I recently met a sociology student from Okinawa International University who performs Okinawan Eisa dancing in her spare time. She is one of many young people of Okinawan descent who are now returning to Okinawa to rediscover their roots and their missing piece/peace. The good news is that she appears to have found it in what remains of Okinawan culture. She speaks of having found ’something ‘ that was missing from her life in mainland Japan. She sparkles with energy, health, and happiness as she talks about her dancing and the deeper spiritual connection with her Okinawan ancestors. It is enough to make me think quite deeply about the meaning of it all.
It is fairly apparent that this young woman and many people like her are seeking something that they cannot find elsewhere in Japan or has been lost somewhere along the path to modernisation and social change. Whereas previous generations struggled to build and rebuild and then experienced the benefits of prosperity the present generation seem to be at the ’so is this it’ stage of social development. The ’something’ that is missing appears to be a sense of, spiritual, cultural completeness and identity without the easy opt out of going down some militaristic or ‘group-mind’ path. The question is why is this missing from mainstream Japanese society and why do so many people in Japan feel that there is something missing from their lives? An emptiness or vacuum. The vacuum left by the absence of the ’something’ needs to be filled.
The number of people seeking to find answers, and who don’t have Okinawan roots, appears to explain the growth of interest in organisations that appear to provide the answers to the problem of the missing ’something’. Some of these organisations are becoming so rich and powerful in Japan that they are becoming influential politically and socially. They have political candidates and fund schools and even Universities not just in Japan but in other countries too. The worrying thing about them and their aims are that they are starting to look a little bit too extreme for most people to ignore them. When a group starts talking about building the leaders to make Japan strong again I start to get worried (stronger economically or militarily?). Echoes of jackboots etc. It is also a bit worrying to think that these organisations want to target their resources at educating young people with obvious parallels with the Hitler Youth and similar Communist youth movements in China and elsewhere. It is interesting that such organisations have found little support in Europe where memories of what happens when nationalism gets out of hand are still relatively fresh.
It is easy to talk about disaffected youth turning to extremists but these organisations don’t look extreme at all at first glance and might actually appeal to kids who just want a good education. They look as if they just want to improve society for everyone (as long as it is according to their principles and agenda). Having met some charming young women from one of these groups colleges I could honestly say I am more than worried not least because they actually followed the no makeup rule. In Okinawa makeup actually helps protect skin against harmful UV and most young women wear a little and other sun protecting measures. An organisation that can stop 19 year old Japanese women from wearing makeup has considerable power indeed!
Okinawans are a proud people. They are the longest lived of all the people of the earth and having spent some time here I am beginning to see why. I always make a distinction in my mind between Okinawans and mainland Japanese people because there is something very unique about the Okinawans that is largely unknown in the West where they tend to be lumped together with the rest of the Japanese peoples. Despite efforts by the japanese mainlanders at various points over the last 400 years or so to dominate, replace, or in some instances erase Okinawan culture it still seems to keep going and there are even signs in some areas of a fight back as mainstream Japanese culture loses its energy in the face of a culture grounded strongly in the hearts and minds of the Okinawan people. To be continued…….
I agree with your view/observation on the Japanese groups/organizations that are thriving nowadays. Many of them are very right-wing, causing concern on the possible revival of militarism. Being a chinese, I get more worried. I don’t want wars. Many peoples think the chinese are over-reacting, think we are mobs. Having been invaded by the Japanese several times since Ming Dynasty, our worries should be understandable, not to mention that many anti-chinese are now on display and found their markets in Japanese book stores. I wonder what you think of the chinese people.
I have also read your fictional writings, can you put them into paragraphs? It’s hard to read without paragraphs. Also, I think you should be more careful in punctuating your sentences. Putting them into right places will get your ideas to flow into senses.
Comment by forgetmenot — 22, October 2006 @ 10:01 am
sorry, I missed out one word in line 8 of the first paragraph. It should read ‘many anti-chinese books’
Comment by forgetmenot — 22, October 2006 @ 10:04 am
Many thanks for the comments. Firstly, your point about paragraphs and punctuation. Unfortunately the editor on the site did not agree with Microsoft Word and a lot of the formatting etc. seems to be lost including paragraph breaks. I am working on this slowly.
Secondly my creative writing is experimenting with word forms and more advanced modes of English expression. This may stretch non-native English speakers and even those who use English as their first language. The meanings may not be entirely clear but then that gives the advanced reader something to think about. The puctuation and sentence order is therefore not wrong but rather it is not written for those who are seeking to learn English grammar. It is all about style.
Thirdly, I have a deep respect for Chinese history and studied China for many years. I think that for years the Japanese people had very little idea or no idea of the atrocities committed on other peoples in their name either before or during WW2 and were fed a somewhat biased version of their own history unlike Germany for example-even after hostilities ceased. Thanks to the internet official histories have been and are being questioned now. Of course their will always be groups who either distort the truth or deny it. The fact is that any kind of extremism or strong political ideology is bad for business. For instance the BBC news website is blocked throughout China (except if you are a party official) Both China and Russia, Japan and much of the Western world are now economically interdependent so we can’t really have wars with each other unless the battle ground is North Korea that has, unlike China, largely opted out of the the world economic system. We can however fall out over offensive behaviour like visiting shrines that contain the remains of war criminals or failing to fairly compensate victims of past attrocity. But in doing so the point should be to educate the next generation to stop other attrocities such as the cultural revolution and the Tiananmen Square Massacre ever taking place again. I think that China is modernising gradually and the younger people coming up will continue the process towards a state that allows its people an increasing amount of freedom.
Comment by David Raho — 22, October 2006 @ 2:12 pm