13 Aug 2006 0250H

Uyoku

At Ginza Fest today, Ryan and I somehow got on the topic of the uyoku (右翼, literally, the “right wing”), these infamous Japanese ultra-nationalists who’ve tied themselves to the Yasukuni Shrine and drive around in black vans with loudspeakers blaring bombastic anthems and nearly unintelligible statements. Well, as it turns out they are not exactly primarily anti-foreign in scope, as is often believed (certainly I was told this by, admittedly, primarily frustrated and disenfranchised hakujin), but more like extreme ultra-militarist-patriots for the Empire of Japan. But, as I started to dig into it, the interesting thing is, it is speculated that they may have ties to the yakuza and to right wing politicians who may have used them to harass the left, and also, pure speculation again, since the evidence at hand is rather scant, that among their members are a considerable number of so-called zainichi (在日) Koreans, permanent residents of Japan of ethnic Korean ancestry who may or may not be naturalized citizens. If this is indeed the case, there’s something very interesting and ironic about their history of how they came to Japan, why they continue to stay, possibly questions about entrepreneurship, employment discrimination against zainichi in hiring or promotions, and perhaps the relatively open structure of yakuza recruitment which allows them to become powerful as a result of sheer manpower among the disenfranchised. Or perhaps this is insular Japan pointing the finger at “eternal foreigners” like the zainichi to blame them collectively for increased crime, the economic depression of the last 10 or so years, hell, even the Great Kanto Earthquake, according to one account. Or even perhaps this is just the usual exoticized fetishism of all things Japanese by the eternally bewildered and fascinated foreigner? In the end, I think there is probably no one pat answer that can explain all of this away and certainly not from our faraway vantage point of the midwest, where these concerns are far and away from our daily lives, and certainly it’s not a metonymy for the entire complexity of Japan itself, which is insular, but no more or less than any other place in the world. But, all of this is quite interesting! I think as a result of today’s interactions, there might be something in the way of an Asian American podcast where we kinda broadly pick at some things in Asian and Asian American Studies, but, given the way we talk about this stuff, it’d probably have to be uncensored and fairly raw. The alternative would be to heavily redact it and I think that’s not quite right. Course we’d have to timebox all this too.

Some great pix of the uyoku on Flickr
Ironically, a picture of a guy who looks a bit like Ryan at the wheel of a uyoku soundtruck. Hey man! What were you doing over there, really? ;-)

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