910).

But would Japan, at the Paris Peace Conference convened from 18 to 21 January 1919, have admitted that Taiwanese and Chosenese constituted "ethnic nations" that deserved rights of "national self-determination" -- either within Japan, or as independent states? Probably not. And certainly not on 1 March 1919, barely five weeks later, which marked the start of what Koreans today celebrate as the beginning, in Korea and then elsewhere, of the "independence movement" against Japan's "occupation" of the "Empire of Korea".

Japan may have miscalculated the prospects of its proposal being adopted, but I do not get the impression that its delegates knew that they were asking the collective membership of the League of Nations to endorse the end of "skin color" discimination between the nationals of its member states.

Nationalisms in Japan
[Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies / Routledge Series]
New York: Routledge [Taylor & Francis Group]
xii, 196 pages, paper cover

Forthcoming.

Our Savage Neighbors
(How Indian War Transformed Early America)
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008
xxvi, 406 pages, hardcover

"Racism" as lazy explanation

Many people seem to use words like "racism" and "culture" as though they take their meanings for granted. Everyone is supposed to know what they mean, and increasingly they are used to terminate arguments. If a speaker or writer imputes this incident to "racism", or that behavior to "culture", then a listener or reader is expected to accept the causal attribution as self-evident.

People are also prone to speak of complex countries like "Japan" and "America" as singularized entities. Here, too, in one language or another, collective comfort is taken in the sheer familiarity and obviousness of phrasing like "the Japanese are" and "America is".

It is equally fashionable to racialize complex populations as monolithic "groups" called "Asians" or "Asian Americans" or "whites" or "Native Americans" or "people of color and women" and the like. Individuals who are perceived to be "members" of such "communities" or "peoples" are often alleged to possess a "culture" or "heritage" or "ethnicity" on purely racial grounds -- as though "blood" ought to determine "identity.

Academics who engage more in identity politics than scholarship are inclined to abuse terms like "racism" in their rush to explain the real and imaginary plights of "groups" they regard as victims. Peter Silver makes this very cogent observation in Savage Neighbors (Silver 2008:xvi).

Silver observes that the concept of "identity" has been much abused, as in the telling of North American history, where there is a tendency to reduce conflict to a question of "white" or "European colonists" against "Indians". In fact, "Indians" became a reduction of hundreds of distinct populations that represented an incredible diversity of ways of life that included conflict with neighboring tribes.

A Silver remarks (Silver 2008:xviii):

The newcomers, Silver continues, citing a contemporary English tourist, represented . . .

And such differences were just as likely to be foils for mutual conflict within and between colonial settlements of different European origins.

Rapid increases in numbers of people coming from Europe, and pushing west of the somewhat stablized mid-Atlantic colonies -- and wars, especially those that raged between the 1750s and the 1780s, beginning with the Seven Years' War between Britain and France in 1855, when western Indians allied with France began attacking middle "English" colonies -- forged alliances among native tribes as "Indians" and among newcomers as "white people".

"The Indians," Silver writes, "may in fact have been the first North American population to discover a broad identity" (Ibid. xx) as they forged coalitions to achieve the common "nativist" goal of containing the incursions of Europeans (Ibid. 16). Europeans, for their part, also came to perceive themselves as having more in common than not -- in particular "an aggrieved sense of victimization" (Ibid. 122). As Silver puts it (Ibid. xx):

The terms "Indian" and "white" were used with various meanings, some more political and cultural than racial. As used by Benjamin Franklin, who had his prejudices, "white" excluded Germans and others who today would be included. Franklin's "lovely White and Red" alluded to the "pallor and flush" of those Europeans he considered worthy of protection from mixture with "Blacks" and "Tawneys" (Ibid. 385-386). Some Indians and whites thought that a white could become an Indian, or an Indian might become a white, as a result of acculturation, during captivity or through education (Ibid. 114-122).

民族幻想の蹉跌：日本人の自己像
Minzoku gensō no satetsu: Nihonjin no jikozō
[The failure of racial illusions: The self-image of Japanese]
東京：岩波書店、1994年8月26日
Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 26 August 1994
ix, 301 pages, hardcover

The blurb on the front of the obi characterizes the book like this.

日本人とは、
日本民族とは、
----- 在日の視座から問う
日本人のアイデンティティ

Japan people,
Japan race,
----- Identity of Japan people

The chapter headings, on the back of the obi, promise this.

 序論 -- 課題としての民族
Introduction -- Race as a theme [problem]
  I  民族幻想の蹉跌
     The failure of racial illusions
 II  近代日本の異民族支配
     Control of different [other] races
       in recent-period Japan
III  日本人のアイデンティティ形成
     The formation of Japanese identity
 IV  日本認識における〈内なる日帝〉克服の課題
     The theme [problem] of "Empire of Japan
       within" subjugation in Japan's perception
  V  象徴天皇制と戦後責任
     The symbolic-Tennō system and
       postwar responsibility
 VI  民衆にとっての「民族」とは
     "Race" for [to] the masses

There an afterword, Yoon explains the origins of the title and subtitle of the book and of its chapters. Chapter one, which inspired the title, was originally published in the December 1993 issue (Number 590) of Shisō (思想) [Thought], a monthly magazine also published by Iwanami Shoten.

The book delivers -- to a considerable point. Yoon's overview of how terms like 人民 (jinmin) or "people", 国民 (kokumin) or "nation, national", and 民族 (minzoku) or "ethnos, race, nation) appeared in Japanese texts from the mid 19th century is not a bad summary. His contentions about how their meanings overlapped and changed in time are both plausible and debatable.

To be continued.

Biographical note

Yoon Keun Cha, born in Kyoto in 1944, is a professor of the history of recent-era Japan-Korea relations and intellectual history at Kanagawa University. As of this writing (October 2009), he was a member of the "Department of Cross-cultural Studies" in the "Faculty of Foreign Languages" of the university.

He has been a prolific writer on various aspects of "Korean" and "Japanese" identity in terms of "ethnos" [race] (民族 minzoku) and "nation" (国民 kokumin).

The following book, written subsequent to the book under review, explores the "Japan people" (日本人 Nihonjin), "Japan nation / nationals" (日本国民 Nihon kokumin), and "Japan ethnorace" (日本民族 Nihon minzoku) in Japan, against the backdrop of the views of "Asia" reflected in the writings of thinkers from Yoshida Shōin (吉田松陰 1830-1859) to Maruyama Masao (丸山真男 1914-1996).

尹健次 Yoon Keun Cha
日本国民論：近代日本のアイデンティティ
Nihon kokumin ron: Kindai Nihon no aidentiti
[Views of Japan nation: Identity of Japan in recent era]
東京：筑摩書房、1997
Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, March 1997
261 pages, hardcover

Yoon is also a mountaineer, photographer, and poet. His sensibilities are reflected the graphic representation of the name of his homepage -- 孤里晏爺 Koreanya.

Yoon shows the names 尹健次, ゆん・こぉんちゃ, and Yoon Keun Cha on his homepage. His Kanagawa University profile shows 尹健次 (Yoon Keun Cha) and ユン・コォンチャ. The colophon of his 1994 book shows "Yoon Keun-Cha" as a romanized form. The kana versions of his name would romanize "Yun Koon Cha".

Cultural Brokerage and Interethnic Marriage in Colonial Taiwan: Japanese Subalterns and Their Aborigine Wives, 1895-1930
The Journal of Asian Studies (Association for Asian Studies)
Volume 64, Number 2, May 2005
Pages 323-360

Barclay, an Assistant Professor of History at Lafayette College, has written a number of articles on conditions in Taiwan when it was part of Japan -- all excellent -- yet marred by his adoption of terminology in English that fails to accurately how his Japanese sources describe the territory and its inhabitants. The article under review here is also flawed by his imposition on the past of present-day "ethnicspeak" that tells us more about academic fashions than history.

In the following refiew, I will compare what Barclay writes in English with what he has reported in Japanese. When citing Japanese sources, he has no choice but to use words as he finds them. Problems begin when he morphs the metaphors of his Japanese sources into English metaphors that have travelled more comfortably outside Japan. The Japanese world is actually far more interesting.

"Western" and "non-Western"

Barclay presents "the case of interethnic marriage in Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule" as one which "takes on special significance" as a "non-Western example that straddles the early-modern and modern periods" (page 324) -- in the light of his introductory summary of "the importance of interethnic marriage to European commercial expansion into the Americas, Africa, and Asia" (page 323).

He introduces the term "tongshi" -- meaning "interpreters [who] conduced commerce and diplomacy and collected taxes among the Aborigine population" from the late Ming period -- and wraps up his introduction like this (pages 325-326).

"Tongshi" reflects 通事 (J tsōji, tsōzu) -- which I would gloss as meaning "mediating matters" or "communication" -- including 通訳 (tsōyaku), meaning "interpretation" between two languages. Both terms could refer to the acts or the persons who performed them. 通事 was also used in Japan, as during the Tokugawa period, when there were posts in Nagasaki like 唐通事 (Tō tsūji) and 和蘭通詞 or 蘭通詞 (both read "Oranda tsōji) -- or "Tang [China] interpreters" and "Olandese [Dutch] interpreters" -- to accommodate dealings with Dutch and Chinese ships.

Barclay's referrence to "Western concerns with monogamous marriage and racial purity" is a familiar stereotype" because it is not helpful to throw all "Western" countries into the racialist and racist bag. Howevere, he at least recognizes that "race" was not that big a deal in Japan at the time of his story.

What he does not seem to recognize is that Japan could not have "banning interethnic marriage" -- not only because "interethnic" did not exist at the time, but because Meiji law had already evolved on an essentially raceless foundation of civil status and family law. In 1873, the Great Council of State issued a proclamation that facilitated marriage and adoption alliances between Japanese and aliens, which resulted in an alien becoming Japanese -- a purely civil status. In 1899, Japan promulgated and began to enforce its first Nationality Law -- which, again, put the status of being Japanese on a purely civil footing.

Two months after the Nationality Law had begun to operate in the Interior, an Imperial Ordinance extended its efficacy to Taiwan, which had become part of Japan in 1895. In 1905, another Imperial Ordinance extended to Taiwan an 1898 revision of the 1873 proclamation, which continued to operate.

"Marriage" and "wife"

Barclay cites a number of Japanese expressions that he alleges can all be translated "to marry" or "to enter into a household". He also explores issues in Japanese family law regarding the registration of "wives" versus "secondary wives/concubines" (pages 342-343).

He states, for example, that "the character mekake/shō/qie . . . has two different possible Japanese readings". He is talking about 妾.

As "mekake" he says the graph "referred to a woman kept for a man's pleasure" -- which "might be understood as a 'mistress' in Western parlance" -- as though there was such a thing as a "Western parlance" that would agree to what the English term "mistress" meant. As "shō", however, he says it "secondary wife/concubine" and cites a Japanese source that apparently supports this contention (page 343)

Barclay then states that "Japan's 1871 Civil Code (Shinritsu-kōryō), an amalgam of Ming, Qing, and older Japanese codes, considered shō, like wives, to be 'second-degree' relatives of their husbands" (page 343). This law, however, was not a civil code but a penal code.

It, and a related amendment, were superceded by Japan's first "penal code" by name (刑法 Keihō) from 1 January 1882. This year corresponds to the "fourteen years after shō had been banished from Japanese civil law" -- as of 1896, when a certain magazine "supplied the furigana reading "shō" (secondary wife) for the charactere qui in reference to Hiyama Tetsusaburō'2 Atayal bride" (page 343). He then refers to an 1896 Tokyo newspaper article that "referred to the same couple as 'man and wife' (fūfu)" (page 343).

Though Barclay's legal characterizations are odd, his dates are right. And apart from whether his distinction between "mekake" and "sh&333;" is valid, he does succeed in setting up the following conclusion to his article ten pages later (page 352, underscoring mine).

Barclay is referring to homicidal retaliation that some Aborigine individuals and tribes occasionally took against Interior men who treated their daughters or women improperly by their local standards or expectations. The psychology is universal and easily understood.

That acts of relatiation, and for that matter all violence along the frontier, would be major nuisances for Interior authorities in Taiwan is obvious -- given their mission to pacify and settle the tribes that continued to resist their rule, in order to exploit the resources in the tribal territories.

And that authorities would want to avoid relatitory incidents -- either by preventing unions between Interior men and Aborigine women, or by ensuring that Interior men respected the customs of the Aborigine woman's family and tribe -- is also obvious.

Barclay's main contribution is to reveal how Interior authorities learned their lessons during the first few years and even decades of the period that Taiwan was part of Japan. As such, his show and tell is dynamic and interesting.

Whether Japan should have ventured into Taiwan in the first place is another issue. That it did, for the reasons it did, in the manner it did, is all that matters historically.

Authorities are duty bound to carry out their missions. They undertake their missions with manuals based on prior experience, or they write their manuals on the fly. For the most part, Interior authorities in Taiwan had to forge policy through trial and error.

The acceptance of marriages with Aborigine daughters offerred by village heads as strategic was naive in the absence of tactics. It was one thing to submit to the pomp and ceremony of marriage as strategy, but another to know what to do on the field of battle after the ritual.

Interior authorities learned the hard way -- in other words, the usual way -- that it was not enough to expect the "enemy" to be "like us". To some extent, at least, they had to meet the enemy on the enemy's own terms -- and this writing new chapters, and rewriting or tossing out old chapters, in the expanding field manual.

My main problem is with Barclay's "racial" and "ethnic" theories. If by "level of practice" he includes family law -- which was essentially reflected in the Nationality Law -- then he needs to point out that "the preservation of racial purity" could not have been an object of Taiwan policy, since it was not an object of Interior law.

In the penultimate paragraph he makes this statement (page 352, underscoring mine).

While understandable that Barclay should raise questions about whether practics in Taiwan were inspired by concerns about racial purity or hybridization, it is odd that, as an historian, he fails to ground his understanding of attitudes toward race and mixture in the growth of "Japan" from the dawn of Yamato history.

