Andre’s Reviews > The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire > Status Update

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?!