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Don’t look to Japan’s Supreme Court for Social Change

16/12/2015
japan, politics

Japan’s Supreme Court today announced a pair of decisions that are attracting significant media and public attention. The one dominating most of the headlines, it seems, is the ruling that a law forbidding married couples from keeping their original names (rather than one party changing their name) is perfectly constitutional, a decision which is already attracting a degree of scorn from commentators. The other, arguably much more interesting from a political and legal standpoint, is a ruling that a law demanding that divorced women wait six months before remarrying is unconstitutional.

The ruling on “waiting periods” for divorced women is a blindingly obvious piece of law – Article 14 of the Constitution guarantees “no discrimination in political, economic or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin”, and the six-month rule applied only to women. The law pre-dated the 1947 Constitution – it was introduced in the late 1800s as an attempt to ensure clear parentage for children born after a divorce, and aside from being discriminatory, is clearly outdated in the modern era of DNA testing (edit: I should note that the court hasn’t demanded that the law be entirely removed, only that it be dropped to a 100-day period, but this is because that’s what the plaintiff in the case asked for, and to the best of my knowledge the Court isn’t empowered to demand that the Government go beyond that in its legal revision. There’s still no waiting period for men who wish to remarry, so the law remains unequal. Hat tip to @anjin_miura on Twitter for pointing this out.). Despite being the sort of ruling on constitutional law that a reasonably bright five year old could manage given sufficient candy incentives, this is still a landmark ruling for the simple reason that it’s incredibly, vanishingly rare for Japan’s Supreme Court to declare a law unconstitutional. Since it was first convened in 1947, the Court has only struck down laws on ten occasions. By comparison, the US Supreme Court (which is, in theory, the model for Japan’s Supreme Court) has struck down over 165 Acts of Congress and almost 1000 state laws on the basis of unconstitutionality in its 226-year history, with the vast majority of those occurring in the 20th century. This underlines the importance of any occasion on which the Japanese Supreme Court actually chooses to rule against a law – no matter how past its sell-by date the law may be.

It also explains, in broad, contextual terms, why the challenge against demanding the adoption of a partner’s surname failed. Even the non-Americans among us are very used to seeing extensive reporting of the US Supreme Court, which regularly turns the tiller of American society with sweeping rulings on social issues, from civil rights to equal marriage. There’s an expectation, perhaps, that the Japanese Supreme Court should be willing and empowered to do the same thing, and a degree of disappointment and even disbelief when they turn out to be far more tame and conservative than their US counterparts.

There are, however, solid legal and political reasons why the Japanese Supreme Court is how it is – and they’re mostly grounded in the 1946 Constitution itself, a document which is revered by Japanese liberals for its pacifist stance but which, in many regards, was flawed from the outset and is now really starting to show its age. The 1946 Constitution established both the Diet and the Supreme Court, and unwittingly created an ill-defined relationship between them, in which the powers and responsibilities of each body are problematically vague. Article 41, establishing the Diet, states that “the Diet shall be the highest organ of state power, and shall be the sole law-making organ of the State”; Article 81, establishing the Supreme Court, says that it “is the court of last resort with power to determine the constitutionality of any law, order, regulation or official act”. So which of them, then, is the highest organ of state power? Does the Supreme Court have the power to command the Diet? Does the Diet have the capacity to disagree with Supreme Court rulings and plough ahead regardless? The language of the Constitution leaves that frustratingly vague, and in a forehead-slap inducing Catch-22, the only bodies with the power to interpret the Constitution’s meaning in this regard are the very bodies whose roles are uncertain in this instance.

The compromise that’s been in effect since 1947 is very straightforward and typically Japanese; the Supreme Court doesn’t rock the boat. When a law is utterly, blatantly in violation of the Constitution, it strikes it down (these are often laws predating the constitution’s promulgation). When a law is in a gray area, in which clauses of the constitution seem to conflict with one another or where there’s a simple lack of clarity, the Supremes shrug their berobed shoulders and toss it back to the Diet, bowing to parliament’s role as the “highest organ of state power” and requesting that they draft legislation to clear things up one way or another. This compromise is made altogether easier by a peculiarity of the Japanese legal system by which it’s impossible to simply request a judicial review of the constitutionality of a law; individuals wishing to challenge a law have to prove that they have standing (i.e. demonstrate that they have suffered damages due to the unconstitutional legislation they’re challenging) in order for their case to be heard. As a consequence, some attempts to challenge laws in the Japanese courts fail not because the law is found to be constitutional, but because nobody can prove to the court’s satisfaction that they’ve personally suffered damages on account of the law; the arguments over constitutionality aren’t even broached before the case is thrown out.