Migration and mixture

It is far from clear what Barclay means by "to the horror of Japanese reformers" -- since, in 1873, the "reformers" had introduced legal provisions for Japanese to enter into alliances of marriage and adoption with aliens. These provisions accommodated household registration practices that had been nationalized from 1872 -- practices which in turn reflected, and standardized, family and registration practices that, until then, had varied regionally.

It is even more puzzling why Barclay suggests that Meiji Japanese would have generally been concerned with "pure bloodlines" in any "racial" or "ethnic" sense -- since, notwithstanding the two-odd centuries of restrictions on unions with aliens -- "intermarriage" with locals and the creation of "hybrids" had been part and parcel of "migration" within the expanding territory of Yamato and then Japan.

The descendants of heaven began miscegenating with the natives from the moment they time they set foot on earth. Jinmu himself was a hybrid. Once firmly established, and armed with Chinese script and law, the court incorporated every territory it embraced through registration of the inhabitants and their land -- and through migration of people from previously settled territories, who intermarried with locals.

The only thing that was truely new for Japan about Taiwan was its size, and its demographic, linguistic, customary, and legal complexity.

When Taiwan became part of Japan, the Japan was nearly four decades into its own steady evolution of a political and legal system that would qualify as a competent state in eyes of the countries with which it had signed extraterritoriality treaties. Taiwan's relation with the Interior would be no different than Japan's relation with the foreign states that held themselves to be legally superior.

Japan's leaders may have been too optimistic about the ease with which the Taiwan Government-General of Taiwan would be able to secure control of new territory. But they had to have understood that, even after TGG had suppressed resistance and gained the cooperation of Taiwan's inhabitants, building the sort of administrative and legal framework that would facilitate social and industrial development would take many years -- and bringing Taiwan to parity with the Interior by any measure would take a few decades.

Wives, concubines, and mistresses

There was nothing "modern" or otherwise new about the household as an entity that, if necessary, could maintained by adoption or concubinage. Adoption was a fairly common practice in all social classes, while "concubinage" had always been possible only for men with the means of keeping more than one woman and family. Nor is it useful to suggest that in "the West" adoption was not a means of family survival -- or that public or private mistress-keeping was not something fairly common among men of wealth and power.

While the so-called "ie" system was not "enshrined" in law until 1898, the provisions it made for the family to survive as a "corporate" entity reflected long-standing customary and statute family law. Besides which, the practice of recording of 妾 (however read) in household registers had ended with .

Keeping mistresses -- "mekake o kakou" (妾を囲う) or "chikushō" (蓄妾 ) -- continued well into the Showa period. Today, too, there is nothing illegal with maintaing a lover, or even a second family, outside a legal marriage.

Under prewar laws, a man could recognize a child born outside a marriage (still possible today), or adopt the child into his register, or adopt a mistress into his household register, thus making her a member of the corporate family. All manner of formal and informal means were available for men with motivation and means to "keep a mistress" for pleasurable and/or family purposes.

The Japanese word "mekake" has no linguistic relationship with the graph 妾 in that the word exists apart from the graph -- whereas "sh%#333;" is the Sino-Japanese reading of the graph. Japanese used 妾 to express "mekake" -- but the graph was also used to express synonyms like "tekake" -- both of which referred to a woman a man "loved" in addition to his wife or "tsuma" (妻).

Other synonyms include Japanese expressions like "sobame" -- written 側女 (byside woman) and 側妻 (byside wife) -- and Sino-Japanese metaphors like "sokushitsu" (側室) or "byside room", as opposed to "seishitsu" (正室) or "proper room" for the "seisai" (正妻) or "proper wife". The latter was also called "honsai" (本妻) or "principal [original] wife" -- also read "moto-tsu-me".

Translation problems

While family law as reflected in family registration practices is somewhat beyond the scope of Barclay's mandate, he examines the linguistic and legal convolutions more thoroughly than any other researcher who has reported in English -- where the problem of "translation" arises. Nevertheless, he glosses over the metaphorical differences of Japanese terminology, and otherwise reduces their nuances to English terms -- Barclay says "Western parlance" -- like "concubine" and "mistress" (page 343).

Barclay then goes on to make these remarks -- alluding at the end to

. . . By the lights of Meiji Japanese practice, then, many of the more remarkable intercultural unions between Japanese males and Aborigine females are plausibly called "marriages" and the spouses called "husband" and "wife." The Taiwan government-general, however, did not publicly acknowledge Japanese-Aborigine marriages. The government-general's vital statistics reports for the years 1905 through 1934 record not a single "Aborigine wife - Japanese husband" marriage. In contrast, these reports assiduously tallied thousands of mixed shufan-shengfan and Han-Aborigine marriages (Taiwan jinkō dōtai tōkei 1905-34). Moreover, not all "Aborigine hands" were as scrupulous as Watanabe [Eijirō] in confirming their families' legal status by entering them into the koseki [as their wife or child]. The 1917 version of Kondō [Katsusaburō]'s koseki contains no entries for Iwan Robau (Taiwan sōtokufu 1920), a glaring omission, considering the very public nature of the marriage and the loyal service rendered to the government by Iwan.

Barclay is truer to the metaphors of his sources when presenting his views in Japanese -- which illustrates the point I have made elsewhere, that scholars reporting in English are in the habit of creating a "Japan" that is very different from the "Japan" described in Japanese texts.

On 21 June 2003, preliminary to the publication of the English report, while a visiting researcher at Keio University (慶応義塾訪問研究員) in Tokyo, Barclay -- billed as an associate professor (助教授) from the Department of History, Lafayette College, USA -- presented the following paper before a meeting of researchers at Kyoto University.

日本人植民地者と原住民の交流問題：台湾の『蕃界』における通事と通訳をめぐって

Nihonjin shokuminchi-sha to genjōmin no kōryū monday: Taiwan no "bankai" ni okeru tsōji [tsōzu, t'ong-su, PY tongshi]to tsōyaku wo megutte

Exchange [transaction] problems of [between] Japanese colonialists and indigenous people: Centering on understanding-matters [通事 liasoning, liaison officers] and understanding-meanings [通訳 interpreting, interpreters] in the "savage world" or Taiwan

We see in Barclay's 2003 Japanese presentation many examples of his total conflation of "Interiorite" (内地人 Naichijin) with "Japanese" (日本人 Nihonjin) in the 2005 JAS article. Here is just one.

The above sentence translates like this.

To be continued.

It corresponds to the following sentence in the English report (page 344, as cited above).

The government-general's vital statistics reports for the years 1905 through 1934 record not a single "Aborigine wife - Japanese husband" marriage.

To be continued.

Barclay makes the following statement in the JAS article (Barclay 2005:342, [ bracketed ] information mine).

Of the five items Barclay lists, the first of the two I have cited is the only one for which he provides a romanization for a substantial part of the item. The second of the two is the only one for which he provides no romanization whatever.

It is not clear that Barclay intends to paraphrase or translate the items. It appears, however, that in the first of the items I have cited, (1) he has not romanized the predicate question reflected in "Is it possible?" -- and (2) he misrepresents the Japanese metaphors.

According to the web posting of Barclay's 2003 Japanese presentation, he said this to his audience.

The two items given in the web representation of Barclay's 2003 presentation are sourced to 理蕃誌稿 (Riban shiō) -- which is Inō 1918/1995 in the "List of References" in Barclay 2005 JAS article. He calls this work "Records of Aborigine Administration" in English.

Metaphors

But Inō Kanori (伊能嘉矩) is also the compiler of a 1904 work called 台湾蕃政誌 (Taiwan bansei shi). And Barclay also dubs this work "Record of Aborigine Administration.

The metaphorical differences are significant. In 1911, between Inō's two reports, the "Bureau of Aboriginal Affairs" of the "Government of Formosa" in Taihoku, not Taipei, went to the trouble of publishing, and widely distributing, a book in English called Report on the Control of the Aborigines in Formosa. In this titling, "Aboriginal Affairs" reflects 蕃務 (banmu), whereas "Control of the Aborigines" reflects 理蕃 (riban).

The "Bureau of Aboriginal Affairs" was under the "Bureau [Department] of Civil Administration" -- in which "civil administration" reflects 民政 (minsei). The compilers of the 1911 report knew better than to "savage" the title of the book -- hence the use of "aborigines" and "aboriginal" for "savages" and "savage" in the titling.

The book is essentially a celebration of the success of having finally gained control of aborigines and their territories. There is a generally tendency in the book to refer to its subjects as "aborigines" -- at least when they are allowing their heads to be counted in a census or otherwise being obedient and subservient

However, the second part, immediately following the introduction, is entitled "A Brief History of the Control of Savages". And throughout the book, "savages" is the term most likely used when discussing aborigines who resist or cause damage, and those who are objects of punitive expeditions and other campaigns to extend the guard-line into their the territories they were attempting to defend.

Certainly the Taiwan Government-General knew the differences between the metaphors "control/manage savages" and "savage affairs" and "administration".

一、内地人ノ妾ト為リタル者ハ再ビ蕃人ニ嫁スルコト能ハザルカ

Ichi, Naichijin no mekake to naritaru mono ha [wa] futababi banjin ni ka suru koto atawazaru ka

[ Item: As for one who has become a mekake of an Interiorite, is briding a second time [i.e., remarriage] to a savage person [savage] not possible? ]

一、遺棄セラレタル者アルヤ否若シ有リトセバ其ノ後該蕃婦ノ動静及ビ蕃人感情如何」[理蕃誌稿]。

Ichi, Iki serashitaru mono aru ya iya moshi ari to seba sono ato gai banpu no dōsei oyobi banjin kanjō ikaga [Riban shikō]

Item: Whether there are or not those [mekake] who have been abandoned [by an Interiorite man], were there to be [some], after that, what about the movements [circumstances] of the said savage women and the savage people's feelings? [Control-savage report manuscript]

Institutional Barriers, Marginality, and Adaptation Among the American-Japanese Mixed Bloods in Japan
The Journal of Asian Studies
Volume XLII, Number 3, May 1983
Pages 519-544

My immediate response, while reading this article when it came out, was to question the editorial standards of what I had assumed was one of the more closely vetted journals in the field of Asian Studies. I was, at the time, beginning to lose my innocence regarding the "authority" of publications. Today I understand that, in the academic market, fashions of misinformation trump facts -- and peer reviewers and editors, wearing the same styles, are unlikely to know the difference.

Much of what Burkhardt writes is on a par with stating that, if you drop an egg, it will probably break. One does not need a degree in sociology to expect that people raised in broken homes, under conditions that may not bless them with an ordinary amount of family nurturance and social opportunity, may have more problems in life than others. It does, however, take a social scientist to make such people the objects of a "marginalization" study.

Pressing "cohorts" of "victims" by one definition or another into the service of the theory of the day is forgivable to the extent that social scientists, as members of the human race, are free to examine the human condition from their peculiar if sometimes warped viewpoint. It is even forgivable to err now and then.

Less forgivable is the misinformation Burkhardt has perpetuated -- because he depended on secondary and tertiary sources he was unable to suitably evaluate -- because he had not spent enough time exploring the larger field of minorities in Japan and familiarizing himself with its terrain.

Burkhardt's article is useful as a "biased" review of the literature in English at the time of its writing -- "biased" because he introduces and cites the literature to advance his own viewpoint, rather than subject the literature to critical scrutiny -- which he could not have done without adopting a more skeptical view of his "science" and doing more research.

Burkhardt's perspective is also useful to the extent he compares "Amerasians" with "Eurasians" -- though here, too, his "historical sketch" is so sketchy he entirely overlooks the history of "Eurasians" in Japan, which would have helped him understand the experiences of some "Amerasians" in Japan -- and several other "categories" of people in Japan -- Japanese and aliens -- of putatively mixed-racial ancestry in Japan.

Research undertaken to clarify problems that some people are more likely to face than others is honorable to the extent that it avoids taking sides in the ideological wars that embattle academia. In this regarad, Burkhardt's empathy cannot be faulted.

He is correct to blame some of the difficulties faced by some "Amerasians" on the responses of the United States and Japanese governments regarding measures that might have eased these difficulties -- relaxations of restrictive immigration and nationality laws in the United States, improvements in social welfare services in Japan.

I have grouped further comments under the following titles.

Mixed bloods in Japan
Legal status
Misinformation
"Japanese" and "Americans"
Marginality versus adaptation
Contradicting Michener
From "deviance" to "adaptation"
Yoder and Burkhardt
Wagatsuma and Strong
Pandering to academic tabloids

Mixed bloods in Japan

Burkhardt leads his article like this (page 519).

"American-Japanese or Amerasian"

Burkhardt racializes both "American" and "Japanese" to the extent that he often excludes "Amerasians" from both categories -- which, as labels of civil nationality, are raceless. He speaks of the "cultural" and "social" marginalization of his subjects while he himself marginalizes them linguistically.

While most researchers on both sides of the Pacific racialize nationality, some racialize it less than others, and a few have adopted labeling conventions that reserve nationality for the purely civil status it is by law. Burkhardt, though, never explains the rationale for his labels, and is not consistent in his usage.

Burkhardt uses "American-Japanese" (his hyphen) as a "Japanese" sub-category of "Amerasians" -- the "hybrid" buzzword of the day popularized by Pearl Buck and others. He does not explore the racialist contours of either term. He does not wonder what "American-Japanese" might mean in contrast with "Japanesse-Americans" (with or without a hyphen).

He might argue that "Japanese-Americans" means something else. Some writers, though, have read racial mixture into this term, and have used "nisei" to mean an American who is racially a "Japanese-American" hybrid.

Had Burkhardt used "American" and "Japanese" to mean only raceless nationlity, then "American Japanese" would denote a Japanese of American ancestry -- regardless of the person's putative race or ethnicity -- just as "Japanese American" has gradually come to embrace any person who is an American of Japanese ancestry -- again, regardless of their putative race or ethnicity.

Burkhardt, though, is a sociologist at lose in a human zoo in which people have already been assigned a cage according to the incumbent zookeeper's classification system. He passes the "Eurasian" cage on his way to cages marked "American-Japanese" and "American-Koreans" in the "Amerasian" quarter.

"Japanese Amerasians" and "Korean Amerasians" are apparently not in Burkhardt's "Japanese" and "Koreans" cages -- for he writes that "Koreans and Japanese tend to label and stereotype them as cultural aliens or "foreigners" (page 523, emphasis mine).

