Masha's rabbit hole

"complex antipathy toward the japanese"

it's a very big topic to talk about....
it's been about 5 months since Korean people can buy Japanese CD in normal CD stores in Korea. I check J-pop ranking in Korean music site and see so many old songs like 'say yes' from Chage and Aska which came out 13 years ago. The ranking list mingled with both old and new songs. How weird to see these all together.

It's much easier to just shut up my mouth to avoid any troubles but is that the right thing to do? I was in a random chat room about 3 years ago when I just started speaking English. and met this Korean girl who was a few years older. My screen name included "jp" at the end she messaged just to tell me how much she hated "me". She hated me because i was japanese. I'd never met her... how could i offend her personally? I could just ignore the message but I didnt. I started talking to her. I wasn't mean or anything. I said what i thought was right at that time. I remembered i was pretty surprised to know how much the korean students at my high school in europe knew about japanese cultural stuff such as movies, music, comics, etc. It was not as if they try to please me or try to get closer to me by knowing those. It was purely they were interested in. I told her, if she had to blaim on me she could do that but I can't do anything about it 'cause I wasn't the one to make the decision and it happened way earlier I was born. We talked who knows how long. It was already at dawn. At the end, we were agreed on each other. Some suffers that the older Korean generation experienced was partly (and a lot to do with) Japanese rulers at that time. But younger generations who never experienced the war were more tolerant to understand to each other.

In the history classes that I attended to while I went to japanese schools, i learned the outlines of historical events but never learned what exactly "JAPANESE" soldiers had to do at overseas. It was the first time that i learned how far they've conquered when i was at american school. As being Japanese, maybe I'm supposed to be proud that they've taken over other countries and expanded the territory, but I didn't feel exactly like that. I felt kind of sad and embarrassed because I thought it was unneccessary to expand the country and made what didnt belong to them theirs. I didnt know anything until my chinese friends became mean to me out of nowhere one time and told me what "JAPANESE" soldiers did to the chinese people.

No matter how much I wish for both to be just peaceful, that can't happen that easily. every time important officials make a vist to Yasukuni shrine, many people make a fuss about the true intension about the visits. Visiting the shrine straight up means praising the soldiers who helped the nation to go into the war and kill innoccent people in other countries? This should be interpreted like this too, saying sorry to the soldiers who were force to do what we generally think is wrong now but at that time of the era they were taught and obliged to do so to be good in the society.
If there's no soldiers in this world, there would be no wars. This Italian movie that I saw lately said, "Make Love instead of war" Could I ever kill other human being just because they're not from my country? No way. What if I were a mixed child and the two nationalities hated each other in the time period like early 20th? I'd be the first one to get killed or used.

It is hard to be proud of your nationality these days. If i say outloud "I AM PROUD TO BE JAPANESE" does it mean that I am too responsible for all the actions that the nation made in the past and the actions that they're going to make in the future. That is, I accepted that any actions that the nation made were justified by me?

I met a lot of people while I was travelling around certain places in the world. Not only local people from the area but a lot of other travelling fellows including those from my own country. Discussions that were made inside and outside of the country definitely differ. An American scholar described the japanese society as in a box. There are always same people in the box and they know each other very well, in other words, they're conservative and they are closed minded. What if little masha decided to open a little hole inside the box to see the outer world? people would tell me how dangerous outside but my curiousity wouldn't stop me and try to make the hole bigger and bigger that finally little masha's body could go through it. once she's out of the box, does it mean she no longer belong in the society back in the box? Getting out equals to hatred to the society? Quite not so. She would be little influeced by outer world depending on how much she was involved of what she wasn't used to, and it might get hard to be stay in the same way they do after seeing something else either better or worse. I've seen a lot of people... roughly three main types; those who love the country, those who don't care, and those who think they don't belong there. One thing, whatever the last group of people say how much Japan sucks does not exactly attract other countries which also holds the sense of hatred because of what happened during the war. They would, if this was ever justified, keep holding the hatred to all of us.

I was watching a tv show with my younger brother when i was around 12 years old. it was showing this guy who was travelling alone in Italy. my brother always wanted to go to Italy and I've heard a lot of times him saying he wanted to go there. The guy in the tv show went ask for help to a bunch of kids who were older than us and one of them throw a coin to him really hard. Since then, my brother never said once that he wants to go to Italy again. Not only what we've seen in this tv show but I don't know from where but I always had this weird impression that japanese was disliked race. Joesan was the only person who I've known so long that I never put a boarder line between us. Yeah,,, i used to think non-japanese people speaking japanese are weird and they wanted to steal from us something, and I'd never talked them back in japanese.

enough speaking for today... there's no conclusion but i think my thought can be caught from here, i guess....

Posted by masha at May 18, 2004 09:25 PM