Japan's Minorities - The Illusion of Homogeneity by Michael Weiner

Author:Michael Weiner [Weiner, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Minority Studies, Sociology, Social Science, Japan - Social Conditions - 1945, Japan - Ethnic Relations, Minorities - Japan, Minorities, Anthropology, Cultural, Ethnic Relations, Ethnic Studies, Japan, General, Discrimination & Race Relations
ISBN: 9780415772631
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-01-08T18:30:00+00:00

Notes

1 A slightly different version of this essay appeared in the journal Zinbun (40), Kyoto University Institute for Research in the Humanities, August 2008. Japanese translations are the author’s own, unless otherwise noted.

Quote: 4-chan BBS black anime characters, http://www.world4ch.org/read.php/ anime 1127335674/140,12 August 2006.

2 See Rubin 1967. The tendency of modern-day commentators to see only ‘black devils’ in these prints may betray a bias to seek historical confirmation of contemporary prejudices, a tendency classicist Frank Snowden (1983: 80) has detected in modern interpretations of black representation in Western classical art.

3 See Fujita Midori 1987a and 1987b for two pioneering studies of premodern Japanese views of blacks.

4 Duyvendak (1949: 23), citing Chinese sources, posits an African presence going back as far as the Ch’in dynasty (221 BC - 420 AD).

5 The historical Yasuke serves as the model for the titular protagonist of Endo Shusaku’s comic novel Kurombd (Nigger, 1973), although the novel portrays him as a cowardly and buffoonish man-child (see Russell 1991).

6 See Fujita 1987a: 28-32.

7 Mansell Upham, a South African historian and former diplomat at the South African Embassy in Tokyo who has researched the genealogy of European families in South Africa, has discovered a property inventory documenting the sale of one ‘Anthony Moor from Japan,’ registered as the son of a Japanese mother and a ‘Moor’ father, to a European settler in Capetown in 1701 (Japan Times,16 December 1993: 3, and personal conversation 1993). Although the term ‘Moor’ is racially inconclusive and the inventory does not confirm that he was in fact a black African, the finding does raise the question of the extent of miscegenation between Japanese and black Africans in premodern times.

8 Duyvendak notes that ‘the Chinese applied the term ... to peoples, mostly of the Malay race, whom they found at the ends of the earth. At first chiefly confined to the races of the South-West, later, as the geographic knowledge of the Chinese expanded, the same term was applied to the native races of the countries around the Indian Ocean, including the negroes’ (1949: 23). Given the ambiguity of the term as a racial marker, Irwin cautions that those ‘described as kunlun in medieval Chinese accounts cannot be assumed to be African unless other evidence supports that conclusion’ (1977: 170), and notes that the term was also used as a sobriquet for a fourth-century priest and a Chinese consort, perhaps owing to their dark complexions. Still, it is noteworthy that despite their dark complexions these individuals enjoyed positions of power and privilege in premodern China. By the tenth century, accounts of kunlun with ‘frizzy’ or ‘wooly’ hair would suggest an African origin.

9 Unlike the neutral kokujin (black person), kurombd (black one) is pejorative and belittling. In Japanese the suffix ‘-mb&，connotes childishness, immaturity, and disreptuable character, as can be seen in such terms as okorimbd (hothead), amaembd (pampered one), chorimbd (a derogatory term for burakumin), and shirombd (white one, whitey), an appellation once applied to albinos and Caucasians. This suffix is also used to express endearment, as in akambd (baby).

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