He speaks of "interracial Koreans" but not "interracial Japanese" -- never mind that "interracial" is a comment about parents and not children. He speaks of "half-white or half-black Amerasians" (page 523) -- while "white Konketsuji" and "black Konketsuji" in one phrase become "half-white and half-black youth" in the next.

He appears to endorse labels that perpetuate "black" and "white" racialism -- much less wonder where the "yellow" went.

It is not clear whether "Japanese mixed bloods" are different from "American-Japanese mixed bloods" -- or whether "Japanese Amerasians" is yet another category.

"historical sketch . . . mixed bloods in Japan"

Burkhardt never gives an account of the long and fascinating history of racial mixture in Japan -- the encounters of men and woman of anthropologically different geographical and local races, and their offspring, over the past roughly two millennia.

"eight American-Japanese mixed bloods"

Burkhardt admits his personal experience with "Amerasian" is limited to "unstructured interviews" with only "eight American-Japanese mixed bloods". Presumably he interviewed them to determine their experiences of "institutional barriers, marginality, and adaptation". He admits the eight subjects may not have been that representative.

Burkhardt does not summarize his eight subjects. No matter how "unstructured" the interview, one would think he would have collected some information in common about his subjects, and asked them some questions in common. But nowhere in his article does he describe his eight subjects.

In fact, of the seven "cases" he sprinkles throughout the article, he claimed to have interviewed only three. Another was a "case study" reported by a writer in a book Wagatsuma edited in Japanese. Another was based on a "biography" in Japanese. Another was related to him by Sawada Miki. Another was taken from Nathan Strong's dissertation, based on material Strong got from Sawada.

"father-absent Amerasians"

Burkhardt describes one man as being "unlike the majority of Konketsuji who are living not only without father but also without blood-related siblings" in that he "enjoyed a good sense of family" from his mother and younger brother. The man's father -- "fondly remembered" -- had been killed in the Korean war page 531).

The man -- "Kashiasu (whose real name was Junichi) -- is Kashiasu Naitō. Though Burkhardt's point about family is well made, he does not tell us that Naito was born on 10 May 1949, while the armistice ending the Korean War was signed on 27 July 1953.

"Amerasians as a distinct racial or societal group"

Why should Burkhardt expect Japan to "officially identify" Americans as a "distinct racial or societal group"? Does he believe the Japanese government is in the business -- or should be in the business -- of racializing people?

Burkhardt reports that "According to researchers and authorities at the Japanese ministries of Justice and Health and Welfare, the crime and delinquency rates among Konketsuji are probably not substantially above national norms" -- then lamented in a footnote that "No national surveys of criminality among Konketsuji, however, have been done" (page 536, and note 19).

The absence of race in Japanese law and policy be as it may, the Japanese government did, in fact, directly and indirectly conduct studies of konketsuji. Research was conducted in three broad areas -- child welfare, child mental health, and physical anthropology.

When interviewing ministry officials, apparently Burkhardt was not told about -- or was not offered copies of -- works like the following, which clearly reflect serious effort on the part of the government to understand "so-called mixed blood children" (iwayuru konketsu jidō).

Clinicians and researchers at private and government institutions, too, studied the problems related to mixed people. Ikeda Yoshiko, as the director of the Child Mental Health Division at the Nationality Institute of Mental Health in Japan, had been following the lives of several persons of mixed racial parentage for many years when I met her in 1975. This was the year my own 20-year affiliation with NIMH began, first as a doctoral fellow, then as an associate researcher.

Ikeda pioneered child battering studies in Japan but was involved in all aspects of child and family mental health. As suicide was my main subject of research at NIMH, and because I was also interested in minority experiences, she talked with me about some of her mixed-blood patients, a few of whom had exhibited suicide ideation or made attempts. My impression was that, despite their problems, they were survivors.

Physical anthropologists in Japan had long been studying every measurable aspect of "race" with respect to the racialized mainstream population of Japan and minority populations -- and hybrids. Journals going back to the Meiji era contain many reports of comparative "race" studies. For examples of such work, see the "Hybrid studies" section of the One-hundred-million hybrids feature.

Most such studies were concerned with racial and environmental effects on physical development and maturation. The following publication is an example such research in the early postwar years.

The publication consists of two long reports of research carried out by the vice director of the Institute of Population Problems with investigators at the Microbic Institute of Nihon University. The reports are followed by English summaries. The English titles and particulars are as provided.

Anthropometric (somatometric) studies of this kind continued through the 1960s and into the 1970s. Some were longitudinal, as researchers measured growth and maturation rates of the same subjects over a period of several years.

Many such reports -- some by prominent physical anthropologists -- appeared in Zinruigaku zassi -- "The Journal of the Anthropological Society of Nippon". The entire volume of Issue 760 was devoted to "Anthropological Reports on the Japanese-American Hybrids" (Volume 76, Number 3, July 1968).

"Japan and Okinawa"

Characterizing Okinawa as though it were not part of Japan is symptomatic of Burkhardt's limited understanding of Japan -- given the 1983 date of his article -- even if Lifton's 1975 article reflects conditions before the return of Okinawa to Japan in 1972.

Legal status

Burkhardt makes this blanket remark about legal rights and illegitimacy (page 523).

These sweeping generalizations come without statistics or citations of law.

"offspring of a foreigner"

There is no denial of "equal rights" under Japanese law simply because a child is an "offspring of a foreigner".

Every child has two parents, known or unknown, married or unmarried. At the time Burkhardt wrote his article, if one parent was a foreigner, and the other was a Japanese, whether the child became Japanese depended on the sex of the Japanese parent, whether the Japanese parent was married to the foreign parent, and the timeliness of filing notifications of birth and recognition.

Only a child born to a Japanese woman who was married to its foreign father -- or a child born to a foreign woman not married to its Japanese father, who had not recognized the child in a timely manner -- would not have become Japanese, and accordingly not have been treated the same as a Japanese child under some Japanese laws. But such treatment would not have been because the child was "an offspring of a foreigner".

Since 1985, only a child unrecognized by its Japanese father before or at the time of its birth to a foreign woman has not become Japanese. This last limitation on the rules for acquiring Japanese nationality at time of birth is now being examined with a view to revise the law.

"most Amerasians are illegitimate"

Burkhardt creates many problems by imposing the term "Amerasian" on the people he wishes to "group" into an object of study. If true that "most" are illegitimate -- which appears to be true only because he has focused on those who were born out of wedlock and have not had a father in their lives -- all would be Japanese if their mother was Japanese and if their mother or another qualified person registered them in the mother's family register within two weeks of their birth. Their status as a child born out of wedlock would not have been cause to deny them treatment as Japanese under any Japanese law.

Foundlings presumed to have been born in Japan became Japanese under jus soli (right of soil) principles. They, too, would not have been treated other than as Japanese under Japanese law.

Another problem is that being the "offspring of a foreigner" does not make one an "Amerasian". Burkhardt writes like this because he is either not aware of, or has chosen to ignore, people in Japan whose foreign father is not "American".

Misinformation

Many of Burkhardt's characterizations of Japan are not true -- partly because he did not know enough about the country to recognize when his secondary and tertiary English sources were incorrect or misleading -- and partly because he set out to prove what he believed to be true on the basis of his own perceptions of the human condition.

Burkhardt gleans most of his views about so-called "Burakumin" from De Vos and Wagatsuma 1966 -- Japan's Invisible Race, University of California Press -- and other reports in the same vein, which describe putative descendants of yesteryear's outcastes as though they were still outcastes -- and, worse, create the impression that "they" constitute a "group" that is metaphorically "racial".

However, there have been no outcastes in Japan since 1871. There are not even any "former outcastes" in Japan today. There is, in fact, no "group" in Japan that considers itself "outcaste" or stylizes itself as "Burakumin".

Some people who consider themselves descendants of yesteryear's outcastes refer to themselves as "buraku jūmin" if they wish to publicize (and politicize) the fact that they are residents of a neighborhood historically associated with an outcaste settlement.

No such person would tolerate the implication they might not be Japanese. As Japanese, they would never consider themselves "inherently inferior".

1980 minus 60 is 1920. Japan annexed Korea as Chosen in 1910. Chosen was part of Japan, and Chosenese were Japanese. Korea had been a protectorate of Japan since 1905. Koreans today would argue that Koreans were subject to "institutionalized discrimination" by no later than 1905.

But the record shows that the vast majority of Koreans in Japan today are descendants of people who migrated from Chosen to the prefectures, where they freely pursued their dreams and were generally treated, under Interior law, like other Japanese, albeit with regard -- sometimes discriminatory -- for their different territorial status.

"Konketsuji" can refer to anyone born to parents of putatively different races. The word originated long before the Allied Occupation of Japan and is hardly limited to what Burkhardt, following academic and other fashions, calls "Amerasians".

Nor is the term "haafu" -- not "hafu" -- limited to "persons fathered by Americans". The word can be used to label a racially mixed people regardless of parentage.

The child of two Japanese could be called half if the parents are of different races. Whereas the child of a Japanese parent and an American parent of the same putative race would not be called haafu.

Here Burkhardt racializes "Ainu" and "Japanese" -- but Ainu are Japanese. What he means is that most people who consider themselves Ainu are mixtures of putatively pure Ainu and Shamo or Wajin -- references to Japan's putative racioethnic majority.

The head count Burkhardt cites refers to Japanese who identify themselves as Ainu. Several times that number would have to be of part-Ainu descent as a result of putatively Ainu-Shamo unions during the past century or so -- to say nothing of the past millennium.

If "Ainu" and "Japanese" are races -- as Burkhardt contends -- then the blood of a lot of his racially "Japanese" cohort would be racially mixed.

The multiracial character of Japan's population becomes even more diverse when one considers that -- from from 1965 through 1980 alone, a total of 91,054 marriages between Japanese and aliens were registered in Japan -- 50,103 of them between Japanese and Koreans, the other 40,951 between Japanese and other aliens. There is no racioethnic data on the Japanese or alien spouses, but to the extent that these marriages are between people of putatively different races, their offspring will be mixed.

The "Caucasoid" theory of Ainu origins had been long debunked by the time Burkhardt wrote this.

Burkhardt seems not have to have heard the rumor, floating around for at least a century, that some Okinawans regard themselves a racioethnic minority.

And not to forget naturalized Japanese. Between 1952 and 1980, some 135,056 aliens became Japanese. Among these new Japanese, 102,455 had once been Koreans, and 32,601 had been of many other nationalities. While none of these nationalities constitute a race, they represent many racioethnic populations.

All such data was readily available when Burkhardt did his research. Yet he minimizes the diversity of Japan's population while endorsing the stereotype that "Japanese" is a race, is sufficiently free of amalgamation as to characterize as "homogeneous".

Burkhardt's statement is not true for many reasons. The nationality law at the time was matrilineal for unmarried Japanese mothers. Hence the child of an unmarried Japanese woman would acquired Japanese nationality if she filed a notification of birth as required by law.

Japan's Nationality Law is not a law of citizenship, which is not defined in Japanese law. Nationality is not a possession a parent "passes on" to a child but is always "acquired" by qualified persons upon timely notification of documents which confirm their eligibility. Eligibility is based on either jus sanguinis or jus soli at time of birth, or legitimation or permission to naturalize later in life.

"Konketsuji"

Burkhardt generally uses "Konketsuji" as a synonym for ""American-Japanese" or "Japanese Amerasians" in Japan. He capitalizes and italicizes the word -- as though to declare that the objects of his study are both a "proper" and an "exotic" subspecies of humans.

"American citizenship"

Burkhardt's remarks about the operation of nationality laws are also misleading. The Japanese government has the authority to define only Japanese nationality. If an American in Japan becomes stateless because a provision in the US nationality act caused a loss of status as a US citizen or national, Japan would recognize the former American as stateless.

"Japanese" and "Americans"

In his conclusion, Burkhardt returns to "the Burakumin and Korean minorities" in Japan (pages 539-540)

Here Burkhardt repeats and compounds a number of previous errors.

"citizenship and legal status"

Burkhardt's "Amerasians" are apparently mostly US citizens or Japanese nationals. The majority of Koreans are nationals of the Republic of Korea and other Koreans are Chosenjin -- a legacy status that does not correspond to an actual nationality.

By 1980, over 400,000 ROK Koreans had qualified for permanent residence status under a status agreement between ROK and Japan effective from 1966.

"much more likely than Japanese"

This expression -- and "higher rates than Japanese" -- would seem to exclude "Burakumin" if not also "Amerasians" from "Japanese". The expression "exceeds Japanese norms" also seems to be exclusive -- unless by this Burkhardt means "Japan's norms".

In any event, he does not give figures. He is a sociologists, but he does not clarify the "norms" much less qualify "higher" or "much more".

"overwhelming majority . . . illegitimate"

Again Burkhardt repeats this mantra -- and again he does not provide the foundation for this claim -- which of course, if true, would correlate with "live in father-absent families".

"a kind of enforced endogamy"

The Buraku Liberation League has long insisted that discrimination in marriage remains a major problem -- but also insists that buraku are not endogamous.

Burkhardt includes Koreans here despite an earlier observation, based on a secondary source, that "recent data indicating a significant increase in their rate of intermarriage with Japanese" (page 525). He failed to give any figures.

By 1974, one in every two marriages registered in Japan, involving a Korean, was with a non-Korean. By 1984, one in every two Koreans marrying in Japan was marrying a non-Korean. The vast majority of Koreans who marry non-Koreans are marrying Japanese. By 2005, nine in ten Korean marriages in Japan were with non-Koreans, which represented an out-marriage rate of over eighty percent.

"legally invisible"

Burkhardt is using this term to mean that the Japanese government does not tag and tract "Amerasians". This does not mean that they are "legally invisible". Everyone who has a legal status in Japan is legally visible in terms of their nationality -- Japanese or alien, including stateless. Being born out of wedlock is also a cause for legal visibility, as is usually the condition of being raised by only a mother.

"full Japanese and Koreans"

Whether Burkhardt means "full Japanese and Koreans" or "full Japanese and full Koreans" is not clear. Legally, there is no such thing as "half" or "full" nationality. One is either Japanese -- or Korean -- because of nationality.

