[ks-open] RE: White People

[Richard Miller]

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I don't have anything for biographical details 1 and 2, but concerning
notions of the whiteness of Japanese, by sheer chance I just ran across two
articles that briefly mention the Nazi decision to make Japanese Aryan. They
are both in the book Deutschland-Japan historische Kontakte edited by Josef
Kreiner , (Studium Universale, Vol. 3. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert
Grundmann 1984). one is  Eberhard Friese's, "Das deutsche Japanbild
1944--Bemerkungen zum Problem der auswartigen Kulturpolitik wahrend des
Nationalsozialismus," pp. 265-284. The other is Peter Pantzer's "Deutschland
und Japan vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis zum Austritt aus der Volkerbund
(1914-1933)," pp. 141-160. As I remember, there is some discussion in
Friese's article also of anti-semitism in Japan during the Axis period.

Apologies to Rudiger for the loss of umlauten in the titles above--I set my
email up for East Asian scripts and now none of the usual European
diacriticals work. There's some sort of historical lesson there, I'm sure,
but just what it might be I don't know.

For a general historical summary of the Japanese notions of "race" and
"ethnicity" in relation to Europeans and other Asians (including Koreans and
Japanese "outcasts"), I think Cullen Hayashida's 1976 PhD dissertation,
"Identity, Race, and the Blood Ideology of Japan" (Seattle: University of
Washington) is still the most succinct. During the Imperial period some
Japanese writers took over Kipling and declared the existence of "The Yamato
Man's Burden." The propaganda churned out by naturalized Japanese-American
apologist K.K. Kawakami should be a good source for that approach. Sorry, I
don't have any titles right off hand, but the guy wrote like a banshee and
the Japanese government did its best to get the books into as many US
libraries as possible, so they shouldn't be too hard to find. As I remember,
any one of his books will suffice, since they all seem to have the same
content. And of course John Dower's books on the Pacific War go into
Japanese notions of race as well.

On the flip side of Japanese considering themselves "white," I know of one
article on Japanese constructions of Black, John Russell's "Race and
Reflexivity: The Black Other in Contemporary Japanese Mass Culture"
(Cultural Anthropology 6/1, 1991, pp. 3-25). There may be other works on the
subject by now, but I haven't searched them out.

Enjoy...

Richard

Richard Miller
UW-Madison School of Music
National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka
http://www.sit.wisc.edu/~rcmiller/