This giant poster is in--you guessed it--China, and if you know characters through Japanese you might not recognize the first two in this slogan ("倭寇入常,天理不容"). They are "wo1kou4," a derogatory term for Japanese. EastSouthWestNorth translates the entire thing as "To let the Japanese bandits enter the UN Security Council is not permitted by natural (heavenly) principles," but most Chinese speakers understand "wokou" to mean something more like "dwarf pirates" since the first character is the "person" radical and the character for "short."The term originally referred to pirate bands that conducted raids on the Chinese and Korean coasts beginning in the 16th century (which, by the way, consisted of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean sailors).
Call me naive, but it's pretty stunning to see something like this displayed in this fashion. Azuma was right in his comment on my post about Japanese "nationalism": In Japan, you might see such an inflammatory message on the side of a nutcase's sound truck, but never hanging from the side of a building like this. I am being persuaded--Japanese nationalism doesn't even come close to the "instrumentalized" Chinese version.
7 comments:
Hey, I posted about that first character here:
http://no-sword.jp/blog/2005/04/geomantic-korea.html
Is it really theorised that the "wa" in "Land of Wa" was originally a Japanese sound? I always thought it was from Chinese and the 和 meaning was applied to it later by Japanese folks casting around for a positive way to write it.
I was thinking I read that in Borders of Chinese Civilization but upon double-checking I have found it's not there. I probably got that backwards so I removed it from the post.
Now that you mention it, I read that post when you posted it. I think I stumbled upon No-sword while searching for something about Musashi.
Any of you ever read a book called Chung Kuo by a David Wingrove? (Not well written, so can't recommend; first in a series I never read more of.) Set two or three hundred years in the future in a world where China Rules. And not in the cool sense.
Pity it's still too soon to book passage off-world. The future's so blight I gotta wear Last Emperor shades!
Man, that same blogger must have been absolutely livid when she had screen sex with a guy who was both Japanese AND Taiwanese, in Lovers. (or was that what they were talking about? i assumed it was a Geisha thing)
I think in the demented mind of the Chinese ubernationalist, Taiwanese are OK--it's just that the "Chen Shui-bian clique" has kept them separated from the Motherland or something like that. And I bet it slips their minds that Takeshi is half-Japanese.
By the way, outside of Japan, that film was called House of Flying Daggers, but Chinese films in Japan need, um, special English names because, uh, Kanji, um, well... huh?
By the way, this brings me to Amida's First Law of the Internet: Nothing on the Internet is representative of anything except the Internet. That's especially the case for stuff about China. We don't know who posted it, why they posted it, etc.
No, no--I meant the blogger's comments, not the photo. I am not going to make apologies for the idiots who hung up that banner. I take Chinese vitriol found on the web with a big grain of salt, as I do with many things online. Every extremist opinion is over-represented online. Crazy people get worked up more and post more.
Japan is a hot button in Taiwan, too. Japanese rule is looked upon fondly by some "ethnic Taiwanese," while many of the "mainlanders" (who came over with the KMT in the late 40s) and their offspring hate the Japanese just as the Chinese do. Aborigines tend to get on the KMT anti-Japan bandwagon due to the treatment they got under the Japanese. Just recently, members of the Taiwan Solidarity Union, an extremist Green (pro-independence ) group, sent their leader to pay respects at Yasukuni Jinja. That was followed by a protest there led by a politically Blue aborigine legislator (I forget if she was KMT or PFP). They were kept on their bus by Japanese policemen outside of the shrine, and I'll be damned if some of them didn't jump screaming and shouting from the bus windows. I am not a fan of their politics but I had to admire them for that.
(I am sympathetic to the Greens, but I have to say that the TSU Yasukuni trip was a pretty disgusting display.)
IbaDaiRon:«Any of you ever read a book called Chung Kuo by a David Wingrove?»
I read the entire ten(?)-book series, and I can tell you you made the right decision to stop at one. In the final volume the key to the plot turns out to have been giant space spiders.
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