If Burkhardt is speaking of "race" then he is doubly wrong -- because no "rights" under Japanese law are conditioned by race.

Marginality versus adaptation

Despite the verbiage that Burkhardt gives to examples of social pathology and maladaptation -- he makes the following observations in the section on "Acceptance" (page 535).

Immediately after the above comment he begins the section on "Aggression" with this remark (page 536).

Then in his "Conclusion" he writes this (page 539).

Some of these statements do, in fact, come as a surprise -- against the general tenor of Burkhardt's article. He seems more certain about "institutional barriers" and "marginality" but less certain about "adaptation" and "deviance".

It only "appears that" the great majority might have adapted well. "Probably" only a small minority have not adapted well.

Burkhardt can't seem to make up his mind.

Out the outset he described "Amerasians" as "a tiny but identifiable racial minority amidst a highly homogeneous society" (page 527). Obviously, if scattered, they cannot constitute any kind of "collective" -- except in Burkhardt's article -- where come together as a "group" and a "cohort".

Contradicting Michener

Burkhardt cites James Michener as a foil for insisting that views on the other end of the spectrum are more truthful (pages 525-526).

Burkhardt goes on to cite numerous sources to rebut Michener's statements. He especially highlights reports on experiences of "racial discrimination, poverty, and a minimum level of education" and "frustration, alienation, delinquency, and self-destructive behavior" -- citing Wagatsuma's report that "a number of mixed-blood girls have raped, boys sexually assaulted" (1973:261-262), and two reports of an "especially shocking case . . . that involved a half-black 16-year-old boy who confessed to the rape, robbery and murder of three young Japanese women" (Robert Trumbull 1967, Era Thompson 1967) -- then declares that "By the late 1960s both half-white and half-black youth appeared to be participants in an alienated subculture heavily involved in early sexual promiscuity, delinquency, drug addiction, and suicidal behavior (Moser 1969).

From "deviance" to "adaptation"

Burkhardt's main problem is that he goes into his research armed mainly with the views of "Robert S. Yoder and Professor George Yamamoto of the University of Hawaii and Professor Hiroshi Wagatsuma of Tsukuba University for their encouragement and assistance" in his research (page 519).

The king of the mountain here -- in so far as studies of "mixed bloods" are concerned -- was Hiroshi Wagatsuma (1927-1985), an anthropologist who, during his many years in the United States, had been closely associated with George De Vos. Following De Vos, Wagatsuma focused on psychocultural issues like discrimination -- until he returned to Japan, where he abandoned his minority studies in favor of exploring the kinkier frontiers of the anthropology of urban sexual behavior.

Yoder and Burkhardt

Yoder, a sociologist, also gravitated toward social pathology. In the bibliography to a paper he wrote called "Assimilation Problems of Deviants: Native Born Interracial Persons From Broken Homes in Japan and America" (4 January 1983, "A paper written in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree in Sociology at the University of Hawaii"), Yoder lists two earlier papers -- the "The Amerasians in Korea: An Assimilation Model and Factors Effecting Their Assimilation" (1980, "unpublished paper") -- and "An Exploratory Study of the Assimilation Pattern of the American-Koreans" (1981, "unpublished paper").

Burkhardt, in the article under review here, list two papers by Yoder -- "An Exploratory Study of the Assimilation Pattern of the American-Koreans" (1980, "Paper presented to the International Human Assistance Program in Seoul, Korea") -- and "A Format Describing a Comparison of Assimilation Between Interracial Koreans and Interracial Japanese" (1981, "Dissertation proposal submitted to University of Hawaii, Department of Sociology").

Burkhardt does not refer to anything he himself wrote earlier. But Yoder, in his 1983 paper, lists an "unpublished manuscript" attributed to Burkhardt and dated 1979 called "Institution Barriers, Marginality and Deviance Among the American-Japanese Mixed-Bloods".

In other words -- by the time Yoder and Burkhardt title their 1983 papers -- Burkhardt has switched from "deviance" to "adaptation" -- while Yoder has switched from "assimilation patterns" to "assimilation problems" with a focus on "deviants".

At the time I met Yoder in the early 1980s he was doing field work on youth deviancy in Japan. Nearly two decades his work was published in a book called Youth Deviance in Japan: Class Reproduction of Non-Conformity (Robert Stuart Yoder, Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2004, Japanese Society Series).

Though Yoder was attracted to the views of De Vos and Wagatsuma with regard to minorities and delinquency in Japan, as a sociologist he examined problems in terms of "institutional barriers" as did Burkhardt. In the course of his research, he was also influenced by conversations with me concerning the workings of the Nationality Law -- as the court cases involving my children were then in progress -- and my misgivings about the racialization of Japanese nationality in mass media and academia.

Both of us were experimenting with different ways to describe people, racially when necessary, without racializing nationality. He ended up using expressions like "interracial people" and similarly modified nationality terms with "interracial" and other qualifiers, in the manner of "interracial Japanese" and "Korean-oriented interracial Americans" and the like (Yoder 1983, op. cit., and Robert S. Yoder, "The Pattern of Assimilation for Interracial Koreans and Interracial Japanese", Sophia International Review, Volume 5, pages 48-59, Sophia University International College).

Yoder's terminology was not perfect. And sometimes he slipped into conventional racialist usage. But at least he perceived the racialization of nationality as a problem.

Burkhardt was lazy. He adopted the conventional labels, thereby aiding and abetting the exclusion, alienation, and marginalization of racial minorities in Japan from "Japanese". And, without skipping a beat, he wrote things like this (Page 527).

At the time I met Yoder he was teaching sociology at Sophia University. He kept his students and others busy completing questionnaires. On a couple of occasions I helped him lug boxes of IBM cards, punched with programs and data, and printouts, between his office and Sophia's computer room.

Burkhardt cites Yoder as an authority and says he "confirmed" the reports of others. Mostly what Yoder did regarding "interracial people" -- and what Burkhardt did concerning "Eurasians" and "Amerasians" -- was recycle the opinions of others.

Wagatsuma and Strong

I was a student of De Vos and through him met and got to know Wagatsuma. In 1975 I attended Wagatsuma's presentation of a paper entitled "Mixed-Blood Children in Japan -- An Exploratory Study" (Colloquium, Center for Japanese and Korean Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 22 January 1975). He had presented an earlier version -- "Mixed-blood children in Japan: An exploratory study" -- at the Conference on Ethnic Relations in Asian Countries, which was hosted at State University of New York in Buffalo, New York, from 20-21 October 1972. A slightly revised version of the 1975 paper appeared as "Mixed-Blood Children in Japan: An Exploratory Study" in Journal of Asian Affairs, Volume 2 (Fall 1976), pages 9-16.

Note 1 of the 1975 colloquium manuscript reads like this (page 20).

Wagatsuma, knowing of my own interest in racial mixture in Japan, asked Yuzuru Sasaki (佐々木譲 Sasaki Yuzuru), a colleague in Japan, to send me the five scrapbooks in which they had collected numerous magazine clippings, including most of those he had used for his article. He was finished with them, and I was allowed to keep them. My own files of clippings and other materials related to "mixture" overflow a four-drawer filing cabinet, and related books fill a dozen banana boxes.

Sasaki was a "Probation Officer / Osaka Family Court / Osaka, Japan" according to the "Contributors" blurbs in De Vos and Wagatsuma, in Japan's Invisible Race (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). In the Preface, however, he is called "a probation officer of the Kobe Family Court" and is credited with doing "the field observations that made the following chapter on the urban Buraku of Kyoto possible" (page ix) -- referring to Chapter 6, A Traditional Urban Outcaste Community, by Yuzuru Sasaki and George De Vos.

Note that the article by Yuzuru Sasaki and Hiroshima Wagatsuma in Lee and De Vos 1981, called "Negative Self-Identity in a Delinquent Korean Youth" (Chapter 14), reviews the personal history of a Korean youth who comes to the attention of correctional officers in Kobe. The article is based on a case study by Sasaki reported in a collection of case studies of juvenile delinquency edited by Wagatsuma and published in 1973 (我妻洋編、非行少年の事例研究、東京：誠信書房 、昭和48年).

The Preface also makes this observation about the three articles, all coauthored by De Vos and Wagatsuma, of Section IV, Psychological Perspectives (pages ix-x).

Immediately following the above paragraph is perhaps the most important disclosure (page x, bold emphasis mine).

Wagatsuma's father, Wagatsuma Sakae (1897-1973), is remembered as the father of postwar family law reform in Japan. In the late 1970s, when both Wagatsuma and I were in Japan, he introduced me to one of his late father's colleagues, who in turn introduced me to the attorneys who represented my wife at the time and our children in their nationality law suits against Japan.

Increasingly alienated with life in the United States, Wagatsuma gradually spent more of his life in Japan, lecturing at Tsukuba University writing at Karuizawa, where his family had a second home. We met now and then to keep each other abreast of the latest gossip.

Wagatsuma and De Vos were not getting along. Karel van Wolferen and I couriered , between the two men their much delayed manuscript for Hiroshi Wagatsuma and George A. De Vos, Heritage of Endurance: Family Patterns and Delinquency Formation in Urban Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

The book was much thinner than the original manuscript I had seen and partly read in the early 1970s, on which De Vos had put his name first. I had met van Wolferen in De Vos's office at Berkeley. He was residing in Japan and we became friends when I moved there. He is a superb photographer, and his work appears in a couple of De Vos's books and in Heritage of Endurance.

Wagatsuma died the following year. I wrote of his struggle with cancer and cited his deathbed writing on the subject of attitudes toward terminal illness in Japan. His wife published an account of his struggles in 1987.

Nathan Strong

Nathan Strong was a student of De Vos and others at Berkeley, but Wagatsuma, then at UCLA, was also on his dissertation committee. Strong and I were doing our field work in Japan at the same time and collaborated in many ways. He gave me material he had obtained from Sawada Miki on suicidal orphans. I shared my collection of magazine ads and other tearouts featuring multiracial people in Japan, and a few of these appeared in the back of his dissertation still bearing my date stamps.

Strong finished his fieldwork first. In 1978 he filed a dissertation called Patterns of Social Interaction and Psychological Accommodation Among Japan's Konketsuji Population (Nathan Oba Strong, University of California, Berkeley). It includes a facsimile of an article I had written on gender discrimination in Japan past and present, focusing on family status and nationality.

My then wife was pregnant with the child who was to be our daughter. While lining up an attorney through Wagatsuma, I had started writing about the nationality we were about to face in court. Strong was a beneficiary (or a victim) of one of my earliest attempts to define them.

My article -- called "Enormous Gaps Exist Between Constitutional Rights for Women and Actual Practices" -- was published in a supplement to The Japan Times on 24 June 1978. Three of Strong's committee members, including De Vos, approved his dissertation in August, and one signed in July. Wagatsuma was the first to sign, on 21 June -- before the final assembly that included my article. That was what you had to do to collect signatures from committee members separated by hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles.

Strong and I had talked about problems of racial description. He ended up characterizing people like this (page 5).

I will leave it to readers of Strong's dissertation to decipher this somewhat cryptic remark. Strong decided to keep his labels fairly simply and conventional, using "full Japanese" as well as "majority Japanese" and "full Asian Japanese" alongside "Black-Asian" and "Caucasian-Asian". He qualifies some terms racially -- like "western (Caucasian) women".

He spoke of some of the "isolates" with whom he established contact as passers (page 15) like this.

Burkhardt says this about the above remark (page 538).

If Burkhardt had lived and worked in Japan for as long as Strong had, he would have met not a few Japanese who he had first thought were "full Japanese" (to use the racialist terminology that he and Strong share". As a sociologist, he should have known that all manner of social passing, including racial passing, takes place in all societies -- and there is no reason to think that Japan should be an execption.

The racial mainstream in Japan is physically rather diverse. Individuals of putatively mixed ancestry, whose features allow them to blend with the mainstream, are very likely to "pass" as racial majorities. Most "passers" I have met don't "hide" their ancestries -- but simply don't go out of their way to advertise their family histories -- their Okinawan, Ainu, Filipino, black, white, Korean, Chinese, whatever roots -- to strangers or others they have no reason to feel they can trust.

Burkhardt interviewed "informants" who were already well-known to journalists and academics who have investigated racial mixture at a distance. He worked through facilitators or handlers who introduced him to people who would tell the familiar stories -- the more conspicuous, higher profile, archetypal "Amerasians".

Strong did most of his field work on turf already familiar to him -- and many of his informants, as Burkhardt points out, were rather Americanized. But Strong also witnessed the human condition in Japan far more intimately than Burkhardt.

I also have witnessed this condition and will vouch for most of Strong's observations about passing. Passing, though, is a no-brainer for anthropologists -- or for anyone who recognizes the essential diversity of human populations, especially those as large, geographically extensive, and historically complex as Japan's.

And apparently Burkhardt did not read carefully -- or take seriously -- Strong's scattered remarks about himself -- his work in Japan as a "professional singer" (page 47) -- and his own raciality, such as "Both myself and one additional Black American constituted exceptions" (page 65) and "my racial status as an American-Black gave me only minimal advantage" (page 73).

Strong says he went into the field, particularly in Nagoya, "to sustain my primary research tasks as a participant-observer" (page 65). He later explains what he meant by this (page 75).

Strong chose not to tell the fuller story of his past incarnation in Japan, before becoming an anthropologist. For a time he had passed himself off as a Jamaican singer at an Akasaka night club. Strong called himself "black" but that covers a lot of shades. some paler than mine. His complexion was light and his eye's were not deeply set. Hence his occasional effort to pass himself off as a "Black Asian".

Strong's "participant observation" included "undercover observation". At least once he blew his cover.

While in Nagoya, he would sometimes call and talk about his adventures. One day he phoned and complained of stiffness, pain, and bruising. No bones were broken, and he had all his teeth, but he worried how many days or weeks it would take to recover.

He said he'd been in a fight. Someone had discovered he'd been faking his identity. Suddenly he was as not just a spy, but a traitor. Spies are tortured. Traitors are lynched.

