Nikkei go home!

Japan to Unemployed Immigrants: Thanks, You Can Go Home Now:

Japan’s offer to minority communities in need has spawned the ire of those whom it intends to help. It is one thing to be laid off in an economic crisis. It is quite another to be unemployed and to feel unwanted by the country where you’ve settled. That’s how Freitas and other Brazilians feel since the Japanese government started the program to pay $3,000 to each jobless foreigner of Japanese descent (called Nikkei) and $2,000 to each family member to return to their country of origin. The money isn’t the problem, the Brazilians say; it’s the fact that they will not be allowed to return until economic and employment conditions improve — whenever that may be. “When Nikkei go back and can’t return, for us that’s discrimination,” says Freitas, who has lived in Japan with his family for 12 years.

 

Yes. It is discrimination. In fact the very idea of the nation-state is predicated on the concept of discrimination between non-citizens and citizens. The world is not flat, and there are grades of human affinity.

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19 Responses to Nikkei go home!

  1. Ploni Almoni says:

    DH proclaimed:

    In fact the very idea of the nation-state is predicated on the concept of discrimination between non-citizens and citizens.

    The idea of the nation-state – in the original meaning of the concept, which is instantiated about as purely as can be by Japan – is predicated on the primary concept of the nation, and only secondarily on the concept of a citizenry. The nation is prior to the state and to the citizenry. The nation-state exists for the sake of the nation. One can approve or disapprove of that philosophy, but that is what 19th-century-style nationalism says that nation-states such as Japan are all about.

    The article you cite makes the same egregious mistake by referring to the Nikkei as “Brazilians.” They may be natural-born citizens of Brazil, but (from a nationalist perspective) they are first and foremost Japanese – that is, members of the Japanese nation.

    Because of this, the nation-state of Japan has some duty to them, despite the fact that they are not Japanese citizens. It’s arguable whether the government’s offer is a violation of this duty. You’re right that all governments must discriminate between citizens and noncitizens, but that’s only half the truth. Nation-states (in the original sense of the word) must also discriminate between their nation and others, regardless of citizenship or country of residence.

    I sympathize with the Nikkei here. Based on what’s written in the article, I think they are totally right to feel insulted by their callous treatment by the Japanese government, even if the government’s offer was necessary. As Japanese, they deserved better than that.

  2. A.A says:

    But it’s an odd thing, isn’t it? National identities are sanguinary, as I understand, and these are full-blooded Japanese born overseas. They took back Fujimori from Chile, didn’t they?

    Perhaps we can use this as a reason to send back the Irish, and their seed.

  3. David Hume says:

    Ploni Almoni, no. e.g., the french proclaimed the existence of their nation when even in 1860 2/3 of the citizens of france did not speak french, and had no great attachment to said nation (this is common in many developed nations). there is obviously something to what you say, but if you believe nations emerge organically naturally their specifications will vary. ergo, the brazilian specification is far less racialist than the japanese one. at the other end, the japanese are notorious for having an extremely specific and narrow conception of japanese where ethnic similarity is not considered sufficient though necessary.

    also, as a point of fact many of the nikkei are mixed-race, and/or their spouses are not ethnic japanese.

  4. Ploni Almoni says:

    @David Hume
    To respond to your points one by one:

    The French Revolution isn’t all that relevant because it was only later, in the 19th century, that the nationalist movement defined the concept of (ethno)nation-state of which Japan is an instance. Some scholars even say that France wasn’t really a nation until around the beginning of the 20th century: despite what French elites had been claiming since the Revolution, most French citizens didn’t think of themselves as French.
    Language does not define nationhood, and it’s a famously poor proxy for it.
    I don’t believe that nations emerge “organically,” if by that you mean strictly “bottom-up.”
    I don’t believe that specifications vary if one means “nation” in the original sense of the word, meaning ethnos. Some scholars distinguish between “ethnic nations” (the Japanese) and “civic nations” (the French). The Japanese are definitely an ethnic nation; I don’t know anything about the Brazilians. I’m talking only about ethnic nations.
    Agreed that the Japanese concept of nation is racialist. I don’t see that as a bad thing. I’m also a member of a racialist nation – Israel. I don’t know how Brazilians understand their nation. Do they consider Brazilian-born Nikkei to be Brazilian, as opposed to citizens of Brazil?
    Re mixed-race Nikkei, nationality (in the ethnic sense of the word, as with the Japanese) is determined by intuitively perceived ancestry, not by biological genealogy (or by language, for that matter).

    Anyway, my main point was pretty simple: the Nikkei protesters are right to the extent that the state of Japan has a duty to them as Japanese, even though they’re not Japanese citizens.

  5. Ploni Almoni says:

    Sorry for the bad HTML formatting of my last post. It was supposed to be a list. Looks like the “OL” HTML tag is not supported here.

  6. David Hume says:

    I don’t believe that specifications vary if one means “nation” in the original sense of the word, meaning ethnos. Some scholars distinguish between “ethnic nations” (the Japanese) and “civic nations” (the French).

    i don’t think binning is useful. there are different ways people organize ethnic nations and civic nations, and different ends of a spectrum (more accurately it explores a multi-dimensional ‘parameter space’).

