Ten Thousand Things

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

Good-Bye Japan, Hello Japan – Morley Robertson's new Transnationalist Movement for Japan, formula 1 (beta level)

Posted January 20, 2006 by Jean Miyake Downey


Multiple hyphenate Anglo-American-Japanese broadcast news journalist-musician Morley Robertson is arguably the most creative, brilliant, and challenging voice in Japan's popular media today. He hosts an early morning (5:00-6:00 a.m.) radio show at Tokyo's hip and stylish J-WAVE radio station and has a podcasting (mostly in Japanese) site with Japanese actress and outspoken feminist Kono Asako.

His improv music and sound effects mixed with his and Kono's stream-of-conscious witty political and social commentaries which Robertson describes as "a sort of verbal punk rock" have easily turned their Tokyo radio fans and an international podcast audience into devoted followers and riled detractors who "make it a point of listening to every back issue, so they can write disdainful notes or bulletin posts about the trivia of what we said wrong."

Robertson thinks that podcasting in Japan has revolutionary potential and he says he plans to "ride the wave of change that is about to rip through the complacent broadcast industry. Many factors are causing upheavals, not the least being deregulation under globalization pressures, and incursions by the IT sector into broadcast. iTunes has been called the "black ship" of our time."

Similarly to Kinhide Mushakoji, president of the Japan chapter of the International Movement against all Forms of Discrimination and Racism (mentioned in the previous post), Robertson sees simultaneous counter-tensions in Japanese society:

Japan is rapidly transforming, in several contradictory directions. There is openness to foreigners and xenophobia running in parallel. Women have both better and worse situations surrounding them. Minorities feel freer than ever to express themselves, but there are also overt and severe restrictions on how "different" people can live and make a living in Japan.

The Japanese at large are still way behind in motivation to learn English, so I think they end up being left behind in the internet. An overwhelming majority wait for Japanese media to translate foreign information, and this time-lag is taking its toll on Japan's competence, I feel.

One of Robertson's fixations is challenging vestiges of Japan's pre-war fascism and new ultra-rightists who want Japan to remilitarize. He is so outspoken that he has garnered threats by rightist thugs and even been stalked by them.

Talking with him, I felt that the powerful impetus for his irreverent and unyielding pacifism traces back to his childhood, which was shaped by the profundity of living through Hiroshima's recovery. His father was an American doctor who researched the effects of gamma radiation on the incidence of leukemia among atomic bombing survivors in Hiroshima. Born in New York City and raised in the California Bay Area until the age of five, Robertson then moved to Hiroshima where he grew up as the city and its residents recovered from the nuclear holocaust. By the late 1960's, the visible scars of the atomic blast had begun to fade or had been painted over, and Robertson noted that getting on with life eclipsed everything else for most people in Hiroshima:

Hiroshima did not overtly show signs of war-time devastation. The survivors were quietly suffering, but people just got on with life. In the late 60's, the Japanese economic miracle was taking place, and the people of Hiroshima were taking part in it. There were many, many skirmishes between myself and local children, but the in the end, we all became dear friends. I originally attended an international school where children from diplomatic or doctor families were highly concentrated.

Later, when the headmaster banned the use of the Japanese language in the school, Robertson rebelled against the American's anti-Japanese and parochial attitude, transferring a Japanese public school. There, he caught the attention of a Zen monk who mentored Robertson, helping him remain true to his complex individual development while harmonizing with Japanese culture. With the monk's tutelage, Robertson flourished and became class president.

Then his family moved abruptly to Chapel Hill, which, in the 1970's, was a Southern American rural backwater, even as a university town. Describing his time there as "the most funky year of my life," Robertson had to deal with anti-Asian racism on a daily basis:

I was the resident Jap or "Nip" as some called me – I wonder if that term even exists now.

Life then roller-coastered Robertson back to San Francisco where he attended Lowell High School, where he was hit with another American regional culture, San Francisco-Chinese-American culture:

Most of the students were Chinese. There were Chinese jocks. I had thought that such a person was a living contradiction. Chinese – to be exact, Cantonese – debutantes, and Chinese going out with Filippinos and Caucasians, and just a few blacks – something very different from the lethargic landscape of North Carolina.