Strong was one of my few and favorite friends. One of the pleasures of his company was his talent for being one of several persona. No one is made of wood or stone, but some people are more plastic than others. Strong was a chameleon, one moment a psychological anthropologist, the next a street-smart, jive-talking racial curiosity with a family history for every occasion.

Strong was doing a double majoring in Anthropology and Education. As an anthro major, he under the supervision of George De Vos, a psychological anthropologist. The psych department at Berkeley was dominated by experimental psychology, and clinical psych students got their training in projective tests from De Vos, who had trained in clinical psychology and used Rorschach Tests and Thematic Apperception Tests in much of his anthropological research.

Strong's heart, however, was more in the anthropology than in the psychological testing. He was supposed to administer a short form of the Thematic Apperception Test but opted for self-assessment and social-distance tests -- less intrusive and more "sociological" than psychodynamic.

Strong also felt that Wagatsuma was pressuring him to focus more than he wanted to on sexuality, deviancy, and other topics of interest to Wagatsuma. This, too, Strong resisted, preferring to look at the people he studied from a broader perspective that embraced adjustment as well as maladjustment.

Bear in mind that psychological anthropology, while defining cultural norms, dwells on abnormal behavior as defined within a culture -- and compares cultures with regard how their pathologies differ. I, also, grew weary of academia's abnormal focus on abnormal exotica.

Pandering to academic tabloids

Burkhardt makes the following remarks regarding the press in Japan.

Burkhardt paints the press and other mass media in Japan as a source of inaccurate and false impressions -- yet accepts reports in magazines like Saturday Evening Post ("Japan's Occupation Babies"), Christian Century ("Another Report on GI Babies", "Those GIs in Japan"), Colliers ("Madam Butterfly's Children"), Reader's Digest ("The Facts About GI Babies"), and Ebony ("Japan's Rejected") as credible sources. He also appears to take for granted the credibility of reports in English academic journals.

Why does he not wonder whether reportage on "GI babies" in US mass media might also have been pandering to popular cravings for tales about interracial sexuality and of nurturing preconceptions about racial and other forms of discrimination in Japan? Or that Wagatsuma and other researchers might have been feeding academic appetites for the abnormal, taboo, and exotic in the guise of "deviancy" studies?

The Heiress and the Love Children: Sawada Miki and the Elizabeth Saunders Home for Mixed-Blood Orphans in Postwar Japan
PhD dissertation, History
University of Hawai'i, August 2002
xvi, 272 pages, PDF file
UMI Microform 3057359

They were not necessarily "love children", not all were of "mixed blood", and a few were not "orphans" in the usual sense of this word. But Fish presents sound evidence to support his thesis that "United States immigration policy working in combination with Japanese social welfare policy served to exacerbate an already difficult situation, leading to a larger number of mixed-blood babies having been abandoned than had to be" (page 8).

Focusing as it does on the acivities of Sawada Miki, Fish's dissertation is far from being a definitive overview of the complex political, social, family, and personal conditions in which thousands of children were born in Japan during the Allied Occupation to parents of putatively different races. Some of these children were raised by their parents, some were raised by their mother or their mother's relatives, and some ended up in a public or private orphanage after being abandoned, or after being directly placed in the care of a facility. Most such children were raised in Japan, but a few were raised outside Japan by adoptive parents.

The main contribution of Fish's dissertation is the light it sheds on the political history of the Elizabeth Saunders Home from its start in 1947 to about 1973, when changes in welfare laws and economic conditions affected the home. Some of the light came from an examination of documents in the archives kept by the home's successors. Other light came from a survey of contemporary bureaucratic reports and mass media.

The most significant observation will come as a surprise to academics and journalists who have written about mixed-blood children, who have generally blamed their alleged plight on racism, in both Japan and in the United States, but particularly in Japan.

To be continued.

Mixed-Blood Japanese: A Reconsideration of Race and Purity in Japan
In: Michael A. Weiner (editor)
Japan's Minorities: The illusion of homogeneity
Second edition
London: Routledge (Taylor and Francis), 2009
Pages 40-58 (Chapter 3)

This article is reviewed here. See Weiner 2009 for review of the book in which it was published.

Forthcoming.

What Are You?
(Voices of Mixed-Race Young People)
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999
xiv, 273 pages, hard cover

The book -- according to the keywords on the copyright page -- is "juvenile literature" consisting of "interviews" of "racially mixed people" in the "United States. The people are "young adults" and "teenagers", and the interviews constitute "case studies" of "race relations" in the United States by way of reflecting on the "ethnicity" and "race relations" of "racially mixed people" -- again, according to the keywords on the copyright page.

The author's Introduction is preceded by a poem called "Me" -- credited to a 26-year-old "biracial" woman who was adopted by "German-American" parents. The poem runs a bit over three pages and pretty much defines the kaleidoscope "attitude" of the entire book. Each turn of a page to another contributor's remarks reveals a different personal take on what it means to "racially mixed".

Introduction

The Introduction is the longest part of the book, which is supposed to be readable by 8th graders and older. It is mostly a personal account of how Gaskins discovered, when growing up, that "in the eyes of many people I am the product of a relationship that wasn't supposed to happen" -- and how she went about answering the question raised by the first line of poem, which inspired the title of the book -- "What are you anyway?.

Tiger Woods pops up throughout. The penultimate paragraph include another crowning tribute to him, and an expression of gratitude that the US government now allows multiple checking of the race boxes it approves for use on federal forms (page 10).

The last graph assures us that "although this book looks primarily at race and ethnicity, I want to emphasize that the young people profiled here have many more dimensions than that" (page 10).

Definitions

One page is given to the definitions of five terms. All of the definitions are problematic, not the least because they seem to endorse the essential racialism that creates the situations which appear to anguish many voices in the book. Some are extremely pendantic and even silly (page 12, comments mine).

Root's Bill of Rights

Facing the page of "Definitions" is the following "Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People" written by Maria P.P. Root, a clinical psychologists known for her writing on "multiracial" issues. Root introduces her self on her own professional homepage -- http://www.drmariaroot.com/ -- as "an independent scholar and clinical psychologist . . . a trainer, educator, and public speaker on the topics of multiracial families, multiracial identity, cultural competence, trauma, work place harassment, and disordered eating" (retrieved 12 October 2009).

The above version is essentially the same as the version that Root makes available for reproduction on her own website -- except her version shows "Not to justify my ethnic legitimacy" ahead of "Not to be responsible for people’s discomfort with my physical or ethnic ambiguity."

My main problem with Root's approach it that it smacks of a clinical checklist intended to "empower" clients with self-esteem and confidence.

Fine. Except Root's phrasing -- beginning with the very title of her "bill of rights" -- encourages people to believe that they are in fact "racially mixed people".

In order to embrace such a bill of rights personally, one has to assume that one is a "racially mixed" person. This assumes -- and other phrasing encourages belief in -- the existence of "races" that could be kept separate within a person. If "races" exist, how is it possible to "keep the races separate within" oneself? Except by identifying "differently in different situations"?

Root's phrasing also encourages people to believe that groups exist -- otherwise there would be have the choice of being loyal toward, or indentifying with, "more than one group of people".

Root is trying to cover all the bases -- but in fact she misses a few. Perhaps her own convictions that "race" and "ethnicity" and "multiraciality" should be recognzied prevent her from advocating that an individual actually has the choice not to believe in such matters at all.

Her rather convoluted list could be reduced to the following simple statement, which would comfortably fit on a T-shirt.

T-shirt

Keep your racial
obsessions and labels
to yourself,
and I'll keep mine
to myself.

William Wetherall's "Bill of Rights for Racially Obsessed People"

The main problem with Root's "Bill of Rights", however, is that it is a bill of "rights". Human rightists focus on "rights" at the expense of overlooking "duties".

Rights need to be balanced by duties. A comprehensive statement of "Rights and Duties Concerning Race, Ethnicity, and Related Matters" might look like this.

Hey, you gotta recognize the dude's authority. He's got one of those "Piled-higher-and-Deeper" thingies! Somewhere in his closet. He thinks. Or maybe it's only in his head -- like race and multiraciality.

Mixed Race America and the Law
(A Reader)
[Critical America Series]
New York: New York University Press, 2003
xv, 505 pages, softcover

This book is truly a reader intended for use as a textbook. . It's 87 articles are divided into 12 parts, and each part ends with several "Review Questions" and a list of "Suggested Readings".

Contents

At eight pages, the table of contents is nearly twice as long as the average article. Just reading it is an education in the incredible scope of "mixed race" issues in the United States.

Here are just the 12 part and 10 subpart heads.

Part I    Miscegenation, Intermarriage, and the Law
    A. The History of the Anti-Miscegenation Laws
    B. The Road to Loving v. Virginia and Its Impact
    C. Beyond Black and White
Part II   Racial Identity
    A. Legal Simplicity: The "One Drop" Rule
    B. Real Complexity
    C. Mestizaje and La Raza Cósmica
    D. Indians, Intermarriage, and the Law of Indian Identity
Part III  "Passing"
Part IV   The Census
Part V    Inheritance Rights
Part VI   Discrimination and "Colorism"
Part VII  Affirmative Action: "Box Checking" and Advantage-Taking
Part VIII Race, Child Custody, and Transracial Adoption
    A. Child Custody
    B. Transracial Adoption
    C. The Indian Child Welfare Act
Part IX   The Immigration and Naturalization Laws
Part X    Racial Mixture Outside the United States
Part XI   Mixed Race Society: The End of Racism?
Part XII  Future Mixed Race Legal Studies

Biographical note

Johnson holds a chair in "Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies" at the University of California at Davis. According the UC Davis School of Law website, he clerked at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Los Angeles, and worked as an attorney for an international law firm in San Francisco, before entering academia.

In addition to the book reviewed here, and numerous articles on immigration law and policy, racial identity, and civil rights, Johnson is the author of How Did You Get to Be Mexican?: A White/Brown Man's Search for Identity (Temple University Press, 1999), a co-editor of the reader Race, Civil Rights, and American Law: A Multiracial Approach (Carolina Academic Press, 2001), and the author of The "Huddled Masses" Myth: Immigration and Civil Rights (Temple University Press, 2003).

This book represents a lot of work, but it gets my highest mark because it brings together material that most other books of this kind fail to recognize as important. Kamato collected numerous scattered pieces of historical data, and assembled them into what she considers a tenable theory of what she insists on calling "kokusai kekkon" -- mostly because she wants her readers to share the pride she seems to take in contending that this expression is peculiarly Japanese.

The main drawback of the pictures she creates of "kokusai kekkon" in Japan is that, rather than leaving them in the daugtertypes and tinted bromides of the Meiji period, she colors and otherwise doctors them with more recent racioethnic pigments. Her montages of the past -- of the customary and statute practices and laws regarding what she calls "'kokusai kekkon' in the provided English title -- sometimes look like digital printings of recent photograph made to look old.

While most of Kamoto's data is undoubtedly from the past, the boxes in which she puts people, and the labels she puts on the boxes, are likely as not to reflect the regionalist and racialist concerns and standards of present-day social historiography. While giving considerable attention to terminology, she herself falls into the trap of imposing today's fashionable boxes and labels on the past, and otherwise morphs the metaphors of true history.

By her own admission, the term she wishes to exceptionalize as "made in Japan" is a latterday coinage. This does not stop her from using 国際結婚 ahistorically -- though, when doing so, she is likely to bracket it as「国際結婚」by way of signifying that it did not yet have currency. If she had done this for all of the many terms she uses ahistorically, her book would be studded with brackets.

All journalists and scholars face the same problem when writing about the past. All are tempted to force the terminological complexity of the past into the current vocabulary that they themselves prefer, and which they feel will be more familiar to their editors and readers. This desire to package the past for present-day consumption denies the past its texture, flavor, and voice -- and creates only an illusion of understandability.

Kokusai kekkon

While one is not to judge a book by its cover, one is allowed to judge the manner in which a book is marketed by its titles and promotional blurbs. The prominence of 国際結婚 in the title of Kamoto's book -- and its romanization in the provided English title -- is meant to attract attention. So is the following declaration on the front of the obi, which is wrapped around the lower part of the jacket in order to promote the book (romanization and translation mine).

「国際結婚」は
　日本産である!?

"Kokusai kekkon" wa
Nihon-san de aru!?

"Kokusai kekkon" is
a Japan product!?
== of Japan birth!?
== made in Japan!?

Note that, in the Japanese title, 国際結婚 is mainstreamed, without quotes or other typographical marks that would exceptionalize the term. However, its romanization in the provided English title -- 'kokusai kekkon' -- is doubly exoticized, with both quotes and italics.

Such exoticization is commonly found in English writing, especially of the past. Today, stylesheets of most popular and even academic publications continue to insist that "foreign words" not anglicized in contemporary English dictionaries should be marked by at least italics if not also quotes. Writer preferences are likely to be overruled by editors who insist on stylistic conformity.

Editing in Japan is often less inspired by stylesheets or an understanding of the implication of single, double, triple, quadruple, or even quintuple marking -- "Kokusai Kekkon" -- quotes, bold, italics, underscored, and capped. While jackets and promotional materials are often designed without an author's involvement, I cannot image that Kamoto did herself write, or at least approve, the provided English title -- as she did much of her research while resident at and I suspect she herself , or even write, the provided English title herselfaspects of a book's design often Moreover, writers are often not party to

国際結婚 (kokusai kekkon) is today generally translated "international marriage" -- which is not to say that this is correct. -- but it should be. Like Koyama Noboru and other writers, Kamoto hesitates to equate the terms -- possibly for good reason -- though such hesitation has not kept such writers from imposing "kokusai kekkon" on marriages that took place before the term was coined.

Kamoto did her work about the time Koyama was finishing and publishing his book on "international marriages" during the Meiji era, reviewed here as Koyama 1995, and while she integrates some material from Koyama's work into her own, the scope of her research was different, and arguably more ambitious, than Koyama's.

The very first sentences of the book set the tone of Kamoto's very conventional, oppositionist, and exceptionalist setting off of 日本 (Nihon) from 西洋 (seiō) -- the familier "Japan" versus "West" dichotomy.

