Status Updates From The Affect of Difference: R...

What? That boring and weird chapter was the last one?

"be­wildered librarians' accounts of the book being so popular that it was literally torn to shreds, to literary scholars arguing that Sambo is the paragon of children's literature, to the Japanese Ministry of Education and Technology­sanctioned versions of Chibikuro,  to parents forming concerned citizens committees, by 1988, Chibikuro had, to borrow the words of Ochiai Akiko, ``permeated Japanese
society."

Oh, this Japanese author seems to have used Japanese Americans to somehow make Japanese people look as victims with the " I want people to know the reality of the masses of Japa­nese people like us who suffer at the hands of groundless discrimination, and that this is a problem that connects with the foundation of Japan's democracy"

Well, looks like Iizawa fell awfool of his own rage and lack of care when he didn't realize that the author of Black Sambo was writing about an imagined American South and not Africa as Iizawa believed. And does Sambo go to India in the story or why does Iizawa claim the author conflated Africa with India?

 African Americans were pecu­liarly affected by the text, though initially, the  response to Sambo among the black intelligentsia was affirmative.

After this early introduction, "Sambo" underwent a peculiar inversion or appropriation, from being a prominent name among the male slave population to an interpellation that supposedly encapsulated the very notion of the African male slave mentality.
And based on modern sensibilities, that is what it has to stay forever.

So this is Little Black Sambo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSfGv...

This statement in the novel that Japan is an unforgiving country where you can never let your guard down reminds me of modern day claims about it enforcing conformity, like with the hair in tokyo schools.

 Yet she acknowledges that lndonesians after independence in 1945 continued to embrace a light~skinned lndo or Eurasian beauty ideal, and also to link "Indonesian whiteness" to a "Japanese whiteness," which was considered superior to European (or Chinese) whiteness.

Using strontium­9 to remove freckles and birth marks?!

One participant, the painter lto Shinsui, stated to general agreement
that "I've been abroad, and on the whole Japanese women are prettier; they do have beauties over there, but on average there are more in Japan". There was fur­ther agreement on the idea that Japanese female beauty "kept longer"­"foreign women deteriorate after the age of 25, and by 3o they're all fat."
Sounds familiar.

The mere thought that beauty contests could be considered progressive and emancipatory and Japanese beauty standards considered superior to western ones would be completely unthinkable for so many progressives today.

this situating of Japanese along the "racial-evolutionary ladder" and switching appearance to reflect that via surgery, reminds me of chinese stories where it is clear that animals have to attain human shape/become human to be able to reach enlightenment or that when they become gods they attain human form. If Japan had similar concepts, the recial hierarchy would have found fertile ground.

cosmetic eye surgery... well it had to come up. However, it does sound interesting as the author doesn't just attribute it to wanting to look white.

This book "Hell of the Starving" by that Chang does sound interesting. Allegedly it shows the dfestating effects of Japanese reforms on the Korean countryside. Makes me alsp wonder why Chang switched so much to pro-Japanese later on.
And apparently he justified Japanization of Korea by taking Anglicization of Ireland as a precedent. Hm... sounds familiar.

Gosh, this chapter on the movie Nightingale was so boring that I won't be able to remember it in any way.

Funny, to read that Russia is considered Western here. Today, it is usually excluded from that category.

Ok, we had lots of stuff about racial segregation, walls, militarism etc. But in what way could that be called a continental Auschwitz like mentioned at the start of the chapter? Maybe the notes will have some more.

So this Yamamuro referred to Manchukuo as an Auschwitz state.... wow. That really clashes with its multicultural image by other Japanese authors.

So for Taiwanese and Koreans speaking fluent, non-accented Japanese actually marked them as colonials in those times.

Wow, the Japanese really went out of their way to not have Taiwan and Korea be official colonies.... hm, did some apologists ever use that?

Oh yeah, during the 1923 tokyo massacres people were targeted as koreans when they didn't speak the right kind of Japanese.

1923 massacre in Tokyo? Does he refer to the massacres after the Kanto earthquake?

Confucianism has a devaluation of picture and image making as well? Why? And in 18th century Korea it was forbidden to use eyes to make social contact... wow, some dramas got that really wrong then.

Those Choson painters had to do portraits without making eye contact due to social conventions... that sounds potentially complicated.

Oh gosh, whenever an author mentions Focault, you can be sure to have an author at hand who babbles some shit no normal person understands.

finally!!! The chapter is over!!!

This author is a real problem. The information he presents can be really interesting, but the way he talks about photographies is so weird. It is a definitive downturn from earlier chapters.

The author quotes some guy who actually thinks that assiilation into the Japanese empire and culture changed the faces of the Koreans over 30 years and yet that sounds less insane and incomprehensible then what the author of this chapter spews out.

Something tells me that these "abject bodies" statement will give me a headache