I became a lone crusader for "Japaneseness", antagonizing all but a handful of Chinese who found me humorous and interesting. Many of the Chinese students lived in Chinatown, and spoke Cantonese as a primary language, at home and in the school hallways. I felt like I was culturally drowning in Little Hong Kong, and wanted to overcome this cultural osmosis by acting out what I thought was a bushido-based way of life. There were Chinese gangs who were fighting turf wars in and out of college, and in other schools, students were caught with weapons, so I didn't go near the truly dangerous faction of boys.

He returned to Hiroshima on his own but was threatened by the son of a yakuza in his school so he moved in with his Japanese grandmother and transferred to his mother's high school in Toyama prefecture where he developed a local punk rock subculture and studied for university exams.

I transfered to the school that my mother graduated from in Toyama prefecture, a very quiet and under-populated part of Japan close to the Japan Sea. Lots of snow in the winter. There were close to zero foreigners excepting Mormon missionaries, so I did not trigger any social allergies. People would look at me, and just not know how to respond. I had a hoodlum-like Hiroshima accent, which must have sounded out of the ordinary. The prefecture is agricultural, and many people were farmhands. They were mostly slow, and in their own shy way, very warm.

In that quiet prefecture, with no adolescent entertainment, with patches of uninhabited farm land, I discovered punk rock...

Anyway, I passed the exams. Not only Tokyo University, but Harvard and five other US colleges as well. The exam standards were of course different, the Tokyo U. exams being the most competitive. Compared to the suffering and training I underwent in preparation for Tokyo, the Harvard essay writing seemed like a kind of talent show... Only when the Japanese press covered my passing Harvard did I realize that it was supposed to be a big deal...

I still think that if my peers who had also competed to get into Tokyo could speak as much English as I could, they would have also aced the SAT and Achievement Tests. But in that situation in early 1981, I was the only person with enough cultural and linguistic bridging to handle both. It didn't feel real, but I became a celebrity for this "double entry".

I even got signed by a record company under Sony, Corp. That truly blew my mind. Because of my passing exams, now I got to be a rock star? Wow.

Robertson graduated from Harvard, with a degree in environmental studies. Then he returned to Japan where he wrote a best-selling autobiography, and worked as a musician and underground talk radio host before signing on with J-Wave's morning show and launching his top-rated podcast site.

He has recently ventured from Japanese-language journalism into English, with a couple of articles in OhMyNews. One is a meditation on what's ahead for Japanese youth, and the other is a penetrating analysis of the Livedoor affair.

Interviewing Robertson at length recently, I was so dazzled by the riffs in this email from him (which is a print replication of the improvisational brilliance of his and Kono's radio show programs and podcasts) that I'm posting it in full:

All right, Jean. Let's start a movement.

The new transnationalist movement for Japan, formula 1 (beta level).

It starts with a revised history textbook.

Seeing that the entirety of Japanese national identity in its formal aspects were created in the days of Japanese poverty, we have come to a point in time where the old regime, in its entirety, is now to be abandoned. This involves every solid institution that makes up Japan today, from the constitution down.

The Japan into the late 1980's, around the time of PM Nakasone's shrine visit, was a continuation of work that had begun in the early Showa era. The Manchurian school of bureaucrats and zaibatsu are documented to have run the show of economic progress – the only regime change which actually took place may have been that instead of the Imperial Army and its allies in the Japanese government, the United States took reign of the entire machinery of Japan, post-occupation. That could also explain why the Imperial Family was not forcibly dissolved or put out in the open for questioning of wartime accountability. In the interests of preventing Communist infiltration, keeping the nationalist religion intact, but merely switching the ultimate master to America was in the best security interests of America in 1945.

Additionally, the Japanese technocrats had designed an ideal economic system which blended capitalism and heavy-handed government intervention, an exquisite blending of socialism and capitalism, a national socialism of sorts. The US could have felt that this was a most attractive template from which Asian economic progress could be induced. With the right politics, the entirety of Asia could be won over to the capitalist side, while sustaining American colonial expansion.