For all the effort Kamoto spends in trying to contrast 国際結婚 with expressions she has found in the English world, she fails to examine the Sino-Japanese metaphors of especially 国際.

The term 水際 comes to mind. The Sino-Japanese reading is "suisai" but it is more commonly read "mizugiwa" in Japanese, and the classical Yamato expression is "migiwa" or "minagiwa". Metaphorically, the term means "water's edge" or "shoreline" as a geographical limit or locality.

Another structurally similar term is 窓際 (madogiwa) or "by the window". Another is 交際 (kōsai) denotes an act or condition of "association" or "socializing" or "mixing company" -- literally "where" (際) one "mingles" (交) with others.

In this sense, 国際 does not mean "international" so much as "where nations meet" in terms of their boundary conditions. Of course, these "boundaries" could be geographic, economic, diplomatic, or legal. And since 結婚 is a status act in Japanese law -- a matter of formally "tying a bond of marriage" -- 国際結婚 would mean precisely a status act involving the marriage between a man and woman of different countries.

In other words, the marriage is not "international" in the sense that the marriage is between two nations. The marriage is between two individuals, of course. No nations could marry, except metaphorically.

The marriage is between two individuals, but the individuals are subjects (nationals) of different states, which have different laws concerning marriage. There could be constraints in the laws of one country regarding the status of a national who would marry the national of another country. Hence the need for legal provisions in both countries to accommodate such status issues. Lack of such provisions could cause friction between the states, especially if the states insist on controlling the private affairs of their subjects.

In the English title, Kamoto, or her publishers, mark kokusai kekkon with both single quotes (following British style, possibly because she conducted much of her research in London), and in italics, as though to stress the term's exoticness -- whereas, in Japanese, she is content with using single corner brackets to mark「国際結婚」in the Japanese title and at places in chapter titles.

The book is generally structured like this.

Front matter

Title page, i
Preface, iii-vii
Legend, viii
Contents, ix-xii

Main text

Introduction (two parts), 3-29
Chapters (seven), 30-216
Conclusion, 217-231

Back matter

Supplement on analytical materials used in book, 232-266>
End notes for everything Preface to Supplement, 237-303
Postscript, 304-307
Name index, 314-311 (1-4)
Subject index, 310-308 (5-7)

In the postscript, she humorously chaffes at the suspicions some people seem to have expressed that maybe she was motivated to study kokusai kekkon because she was married to a foreigner. Or suggestions some made, when she said she was single, that perhaps she should try such a marriage. She then makes this disclaimer (page 304).

A researcher in physical sciences wondered whether international marriage qualifies as an academic field. Others considered it a "substream" (亜流) of something. Kamoto protests (page 305).

As Arnold Schwarzenegger said to a woman at a press conference who had just confronted him with a litany of sexual abuse charges, there may be a role for Kamoto in Terminator 4. Seriously, though, her attitude generally appropriate if somewhat defensive.

I get the same treatment from people who suspect that my obession with "nationality" and "race" in Japan stems from personal circumstances. Though in my case it is true, my position is that it really doesn't matter -- besides which it is no one's business. And hence I see no point in Kamoto even raising the subject -- except to imply that her research may be "purer" because her motives are not "contaminated" by romantic interests with an outlander.

Introduction and chapters

The main titles of the two parts of the Introduction, and the seven chapters, are as follows. The translations are structural. Contrary to what Kamoto might prefer, I have , except that, as Kamoto would seem to prefer, I have transliterated 国際結婚 as "kokusai kekkon" rather than translate it "international marriage(s)".

序論

１ 国際結婚と近代国民国家：二つの前提条件
１ International marriage and recent-age-national-state: Two prior conditions

２〈国民〉を入れる箱と国際結婚
２ The box in which to put <nationals> and kokusai kekkon

第１章 鎮国、開国、「国際結婚」
Chapter 1: Pacifying the country, opening the country, "kokusai kekkon"

第２章 「私生子」の誕生、「国際結婚」の成立
Chapter 2: Birth of "private born children", establishment of "kokusai kekkon"

第３章 分限主義時代の「国際結婚」
Chapter 3: "Kokusai kekkon" of standing-ism age

第４章 外国人に嫁いだ日本人女性と「私生子」の「分限」
Chapter 4: The "standing" of Japanese women who wedded outlanders and "privately born children"

第５章 外国人の婿入り：「日本人タルノ分限」を得るということ
Chapter 5: Grooms of outlanders: Gaining "the standing of being Japanese"

第６章 「日本人タルノ分限」と日本人男性
Chapter 6: "The standing of being Japanese" and Japanese men

第７章 帰化論争と分限しゅぎ時代の終焉
Chapter 7: The end of the naturalization debate and the standing-ism age

結論
Conclusion

In this translation, I have used the tags I first used serveral years before acquiring and reviewing this book (October 2009), when translating and commenting on Meiji status laws -- hence "the standing of being Japanese" for 日本人タルノ分限 (Nihonjin taru no bungen), the phrasin used in the Great Council of State Proclamation No. 103 of 1873. The phrasing in the 1899 Nationality Law varies from "when being Japanese" (日本人ナルトキ Nihonjin naru toki) to "will be regarded as Japanese" (日本人トス Nihonjin to su)

To be continued.

Biographical note

Kamoto Itsuko, a professor in the "Department for the Study of Contemporary Society" (現代社会学部) of Kyoto Women's Univeristy (京都女子大学), specializes in sociology and family sociology, including "international Japan studies" and "historical sociology". She supervises "international marriage studies" in the university's graduate school, and lectures on subjects like international marriage, comparative marriage, and social surveys.

Kamoto is also the author of the following article, which I have referred to elsewhere.

国民国家と国際結婚：近代国民国家間家族という視点
Kokumin kokka to kokusai kekkon: Kindai kokumin-kokka-kan kazoku to iu shiten
[National-states and international marriage: [From] the vantage point of inter recent-period national-state families]
Pages 35-56 (Chapter 2) in
比較家族史学会監修
Hikaku kazoku shi gakkai kanshū
[Comparative family history association (Supervision)]
(田中真砂子・白石玲子・三成美保編)
[Takana Masako, Shiraishi Reiko, Mitsunari Miho (editors)]
国民国家と家族・個人
Kokumin kokka to kazoku・kojin
[National-state (Nation-state) and family-and-individual]
東京：早稲田大学出版会、2005年
Tokyo: Waseda University Press, 2005
xiii, 285 pages, softcover
シリーズ比較家族 第�V期
[Series comparative family 3]

Kamoto is also the author of the two volumes reviewed below. Published as a set in 2008, they draw on some of the material Kamoto introduced in her 2001 book, but are essentially different in both their scope and their appeal to a broader readership.

Here are cuts-and-pastes of the English abstracts of Parts 1 and 2.

It is good to see a social scientist "proving" what should be obvious -- that, if you drop an egg or tomato, you are likely to have mess -- because an egg or tomato is, afterall, an egg or tomato. Or, if it starts to rain, and your unbrella has holes, you are likely to get wet -- because, afterall, rain is wet.

Actually, a lot of people believe that "ethnicity" and "culture" are somehow related to "nationality" -- and while Kamoto has gone to such trouble to conclude that "retention of the ethnic identity as Japanese or Japanese culture has nothing to do with the selection of Japanese Nationality" -- a lot of people causally relate nationality with what they construe to be "ethnicity" or "culture" or "heritage" or "race" or whatever.

The abstract, unfortunately, does not faithfully reflect the provisions made in Japan's Nationality Law from 1985.

The 1985 changes in the Nationality Law applied to the children of a Japanese woman married to an alien man. The children of an unmarried Japanese women had always been able to acquire Japanese nationality.

So called "choice of nationality" is not actually "enabled" but "required" -- but only if nationality has been acquired, which itself requires timely registration at time of birth. Choice of nationality could not, in any event, have any impact on "ethnicity" -- since whatever a child acquires from the circumstances of its parentage and upbringing are independent of legal status.

Besides which, "ethnic retention" is impossible -- since there is no "ethnicity" at time of birth -- and, again, whatever a child acquires that might be called "ethnic" is a byproduct of family environment which could not possibly be effected by the child's nationality.

More important, though, is the use -- presumably Kamoto's use -- of "crossnational marriage" as translationese for "kokusai kekkon". Oddly, she does not introduce this phrase in her 2008 volumes, in which she lists both parts of her 2006-2007 Canadian study.

歴史編
Rekishi hen [History volume]
xi, 122 pages

現代編
Gendai hen [Present-age volume]
xi, 168 pages

While the sheer amount of information and the effort to collate it as well as Kamoto has done in these two interesting volumes deserve an A, I'm giving her only a B -- because she seems to place more importance on showing the many ways other people have racialized the world, while she herself generally goes along with flow.

The shared main title of these sister (er, sibling) volumes echoes the blurb on the obi of Kamoto's 2001 book, which baits the reader with the statement! -- or is it a question? -- that perhaps 国際結婚 (kokusai kekkon) is a product of Japan. Kamoto, like Koyama in his 1995 book, and others,

国際結婚第一号：明治人たちの雑婚事始
Kokusai kekkon daiichigō: Meiji hitotachi no zakkon kotohajime
[The first international marriage: The beginnings of mixed marriages of Meiji people]
東京：講談社、1995
Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1995
282 pages, softcover, jacket

Noboru Koyama is the librarian for the Japanese Collection in the Cambridge University Library, which explains his familiarity with the Japanese archives he used to carry out this fine study. But he also proves to be a social historian of the highest caliber.

This book is an almost exhaustive study of the legal, social, and personal ramifications of marriages between Japanese and other nationals -- and ancillary changes in their legal status -- during the first two decades or so after the promulgation of the 1873 Great Council of State proclamation on marriage and adoption alliances between Japanese and aliens. I say "almost exhaustive" because Koyama -- in writing this book for a broader audience -- has omitted some the linguistic details of contemporary documents other scholars will need to appraise in order to answer questions he does not address.

The main part of the book discusses several Meiji "international" marriages by way of dramatizing how such alliances were both formed and dissolved under the laws of the period.

A table in the back entitled "Kokusai kekkon risuto" [International marriage list] (263-271) shows, in chronological order, the names, nationalities, and other particulars of the marriages of 260 couples recognized between 1873 and 1897.

See Becoming Japanese in the Meiji period: Adopted sons, incoming husbands, and naturalization for summaries of alliances involving status change, based on Koyama 1995 and other sources.

See International marriages, 1873-1899: Statistics based on Koyama Noboru's 1995 study for my analysis of Koyama's data on alliances under the 1873 proclamation.

Three Meiji Marriages between Japanese Men and English Women
In: Hugh Cortazzi (editor)
Biographical Portraits
[Britain and Japan, Volume IV]
London: Japan Library, 2002
London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003
Part 6: An Aviator and Two Themes
Chapter 33, pages 383-396

Many chapters of this book, including most of Koyama's article, can be read on Google Books.

Koyama's article is valuable as an overview in English of the marriages of Minami Teisuke and Eliza Pittman, Ozaki Saburo and Bathia Catherine Morrison, and Sannomiya Yoshitane and Alethea Yayenno [Raynor] -- all of which were featured in his 1995 book. The article also contains some information apparently not available to him when he compiled the book.

However, the article falls a bit short of the book's overal quality. Some statements about the laws that facilitated the sort of marriages he describes are not accurate. The use of metaphors like "citizen" -- and at times even "nationality" -- also substract from the article's historical accuracy.

"international marriages"

The introduction to the article includes these two paragraphs (page 384, underscoring mine).

Though he generally speaks of marriages "between" Japanese and "residents" or "foreigners" or "British" or whatever as individuals, he suddenly characterizes such marriages as international marriages" -- and goes to the trouble of glossing this English expression in Japanese -- though kokusai kekkon does not figure in his story. Moreover, later on the same page, he speaks of such marriages this (underscoring mine).

Interracial Intimacy in Japan
(Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900)
London: Continuum, 2003
xii, 313 pages, hardcover

Gary Leupp, a professor of history at Tufts University, has brought together a great deal of material on the topics related to the words in title. Some of his discussions of how others have viewed these topics are interesting and at times insightful.

Unfortunately -- like most writers on race, race relations, and racial mixture -- he embraces the racialist language of the present to racialize the past in ways that warp his historical data. The quality of some of his data is also marred by what appears to be his superficial and stereotypic understanding of, say, family and nationality law in Japan.

Leupp, who specializes in what I would call social history, is also the author of Servants, Shophands, and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan (Princeton University Press, 1994), and Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan (University of California Press, 1997).

Ahistorical terminology

Leupp's historical discussions would have been more credible had he been more objective in his use of terminology.

It is appropriate that he quote Lafcadio Hearn's remarks on "becoming a Japanese citizen" as a means of protecting his wife from having to become an "English citizen, and her children English subjects". But when Leupp himself writes that Hearn "acquired Japanese citizenship" then he too is guilty of using the wrong term to describe status under Japanese law, then or now -- for Japanese law speaks only of "nationals" and "nationality" and not of "citizens" or "citizenship". And British law did not shift from "subject" to "citizen" until the 1948.

In other ways, too, readers are deprived of a true contemporary and local understanding of the historical events and behaviors Leupp is describing. Currently fashionable expressions like "ethnicity" and "ethnic differences" and "ethnic Japanese" and "cultural conflicts" pop up in numerous discussions of periods when no one would have referred to life or people this way.

Lack of attention to 1873 law

For all the work Leupp did -- stressing (one might say "obsessing over") the "racial" aspects of intermarriage from the mid-16th century through the mid 20th century -- he seems to have overlooked Koyama's 1995 study. And while alluding to the 1873 Great Council of State Proclamation, he neither names the law nor illuminates its significance.

The 1873 proclamation not only permitted Japanese to marry or adopt foreigners, but also allowed foreigners to become Japanese through marriage or adoption. Leupp's lack of interest in such measures is reflected in his hit and miss descriptions of related laws. He associates the start of "a new national system of household registers" with 1873 (page 197) -- though the Family Registration Law, promulgated in 1871, came into effect from 1872 -- and the system that became "national" was hardly new.

In talking about the patrilineal effects of registering children born between Japanese and foreigners, he makes this statement (page 197, bold emphasis mine).

