RE: [rehfans] Howard and racism

[Mark E. Hall]

The Germans werent raised in a culture that was taught to idolize their emperor as a God.  This seems to add a bit more potential devotion to the Shinto emperors even after a number of generations than the germans to their former government.    Okay, a point---but doesn’t taking something like that into account constitute racism?  I mean if both ethnicity and religious beliefs are involved, to me that seems like racial discrimination.  And before you go down the road of the Emperor not being a god, we can raise all sorts of equally valid questions about Christianity and Islam.  See, until 1946, the Shinto religion taught that the emperor was divine and a direct lineal descendant of the Sun Goddess.    Not only that but many Japanese are very racially concerned and do not like "Gai Jin" or people from other backgrounds than Japan.    That is a generalization at best applies to Japanese living in Japan.  And as Harumi Befu and Ohnuki-Tierney have commented in their books, this is a generalization that needs a lot of qualification and the like for the post-war Japanese.  Kinda like saying all white Americans hate black Americans.  As a white guy living in Japan, there are things I can get by with that I would never be able to get by with in the USA or a Japanese person in Japan could get by with.  By the same token, I’ll also admit that I have experienced and do experience social discrimination in other areas.  See thing that both Reischauer and Ruth benedict pointed out to the War Office, emigration from Japan was viewed as admitting one’s failure in life.  The Japanese didn’t emigrate from Japan with the same reasons and motivations as most of the European groups; for them (unitl the past 20 yrs. or so) it was admitting failure and trying to save others in your family from shame.  So it is not like the other immigrant groups in maintaining ties to the homeland.    My guess is that they would have done the same to a large number of gai jin in Japan had they settled there.    The majority of the Westerners they left alone.  On H-Japan there was talk about this a few months back.  For the Koreans and Chinese, they had discriminatory policies, indentured servitude, and slavery in effect as early as 1905 with their conquest of most of the Korean Peninsula.  Peter Maas has a series of books out on their conquest of Korea and China and the social effects.    Does anybody know?   Later, MEH