The mindset of Japanese, post-war, while feverishly studying democracy and the American way, was actually a cosmetic make-over of the Japanese Empire. The prototype of nationalism itself, which was a modern construct, aimed to bring Japan out of poverty and into modern prosperity which could compare to the West. What veiled naked reference to the great Japanese Empire was the deliberate forgetting of pre-war history, keeping the clock frozen, as it were. Japan simply shooed all historic reference about war-time activity into the zone of taboo. Not being able to touch the pacifist constitution also helped keep the clock frozen. Japan entered a 50-year long moratorium, in suspended animation. Every day was, effectively, January 1st, 1946, the beginning day of a new era.

However, this moratorium was qualitatively finite, meaning the moment Japan achieved a truly Western level of affluence, the model began to run out. The bubble-crash and Japan's "lost ten years" was a period in which Japan "thawed its clock," so to speak. The media became slowly deregulated about taboos of reporting (save for constitutional matters and the Imperial House), and much of the morale which kept the Japanese going at the worker-bee lifestyle melted down.

At that time, we see the rise of global capitalism, sped up by the internet. Japan begins to lose sovereignty on many of its political and economic decisions – but so do most other countries, including those in Europe. Japan begins to polarize into a few wealthy "winners" while its middle-class structure breaks down, and a lower-class "loser" group emerges. This trend happens in America as well, which is supposedly the sole beneficiary from the new economy. Nobody really seems to be in charge of world events any more, and the world erodes its chances of sustenance within the Earth's ecosystem.

Stalwarts of Showa-era recovery and prosperity call for a revived nationalism, re-armament, economic and military containment of China, revived adoration and fetishism of the Imperial House. The left, which lost its steam with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, largely remains silent or trivialize themselves by concentrating on non-political humanitarian matters, effectively going into retirement. We need a "third view" in Japan, badly.

–Steps to fire up the movement–

Allow the ethnic Koreans to vote and to run for office. Extend this to all long-term foreign residents. If they vote in ways that benefit their country of origin, including North Korea or China, so be it. Expanding the scope of democracy overrides the potential security concerns of allowing qualified foreigners to directly enter the political process.

Study foreign languages for real. Until now, the national consciousness strongly blocked people from acquiring any outside language. Another fear could have been that the Japanese language would be swallowed by English, if the Japanese became too fluent. Now, Japanese itself is collapsing any way – most people cannot read and write kanji as well as before, and the younger generation do not know proper ways to speak – when compared to the US, it isn't rebellion like Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, but more like lack of schooling in the inner city. I propose that the Japanese "give it up" and start learning conversant foreign languages, be it English, Mandarin, Korean or French. Knowing a foreign language opens up the mind to the true beauty of the Japanese language, making the perception "3D."

Let's bring Japanese up to OSX. And with advanced software comes open-source architecture and the ability to attach plug-ins and appendages.

Why not create a new pygin Japanese, a hip-hop of Japan, a true hybrid mish-mash of linguistic speech and alter the content of Japanese? It could centrifugally split up into High Japanese and a Bastard Japanese, with all the beautiful shades of grey in between – but that could be what happened to Arabic. I think artists can take initiative in metamorphosing the Japanese language in this way.

Remove the final taboos of media. Report and remark on the Imperial House, re-armament, the constitution, openly and actively. Turn it into a national pastime, like football. Use the net. Throw foreigners into the mix.

Become outspoken from within Japan to the international community. Help advise the government's diplomatic decisions by inducing foreign feedback, in visible places.

Shift the mind away from a rudimentary pursuit of personal gain or national profit, into a new era of global prosperity, security balance and sustainability. Develop the mindset of actively engaging in solving crises by studying and advising on hot spots around the world, beyond national boundaries. Mature capitalism into a new system of global wealth generation. Develop economic models relying less on GDP.

The formula is "Good-Bye Japan, Hello Japan."

This was just a thought I had this morning, after a dream.

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