Never mind that the 1872 law was not about nationality, and that Japan did not have a nationality law until 1899. Leupp appears to have quoted von Siebold inaccurately.

Leupp cites von Siebold et al. 1973 a number of times in his book. Other citations generally match, but not this one. Leupp has 279 notes in this chapter alone. Possibly he confused this attribution with another.

The passage Leupp claims to have cited from von Siebold 1973 is well known. It was easy to find in my copy, as I had already flagged it (pages 28-29, bold emphasis mine).

Matrilineal, patrilineal, and ambilineal

Whoever Leupp is citing or paraphrasing -- the passage in von Siebold 1973 concerns the treatment of a child whose mother is not married to its father -- in Dejima, over half a century before the Meiji period. Contrary to what Leupp implies, the treatment of such children, as Japanese, did not change after the 1873 proclamation. The status of such children was based on matrilineality. And to this day, the child of an unmarried Japanese woman continues to be based on matrilineality.

The 1899 and 1950 nationality laws continued to be matrilineal for a child born to an unmarried Japanese woman. The 1950 law, as revised from 1985, is also matrilineal in cases of a child born to a Japanese woman who is married to a foreigner. Or, more generally, the law became ambilineal -- a child can become Japanese if either its mother or father is Japanese.

The 1873 proclamation was introduced partly in response to demands from foreign delegations that Japan recognize marriages between Japanese and aliens, and partly to facilitate the legal status of such couples and their children in family registers. The proclamation was not about nationality but about "the status of being Japanese" through family registration.

In other words, Japan dealt with international marriages and their offspring within the conventions of its family law. Statute and customary family law, which governed family registers, easily accommodated the practice, then common in Euro-American laws, of a woman changing her nationality when marrying an alien. What the foreign delegations did not foresee was the Japanese custom of male heir and husband adoption.

Leupp's remark about patrilineality and the 1985 Nationality Law is also odd. Both the 1899 and 1950 laws also had matrilineal clauses and even place-of-birth clauses. The 1985 revision introduced an ambilineal condition for children of married parents, so the condition is now either patrilineal and/or matrilineal, depending on the couple's nationalities. The national affiliation of a child of an unmarried mother continues to be primarily matrilineal -- as it has been for most of Japan's long history.

"half-Japanese" as a latter-day label

Note, also, that von Siebold 1973 -- or whoever Leupp is citing -- does not say "half-Japanese children".

Leupp himself is racializing the children. He is imposing latter-day labels like "half-Japanese" on earlier periods -- rather than using contemporary (most likely race-neutral) terms more in character with the time and place.

Hiraizawa, Hiroshi, Hoare

In his discussion of interracial marriages and offspring in postwar Japan, Leupp turns Hiroshi Wagatsuma into "Hiroshi Wagatsuna" and even "Wagatsuna Tsuneo" -- and wedges "Hiroshi Wagatsuna" between "Hiraizawa Kyokuzan" and "Hoare, J. E." in the Bibliography. These are just a few of the errors which suggest that Leupp was in a rush to publish his study of "interracial intimacy" between "Western men" and "Japanese women" -- a focus which seems both sensationalistic and narrow.

White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race
New York: New York University Press, 1996
xiv, 296 pages, softcover

A revised edition appeared in 2006.

The following review refers to the 6th printing of the 1996 edition.

"White" is printed in white on the black top of the cover, "by Law" in black on the white bottom, and "The Legal Construction of Race" in black on a red stripe between the top and bottom. While the book thus appears to be about "whites" and "blacks", it is mostly about "whites" as defined through "Orientals" and "Asiatics".

Lopez reviews a number of court cases in which the meaning of "white" was tested by putative "Orientals" or "Asiatics" seeking to become US citizens through naturalization. He argues that laws and society construct each other, and that "Those people constructed as non-Whites in this country have been complicitious in this construction" (page 152) -- Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) being cases in point (see below).

The table of contents suggest the extent to which "white" -- originally conceived in terms of European migration to what became the United States of America, in contrast with Indians and Africans -- increasing came to be defined in opposition to Asians.

1. White Lines
2. Racial Restrictions in the Law of Citizenship
3. The Prerequisite Cases
4. Ozawa and Thind
5. The Legal Construction of Race
6. White Race-Consciousness
7. The Value to Whites of Whiteness

Appendix A. The Racial Prerequiste Cases
Appendix B. Excerpts from Selected Prerequisite Cases
Notes
Bibliography
Table of Legal Authorities
Index

Appendix A

The cases tabularized in Appendix A are divided into three periods. A very high percentage of cases in each group involve persons of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Burmese, Asian Indian, or Punjabi -- i.e., East, Southeast, and South Asian -- descent (pages 203-208, my tallies).

1878-1909  8 of 12 cases
1909-1923 17 of 25 cases
1923-1944 10 of 15 cases

Most of the other cases involve persons of Syrian, Armenian, or Afghani descent. Native Americans and Mexicans figure in some cases. A few cases involve people of Asian/non-Asian mixture.

Only one case in the table involved someone of part African descent. In 1938, a petitioneer of three-quarter Native American and one-quarter African descent attempted to naturalize as a person of African nativity (In re Cruz). The petitioneer was held to be "ineligible to citizenship as a person of African descent" (page 240, note 2).

See 1870 Nationalization Act for more details about the background and judgment of the Cruz case.

Appendix B

Appendix B includes the substantial excerpts from the following cases (pages 209-225).

In re Ah Yup [1878, China]
In re Najour [1909, Lebanon]
Ex parte Shahid [1913, Syria]
Takao Ozawa v. United States [1922, Japan]
United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind [1923, India]

Colorblindness

Lopez squarely confronts the complexities of racial issues in the last three chapters. "Law" is not what exists in statutes so much as "a catchall phrase" for "a complex, incoherent system of practices, rather than a monolith" (pages 114-115). By the "legal construction of race" he does not mean that law has a unidirectional influence, since "'construction' here does not carry teleological or normative connotations" but "refers only to complex social processes" (page 115).

Lopez is opposed to what he calls "color-blind constitutionalism, the insistence that government should never take race into account" (page 176). He feels that "color-blindness" is perverse because "to banish race-words redoubles the hegemony of race by targeting efforts to combat racism while leaving race and its effects unchallenged and embedded in society, seemingly natural rather than the product of social choices" (page 177).

Lopez very squarely comes down on the side of maintaining racial consciousness in American society for the sake of improving the quality of racial identity and overcome "the dynamics of self-blindness and superiority" in "White race-consciousness". Race, for him, is here to stay. Race may be essentially "coercive" but it has become too deeply embedded in American life to ignore.

There are many problems with Lopez's thesis, one of which is that he does not consider the role of "race" in a society with laws that have not codified race -- such as Japan.

Chapter 7 is very short and is really an introduction to Appendix A. The true conclusion of the book comes at the end of Chapter 6, in which he dissects the what he thinks it means to be "White" in terms of "White Race-Consciousness" (pages 194-195; I have paraphrased Lopez's citations from Howard Winant, Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons, University of Minnesota Press, 1994, as "scenarios").

Biographical note

The Faculty Profiles section of the School of Law, Boalt Hall, University of California, Berkeley website describes Lopez as follows (retrieved September 2007).

内鮮混血問題
Nai-Sen konketsu mondai
[Interior-Chosen mixed-blood problem]

Pages 20-21 in:

人口問題研究会編
人口政策と国土計画
人口問題資料第五十一輯
昭和十七年十一月十日 印刷
昭和十七年十一月十五日 初版発行
(二０００部)
東京：人口問題研究会 (財団法人)

Jinkō Mondai Kenkyū Kai, editor
[Population Problems Research Association]
Jinkō seisaku to kokudo keikaku
[Population policy and national land planning]
Jinkō mondai shiryū Dai 51 shū
[Population problems materials No. 51]
Tokyo: Jinko Mondai Kenkyūkai
Printed 10 November 1942
Published 15 November 1942
1 (preface), 2 (address), 9 (contents), 369 (main text), 5 (appendum)

Forthcoming.

Biographical note

Forthcoming.

Is Lighter Better?
(Skin-Tone Descrimination among Asian Americans)
Lanham (MD): Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007
x, 148 pages, softcover

Contributing Researchers and Writers

Lilynda Agvateesiri
Monica Chum
Sara Cruz
Luz Devadason
Holly Hoegi
Karen Jackson
Lynn Kawabe
Christie Trieu
Charmaine Tuason
Mey Year

This is not a bad book -- in fact it's all right. It could, however, have been better.

The problem with most books about "Asian Americans" is that they are so over-whelmingly "American" in their bias toward "racialism" as an American experience. Chapter 1, "Colorism in Asian America", gives an excellent example of such bias in its definition of "colorism" (pages 1-2).

The introductory chapter gives overviews of "ASIAN AMERICANS AND COLORISM", "COLORISM IN BLACK AND WHITE", and "AND BROWN". Is the "BROWN" Brown or brown? Apparently "Brown", for the first line reads "Writers who study non-Black peoples of color in the United States are beginning to look at colorism in other communities" (page 13) -- and goes on to talk about "Latios" -- and refers to an essay called "A White Woman of Color" by novelist Julia Álvarez, who says that she was light enough that "All I had to do was stay out of the sun and behavr myself and I could pass as a pretty white girl" (page 15).

The introductory chapter ends with a section called "THIS BOOK" -- Book? book? -- which begins with this paragraph (page 15).

The authors and contributors have locked themselves into a "White group" versus "people of color" dichotomy in which "Asian Americans" are on the "people of color" side -- and consist of "Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese, and all the other sorts" (pages 2-3). As these words are written with capital letters, apparently they are supposed to be taken as being "proper nouns and [proper] adjectives" -- but of what? Race? National origin? Nationality? By whose definition?

Perhaps the greatest contribution of this book is how witnesses and commentators alike racialize themselves and others -- often in present-day terms like "Asians" and "Asian Americans" that would appear on their "proper" racialist surfaces to exclude actual Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and other would would be "Black" or "Brown" or "White" or whatever in the "proper" racialist world.

One wonders what the authors and contributors think of parasols, cosmetics, and cosmetic surgery within the "White" world -- historically as well today.

Arguably, such topics are beyond the scope of the book as defined by its subtitle -- "Skin-Tone Discrimination among Asian Americans".

Still, one wonders where the "Yellow" went -- since the last time I looked up "Asian" it was not a color. And as far as I can tell, from where I sit in Japan, "Asian" includes ever color in this book's racialist crayon box.

One also wonders from whose point of view -- and according to what racioethnic agenda -- the book is dedicated "To our darker and lighter sisters and brothers". It sounds as though the authors and contributors collectively place themselves in the middle of the "color spectrum" among their putative siblings.

The above nitpicking notwithstanding, this is a very interesting and insightful book -- though, again, be warned that it was conceived in, and delivered from, the womb of present-day American-style "ethnic studies" -- or should it be "Ethnic Studies"?

Biographical note

"JOANNE L. RONDILLA is a doctoral candidate in ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley" while "PAUL SPICKARD is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara" according to the back cover.

Paul, a pioneer of present-day "mixed blood" and "multiracial" studies in the United States, is perhaps best known as the author of Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). This book is partly inspired by, but better described as a sequel to, his doctoral dissertation, Mixed Marriage: Two American Minority Groups and the Limits of Ethnic Identity, 1900-1970, which is copyright 1982, though his Ph.D. in history was conferred the following year.

Disclosure

Paul and I were acquainted at Berkeley, where we crossed paths in a graduate seminar on Japanese history. Though we were pursuing different majors, we found a lot to talk about. I bought a copy of his dissertation from University Microfilms International in 1989 shortly before his book came out.

His dissertation runs a massive xvii plus 713 pages. As such it seriously outweighs my own embarrassingly long 608-page brain dump on Following-in-Death in Early Japan, coincidentally submitted and accepted in 1982.

Nathan Strong, while doing his research in Japan, sometimes went undercover, passing himself off as a person of mixed black and yellow ancestry. He blew his cover at least once, but he could be very convincing.

He also did something else rather remarkable for a field worker under the direction of George De Vos and Hiroshi Wagatsuma -- he went against the grain of their professional interests in the darker side of minority status, and found that not a few of his subjects were as happy with their lot as anyone else.

Strong went on to become a professor and administrator at colleges in Oakland and Alameda, south and north of Berkeley.

For further details, see comments in my review of Burkhardt 1983.

Disclosure

I met Strong when both of us were graduate students at UC Berkeley. We did our doctoral research in Japan at the same time, and were in constant touch about each other's work, and about dealing with De Vos and Wagatsuma.

Strong gave me copies of some of the primary materials he collected from Sawada Miki, who passed away a couple of years after he filed his dissertation. His dissertation includes several full-page facsimiles of clippings which I provided him, of Japanese magazine ads featuring people of putatively "mixed blood".

国籍に翻弄された人々
Kokuseki ni honrō sareta hitobito
[People who were tossed about by nationality]
Pages 136-151 in:
土井たか子編
Doi Takako (editor)
「国籍」を考える
"Kokuseki" o kangaeru
[Considering "nationality"]
東京：時事通信社、1984年2月1日
Tokyo: Jiji Tsūshin Sha, 1 February 1984
257 pages, softcover, jacket
4 (preface), 4 (contents), 248 (text), 1 (author introductions)

I am reviewing Utsumi's article here because, though nominally about loss of nationality, it is mainly concerned with the nationality consequences of marriages between Interiorites and Chosenese, during the period that Chosen was part of Japan and Chosenese were Japanese. The book containing her article is somewhat important to me because it reviews (though somewhat erroneously) my daughter's nationality lawsuit at a time when the Nationality Law was undergoing revision.

For a review of Doi's book, see Doi 1984.

Shifts of viewpoint

While Utsumi's article is mostly about nationality problems experienced by some Chosenese in Japan after 1952, she frames the article in a story about nationality problems experienced by some Japanese Americans under Japanese and American nationality laws . She does not tell the story very well, and does not clearly establish its links with her story about "nationality" in Japan before, during, and after the Occupation of Japan after World War II.

Skin Deep
New York: Avon Books, 1999
307 pages, paperback

The blurb on the back cover baits the hook.