    I don’t see that as a bad thing. I’m also a member of a racialist nation – Israel. I don’t know how Brazilians understand their nation. Do they consider Brazilian-born Nikkei to be Brazilian, as opposed to citizens of Brazil?

    my understanding is that they do. they’re yellow brazilians or something. the majority of the genetic ancestry in brazilian is no longer portuguese. and israel is a racialist nation if you define people of disparate genetic clusters to be of the same race 🙂

  7. Chris says:

    and israel is a racialist nation if you define people of disparate genetic clusters to be of the same race

    Which Israel, in fact, does. Racism is often pseudoscientific; the fact that the people identified as a race don’t constitute one in any strict biological sense doesn’t say much about the social or political dimensions of that racist behavior.

    More fundamentally, the fact that “the very idea of the nation-state is predicated on the concept of discrimination between non-citizens and citizens” is in fact the foundation of the cosmopolitan critique of the nation-state as a source of needless dissent and conflict (e.g. both world wars and the current situation in and around Israel to name just a few) – which you don’t bother to address or even acknowledge in this post. Do you think there is a valid defense of nation-states, and if so, what is it?

  8. This seems more related to the Japanese mindset more than anything else. There is an attitude in Japan that ethnically Japanese people born outside Japan are more or less like any other outsiders. Some will go far as to call such people gaijin. Japanese culture is very xenophobic.

  9. David Hume says:

    Which Israel, in fact, does.

    no it doesn’t. ashkenazi prejudice against the “oriental” jews and the beta israel exists.

    Do you think there is a valid defense of nation-states, and if so, what is it?

    they work better than the alternative.

  10. B.B. says:

    Joshua Zelinsky
    There is an attitude in Japan that ethnically Japanese people born outside Japan are more or less like any other outsiders. Some will go far as to call such people gaijin. Japanese culture is very xenophobic.

    Gaijin just means foreigner. It is not an epithet. I suspect if you ask the average German person if an ethnic German who was born and raised in the United States was a foreigner in Germany, they would say yes as well.

  11. David Hume says:

    I suspect if you ask the average German person if an ethnic German who was born and raised in the United States was a foreigner in Germany, they would say yes as well.

    this is fair, but do note that until recently germany allowed the open immigration of ethnic germans from eastern europe and russia, even in the cases of those who didn’t know any german (this was common for the russians i believe). that’s because germany’s citizenship law was based on descent/blood. i don’t think the same applies to japan, as they are more restrictive. i.e., the “taint” of familial residence abroad disqualifies you. in fact i know japanese who spent their teenage years abroad because their parents were executives, and they are perceived by many japanese as no longer fully japanese.

  12. Ploni Almoni says:

    David Hume :

    David Hume

    no it doesn’t. ashkenazi prejudice against the “oriental” jews and the beta israel exists.

    Ooh, officially-designated victim groups make their appearance on Secular Right! First of all, remember that we were talking about the nation of Israel (also called “the people Israel” or “the Jewish people”), not the State of Israel. It includes all Jews worldwide – America, England, Russia, etc. There’s very little prejudice by Ashkenazim outside of Israel because they have little contact with non-Ashkenazi Jews.

    Bigotry within the State of Israel has been sharply decreasing all around, but what remains does include plenty of anti-Ashkenazi prejudice as well as other kinds. I think there’s still a lot more prejudice in Israel against Ashkenazim than against Ethiopians (that was certainly the case about ten years ago). If anti-Ashkenazi prejudice comes as news to anyone here, then here’s another news flash: in America there are even people who don’t like whites!

    Anyway, our disagreement on Israel is partly just a matter of definitions, but only partly. All nations (races) have subcategories, which are inevitably “prejudiced” against each other but which band together when confronted by outsiders. The nation of Israel used to comprise twelve tribes, which sometimes fought each other on the battlefield. Israel was nevertheless a “racialist” nation. And in my opinion, it’s good to be part of a “racialist” nation. You deracinated Americans don’t know what you’re missing.

    It’s yesterday’s news that biological genealogy doesn’t coincide with national myth (and pace another commenter, racial/national myth is not “pseudoscience”). A traditional 19th-century definition of “nation” is “a group of people united by a shared error of ancestry and dislike of their neighbors.” A century ago, “Melting Pot” author Israel Zangwill remarked that if you run history’s zoescope in reverse, you’ll find that all the Germans are French and all the French are German. Nationalists correctly reply to that, “So what?”

  13. Ploni Almoni says:

    David Hume :

    David Hume

    i don’t think binning is useful. there are different ways people organize ethnic nations and civic nations, and different ends of a spectrum (more accurately it explores a multi-dimensional ‘parameter space’).

    I don’t think this is binning. I’d go further and not even call a “civic nation” a nation at all; I’d just call it a commonwealth or something.

    In this case I think there are natural, orthogonal axes which it’s useful to identify and distinguish. Walker Connor persuasively showed that (ethno)nations, surprisingly, can best be characterized unidimensionally: by perceived ancestry. It only confuses things to add additional dimensions such as language, religion, etc. to the definition.