The story begins with a steamy bed scene, in which Nina is thinking of telling Derrick, her fianc&#eacute;, that she can't marry him, while at the same time admiring his skin, "the color of dark chocolate, and as smooth as an ocean-polished stone" (pages 3-4). Despite his "almost regal appearance" (page 5) he scores low in the qualities of personality she wants in a partner.

It didn't help that Derrick had told her that, in being with her, he had the best of two worlds -- the way White men looked at them when they were together -- "I just get off on the fact that they're so pissed off at me being with a beautiful White woman" (page 57). Nina tells her best friend "I knew the man was color-struck a long time ago, and I stayed with him anyway" (page 58).

Nina sometimes felt she didn't belong in her family because "she had inherited almost no pigment and had arguably 'European' features" (page 8). "People often told her that if you didn't hear her speak, or watch the way she moved, you would mistake Nina for a White woman" (page 9).

Mitchell Moore, a jazz musician, had remarried Mama when Nina's mother died, but in the family their son, Nathan, was Nina's brother, not "half-brother", and no one spoke of Nina as being "mixed" (page 10). In Los Angeles, people hadn't made a bit fuss over her looks. Strangers took her for "just an extremely pale sista" (page 11).

Derrick later confronts her with the reality of her racial condition, and she confronts him with what she regards as his problem (pages 248-249).

Skin Deep could easily be read as a story more about Ahmad than Nina. He avoids Nina because he thinks she is White, and even after he learns she is Black, he can't ignore that she looks White. He appreciates Nina's help in carring for his daughter Ebony, until it appears that Ebony admires Nina's whiteness.

The entire story is contrived partly to resolve Ahmad's misgivings about Nina's appearance and his attitudes toward his White adoptive mother -- and partly to take Nina down the twisted path she must follow in order to discover the truth about her parentage. This is not easy to do, and while Cross creates the necessary suspense, some of her gimmicks are reminiscent of bad soap opera.

Biographical note

The author profile on the inside of the back cover bills Kathleen Cross as "an educator, consultant, writer and mother of three teenaged daughters." She is said to have "appeared on Oprah, Donahue, and The Montel Williams Show to discuss the dynamics of race and skin color in American society" and to have been "featured in Ebony magazine in an article she wrote about the social complexities of being Black and looking White." It is difficult to tell from the portrait of her face, but it appears that she may be talking about herself.

Color of Justice
New York: William Morrow, January 2002 (hardcover)
New York: HarperTorch, November 2002 (paperback)
388 pages (paperback edition)

This is a work of fiction. I am reviewing it here -- unrated, hence gray -- as an example of how one writer has spun a crime thriller around the theme of supremicist "colorism".

White cop as black man

The hero is introduced on the back cover.

In the flashback Prologue, called "New Kid", a cop enrolls his son in a Detroit elementary school. The last line of the scene depicts the boy "sitting in the middle of the class, the only white face in a sea of black students."

Detective Danny Cavanaugh therefore grows up "black" in all respects except the color of his skin. In the novel, his lover is a "black" woman, his best friend is a "black" man, his partner in the homicide division of the Detroit Police Department is a "black" man, and the FBI profiler who joins the team in the investigation of what may be the first case of serial killings by a "black" man is a "black" woman.

Cavanaugh catches lots of attitude from people who don't know him, including, who think his mannerisms are those of a pretender or imitator. But Hardwick invests Cavanaugh with character traits that qualify his protagonist's feelings that he is on the "whitest" end of the "black" color spectrum -- never mind the grief that his total immersion in the "black" world has caused his mother.

The Epilogue, like the Prologue, bears a simple title, as do the 34 intervening chapters, each of which reads like a short story. The chapters are divided into three tidy parts -- 1. Shadow of Justice, 2. Vision of Justice, and 3. Color of Justice.

The theme of the novel clearly surfaces at the end of Part 1, in Chapter 17, called "Jurisdiction". The FBI profiler is convinced the killer is black because "A serial killer preys on his own race or subgroup," and all the victims in the case are black (page 176). Cavanaugh is not convinced by her "race" or "subgroup" theory, but by the end of the chapter he pointed out, to the suprise of the others, that "All of the killer's victims are light-skinned blacks" (page 181).

The FBI investigator frowns at Cavanaugh's remark and wonders if his observation is significant. After given it a bit of thought, calls it fascinating, and declares that it means she's right, "Our boy is black and he's preying within his subgroup." She then praises Cavanaugh for his "catch" and says, "Perhaps it took a nonblack person to see that so clearly" (page 182).

The narrator tells us that "Danny sat down at his desk not knowing what to make of her last statement" (page 182). Throughout the story, Hardwick goes to this sort of effort to reveal Cavanaugh's feelings about being racialized by other people who don't accept him for what he is -- someone who comes across as being "black" but happens to have white skin.

Colorism

The dialog in Chapter 25, called "Colorism", in Part 2, reads like the characters are paraphrasing any of a number of books on perceptions of color differences among African Americans. A number of fictional works develop this theme of "color discrimination" on the part of "blacks" and others who differentiate skin tones among people who are "black" their own or in society's eye.

I won't give away the ending -- except to say that mixed-blood supremicism loses. But that much is predicatable.

By the final chapters, Hardwick's writing, too, loses the character-driven dramatic quality that powers the earlier chapters.

Biographical note

The back cover of the paperback edition shows a photograph of the writer and cites several reviews, one of which describes Hardwick as "The Elmore Leonard of black mystery writers" (Seattle Times).

Hardwick, a former attorney, is also the author of Supreme Justice, Cold Medina, and Double Dead, and the writer of several film and TV scripts. He was born and raised in Detroit and now lives and works in California, according the his current profile on HarperCollins (viewed October 2009).

Chandra Prasad (editor)
Rebecca Walker (introduction)
Mixed (An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience)
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006
326 pages, softcover

This book presents eighteen stories about so-called "multiracial" experience. Before I launch into my usual critique, let me say that most of the stories -- even those that sometimes break their novelistic "show" spell with self-conscious multiracialist "tell" -- are well crafted by seasoned authors whose writing should not be confined to shelves of "ethnic niche" fiction.

Chandra's illusory boundaries

The nineteen authors (including the writer of the Introduction) -- or the twenty authors (including this reviewer) -- represent but a tiny fraction of the combinations and permutations of the thousands of political "races" that constitute humankind -- all delimited by one or another "boundary".

Chandra Prasad, the editor of the Mixed anthology, concludes her Foreword on this note (page 9).

Prasad, who contributed one of her own stories to the collection, claims in her profile to be "a mix of Italian, English, Swedish, and Indian" (page 203). If she truly wants to blur boundaries, or thinks that most were illusory, why is she labeling herself this way?

Most other contributors also reveal, directly or obliquely, who they think they are. How else could such a book be published and promoted in a world in which "mixture" has become a commodity? In a "multiracial" fiction market which all but excludes authors who are unable to claim that they themsleves are "mixed"?

The illusory boundaries of "lineage" and "heritage"

Perhaps the sort of hybridization that is going on today in the world is "new" in the sense that it comes, in most places of the world, after many centuries if not millennia of fairly stable geographical racial development -- and in the United States, in the wake of a couple of centuries of widespread anti-miscegenation practices that reflected beliefs in racial eugenics.

It would be wrong, though, to assume that hybridization itself is new. For without hybridization throughout the development of the human species within which subspecial (geographical racial) mixture would be possible.

The writer of the blurb on the back cover was apparently even less aware of the oldness of racial mixture in the United States than even the editor.

The blurb implies that being "multiracial" is a matter of being able to trace one's "lineage" to something called "heritage" -- which is qualified with labels like "Native Americans, black, Asian, Irish, Italian, and Puerto Rican." Note the attributive use of plural "Native Americans" -- but not "blacks, Asians, Irishes, Italians, and Puerto Ricans".

Since "heritage" seems to embrace nativity (Native Americans), coloration (black), geographical region (Asian), and national or territorial affiliation (Irish, Italian, and Puerto Rican) with equal abandon, then there are thousands of "heritages" -- thousands of sources of "multiracial" lineage.

Accordingly, one would be very hard pressed to find a single American who is not, broadly speaking, "multiracial" as a consequence of the confluence of more than one "heritage" in one's "lineage".

That only 20 million people might acknowledge their "mixture" on a national census form reflects merely the effects of race-box identity politics -- not the true extent of hybridization, which has been the rule rather than the exception throughout the known demographic history of the United States. I would speculate this was true even of the pre-Columbian history of the Americas. Over the centuries, going back to the peopling of the region many millennia ago, there was constant migration and mixture. The thousands of "tribes" and "bands" north, central, and south were "nations" that, had Europeans not come and usurped their lands, would by today, five centuries after Columbus, have become a somewhat different shuffle of people.

The same would be true for large regions like Africa, Asia, and Europe -- all of which have witnessed mongrelization as existing political and other communal boundaries change, as people migrate and mix. The same would hold also for smaller regions, and in fact for any locality, of any size and complexity, such as a country -- Argentina, Britain, China, Denmark, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Korea. For no human aggregation in the world has escaped the imperative of "heritage" amalgamation through the fusion of more than one "lineage".

The most insidious implication of the blurb, however, is that "heritage" is a matter of biological "lineage". As anyone who had crossed any kind of border, at any stage of their life, will testify -- "heritage" is not a matter of descent or ancestry.

"Heritage" is what comes with whatever human territories one inhabits by choice or fate -- and race and lineage are mostly incidental. Whether straddling or crossing a border between a protestant and Catholic world, a Christian and Buddhist world, a village and city, a forest and dessert, a birth home and an adoptive home, one's home town and an internment camp, freedom and captivity, poverty and affluence -- one inherits the choices that come with such situations.

Wilful or forced migration over a mountain, across an ocean, from one family or clan to another -- or plying between such twains -- compell encounters of two or more "heritages" and experiences of "mixture" -- with about the same risks of trauma and chances of joy that come after exiting the birth canal of a woman of one putative "race" who has been impregnated by a man of another.

To be sure, offspring of parents who are conspicuously different in their racial appearance or have markedly different cultural backgrounds are likely to be pulled between such racial and cultural poles as they discover the map and compass that helps them best navigate life in a world magnitized by racial, religious, and national suspicion, intolerance, even hatred.

Yet it would be wrong to allege that the conflicts and stigmas that sometimes attend challenges of choice between contending "identities" are unique to "multiracial" people. Everyone who feels the pull between several sides has to decide whether to take sides, to accommodate all sides, or to forge a new side or several that may or may not incorporate elements of the received sides.

Fortunately, the stories collected in Mixed prove the adage that you can't judge a book by its misleading blurbs. The mixture threads could be pulled from the fabric of most of the stories, or replaced with other threads, with no loss of strength -- a test of their quality as literature.

My favorite was "Minotaur" -- which hooked me with this lead (page 65).

This sort of writing makes trauma a joy. The writer, Peter Ho Davies, is arguably the best short-story writer of the Mixed lot -- judging from his two anthologies, The Ugliest House in the World (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997; Mariner Books, 2003) and Equal Love (Mariner Books, 2000). I recommend both.

I also liked "Hollywood" by Marina Budhos, who claims to be "half Indo-Caribbean and half Jewish." She doesn't say which half is which, but since she wrote the equation, I'll leave it to her to solve it.

Chocolate Sangria
New York: Strivers Row (Ballentine Books), 2004 (softcover)
273 pages, plus Reader's Guide (pages 275-279)

New York: Villard Books (Random House), 2003 (hardcover)
New York: One World (Ballentine Books), 2007 (paperback)

The back cover of this novel presents the story like this.

This overcooked story about "the hearts of two lovers who get caught in the great cultural divide" has two main plots. One concerns the mystery of Juanita's parentage, given her lighter complexion, green eyes, and other features unlike those of anyone in her black family. The other involves opposition to Juanita's dating of Conan, a Puerto Rican, especially by Aunt Hattie, who had raised her.

By the end of the story, Juanita has heard the story of her birth from her biological mother, Aunt Hattie has accepted Conan, and the couple plan to visit the land of Juanita's biological father. The narrative voice is somewhat didactic, even inspirational, in the manner of most fiction written for the "multiculural" market in America.

Imprints

There is a story behind the various editions of this novel.

Villard Books has been a Random House imprint for popular fiction and non-fiction titles since 1983.

Strivers Row has been a Ballantine imprint "to showcase African-American fiction" since 2001.

One World has been a Ballantine imprint "devoted to multi-cutlural titles" since 1991.

Ballantine became part of the Random House group in 2003.

The imprints are sometimes listed as "Villards Books/Strivers Row" or "One World/Strivers Row" and the like.

The movement from Villard Books to Strivers Row and now One World editions of Chocolate Sangrila to some extent reflects the different economics of hardcover, trade paperback, and mass market publications.

Biographical note

The author profile in front describes Tracy Price-Thompson as a native of Brooklyn, New York and "retired Army entineer officer" who is a "highly decorated Desert Storm veteran who graduated from Army Officer Candidate School after ten years as an enlisted soldier."

Price-Thompson's debut novel, Black Coffee features two black sergeants, Sanderella Coffee and Romulus Ceasar, rising through the ranks -- Sandie a single mom with three children, training to apply to Officer Candidate School, battling sexism and self-doubt, Romulus drill sergeant who wants to excape his unhappy marriage -- fraternization complicated by infidelity. First self-published in 2000 (iUniverse), it was reissued in 2002 by Villard Books (Random House), and in 2005 by One World (Ballentine).

Price-Thompson has published a number of fictional works since Black Coffee and Chocolate Sangria in One World (Ballantine Books) or Atria (Simon and Schuster) imprints, including A Woman's Worth (One World, 2004), Knockin' Boots (One World, 2005), Gather Together in My Name (Atria, 2008), and 1-900-A-N-Y-T-I-M-E (Atria, 2009). She is also the author of one of the stories in Other People's Skin: Four Novellas (Atria, 2007), and some shorter fiction has appears in other anthologies.

Most of her stories involve romantic and racial interpersonal conflict laced with explicit sex scenes and paced with sermons on the importance of family, friendship, community, healing, and unification. Inspirational pornography?