    Furthermore, nations, in the original sense of the word, are prior to states. The nation of Israel existed for two thousand years without any political organization. Concepts like “civic nation” (or “civic-territorial nation”) combine two orthogonal vectors, ethno-nationhood and political organization. One can be loyal to his nation but not to his state, and vice versa. You can never even hope to understand what’s going on if you don’t even distinguish between a people and their political institutions.

    So I’m not recommending binning. I’m just suggesting that one should to identify useful, hopefully orthogonal axes for his parameter space.

  14. kurt9 says:

    This is very typical of the Japanese. The Japanese have a difficult time accepting “foreigners” in their midst, even those who are ethnically the same as themselves.

    The Nikkei, who came back during the bubble around 1990, are ethnically Japanese but are culturally Brazilian. The ones I knew were very much into Salsa dancing and spoke mostly Portuguese. There were several good clubs in Roppongi where they went to dance salsa. They also ate mostly Brazilian food (mostly beans, beef, and rice) and there are several small markets that cater to them. Because of these cultural differences, the Japanese slowly came to view the Nikkei as foreigners during the 90’s and began to treat them as such.

    Likewise, the ethnic Koreans (brought over before and during WWII) are also treated as foreigners even though they are now born and raised in Japan and are essentially Japanese, culturally speaking. Because of subtle and not so subtle discrimination in the past, occasionally these Koreans joined the Yakuza (particularly in Kansai area).

    Many pachiko parlors in Kanto and kansai are Korean-owned, as are many of the yakki-niku (Korean and Mongolian BBQ) restaurants.

    Foreigners who live in Japan, other than those on tourist visas (which are 90 days) must register with the city office where they live and be finger-printed (one index finger only).

  15. David Hume says:

    All nations (races) have subcategories, which are inevitably “prejudiced” against each other but which band together when confronted by outsiders.

    my point is that even among the askhenazi + sephardim + mizrachi there are genetic differences whereby these hybrid groups aren’t just simple subclasses of a “jewish group.” e.g., by total genome content ashkenazi are between middle easterners and europeans, while yemenis jews may be closer to yemenis than to ashkenazis. OTOH, these groups do share ancestry in common, in particular through the patrilineage. the japanese calling themselves a racial state makes sense, as the japanese exhibit variation, but it is continuous. i’ve always thought it peculiar to consider israel a racial state when jewish physical differences exhibit a discrete character across groups.

    d go further and not even call a “civic nation” a nation at all; I’d just call it a commonwealth or something.

    i think we’re having a semantical debate. what book would you recommend, i am not too invested in any of these terms but also am not particularly fluent in these distinctions.

  16. Ploni Almoni says:

    @David Hume

    I’ll start with the easiest: what one book would I recommend? Without a doubt, Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism:

    http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5371.html

    Read this before you read any other book on nationalism, because it’s mostly about the right and wrong ways to think about nations and nationalism. Essentially a book of theory, it’s very well-written, accessible and jargon-free. I’ve been trying to channel Connor in this thread, often stealing from him without attribution. I’m pretty sure that none of my remarks were original.

    If you don’t have time to read all the essays in the book, read the classic essay “A Nation Is a Nation, Is a State, Is an Ethnic Group, Is a…”. You’re right that our disagreement is over semantics, but that essay, and others in the book such as “Nation-Building or Nation-Destroying?”, show the critical real-world consequences of these “semantic” differences.

    On race and Israel, we’re talking about two different things. You’re talking about biological race: clades perhaps, which you can identify by looking at DNA. I’m talking about socially-defined race, as the word was often used a century ago, almost synonymously with the original meaning of “nation.” Jews – called in the Bible bnei yisra’el, the sons of Israel – are “mythologically” the descendants of a common ancestor named Jacob/Israel. Conversion is of course allowed, but membership in the nation is defined primarily by birth: if you’re born Jewish, it’s literally impossible (according to Jewish law) to stop being a Jew, even if you convert to another religion. That’s all I meant when I said that the nation of Israel is racially defined. So I don’t think we’re disagreeing on this question, just talking about different things.

  17. Mike says:

    I agree with David Hume. A nation, as opposed to an ethnic group, has well definded borders and a well-defined citizenry. You can’t sort of be a citizen or sort of have a nationality. However, you can sort of have an ethnicity. If you are 1/4 Irish, 1/2 Chinese, and 1/4 Aborigine, and are a citizen of Canada, your ethnicities are Irish, Chinese, and Aborigine, and your nationality is Canadian. I have no problem at all with what the Japanese government is doing. I kind of wish we did it in the US.

  18. Devin says:

    @Ploni Almoni

    “And in my opinion, it’s good to be part of a “racialist” nation. You deracinated Americans don’t know what you’re missing.”

    Actually we did have a “racialist” nation. And it ain’t exactly clear that you Jews had nothing to do with destroying the “racialist” USA.

  19. Devin says:

    Also, regarding American as a racialist nation, it’s not exactly clear that many Americans and people around the world don’t conceive of the US as a racialist nation.

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