What’s happened in the case of the surnames issue, then, is that the Court has decided that the Constitution doesn’t have anything direct or blunt enough to say on the matter, and thrown it back to the Diet for a legislative solution. Could the court have ruled otherwise? Sure; the plaintiffs argued under Article 13 of the Constitution (“All of the people shall be respected as individuals. Their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness shall, to the extent that it does not interfere with the public welfare, be the supreme consideration in legislation and in other governmental affairs.”) that demanding that one partner give up their family name was an undue interference in people’s lives, and a more activist-minded court could absolutely have agreed with that position. It would, however, have risked a run-in with the government, which takes a conservative stance on family issues, and that would have sailed the ship of state far too close to the awkward questions over the roles of Diet and Supreme Court that nobody wants to ask or answer. The safe ruling, which is on rock-solid legal ground, is to say that the Constitution doesn’t really say anything one way or the other on this issue, giving the Diet free rein to implement whatever legislative solution it likes (in this instance, most likely a continuation of the status quo).

Incidentally, this is a somewhat gloomy preview of what’s going to happen if and when legal challenges on equal marriage work their way through Japan’s courts. Article 14, as cited above, does not offer protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and Article 24 defines marriage as being “based only on the mutual consent of both sexes… maintained through mutual cooperation with equal rights of husband and wife as a basis.” An activist or progressive court could happily rule that Article 14’s list of protections is non-exhaustive and that its protection from discrimination on the grounds of gender directly implies protection for sexual minorities, which takes legal precedence over Article 24’s mention of both sexes since equal marriage would extend, rather than curtailing, the protections Article 24 is designed to provide. Japan’s Supreme Court is not an activist or progressive court; it will rule that the present marriage rules are constitutional, and throw the whole issue back to the Diet (where the Abe Cabinet, deeply socially conservative, will bat them it of the field).

There’s no point being angry or disappointed in the Supreme Court over these rulings; it is what it is. The Court is operating from a far weaker and less well-defined position than its US counterpart, its capacity to carry out judicial review is hobbled by legal restrictions, and the Constitution on which it must base its rulings is riddled with contradictions and anachronisms. The Court’s long-standing habit of passing responsibility for decision-making on most issues back to the Diet is pretty much the only option open to it – and simply means that, for those who decry slow progress on social change in Japan, the buck stops with the democratically elected government, not with the Supreme Court or, for the most part, the Constitution. It also, incidentally, means that for significant progress to be made on an issue like equal marriage, a constitutional amendment would be required – meaning that perhaps some liberals could find common ground with conservatives who are determined to change the (extremely high) bar for constitutional amendment.

Syria: A Triumph of Action over Intelligence

03/12/2015
politics, UK

Insanity, we are so often told, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Quotes to that effect are regularly attributed to both Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, though there’s no evidence that either man ever said it. Even shorn of the weight of authority that comes from being uttered by men of genius, the concept sticks with you because it makes obvious, intuitive sense. You don’t stick your hand into the fire a second time to see if it burns again; “once bitten, twice shy” is a powerful instinctive behaviour for good reason.

The comparisons between Tony Blair committing the UK to war in Iraq in 2003 and David Cameron committing the country to bombing Syria, as passed by Parliament yesterday, have often referenced this convenient definition of insanity. Blair’s misadventure in Iraq, its horrific consequences and the calculatedly dishonest “intelligence” which supported it remain a millstone around the neck of the Labour party. The strides the country made under Blair’s premiership are forgotten under the weight of opprobrium heaped upon his arrogance and egotism over the war and his stubborn refusal to acknowledge, even now, the awful mistake it represented. Twelve years later, Cameron’s insistence that Britain must join in raining bombs on Syria certainly feels like deja vu, and has left many wondering out loud if another Prime Minister will find himself so despised over another committment to another hopeless war.

There are key differences, of course. Cameron has not committed troops to Syria, as Blair did to Iraq; there will be no British soldiers returning in coffins on carrier planes, at least not yet. Cameron has also, bluntly, made little or no effort to make or manufacture a case for war. Blair and his spin doctors burned the midnight oil to create a compelling, if almost entirely dishonest, case for the invasion of Iraq; Cameron, perhaps recognising that the lies supporting the Iraq War were the very petard upon which Blair was hoist, has instead chosen to justify the bombing of Syria in only the most broad, rhetorical strokes. It’s a cynical masterstroke; opponents of the war find themselves grasping at thin air, because there’s no case for war to rebut, no intelligence to question. The logic is as ephemeral as mist; ISIS may back attacks in the UK, as they did in France (though the extent to which ISIS in Syria actually aided or participated in the organisation of the Paris attacks, as opposed to merely lending their name to an attack from domestic extremists, is entirely unclear), so Syria must be bombed, not because bombing will reduce the risk of terrorism – the government isn’t getting pinned down into claiming that, oh no sir – but because something must be done, and suddenly we’re off into the realms of pure rhetoric, where anyone daring to question whether dropping more high explosives on a volatile region that’s already essentially hosting a proxy war between NATO and Russia might be a bad idea is a “terrorist sympathiser”.

You can’t argue with that; you can say it’s mad, or offensive, or grotesquely stupid, but you can’t argue with it because it isn’t a coherent argument in itself. In the absence of a case for war, counter-arguments are like tilting at windmills; Cameron has won the debate by refusing to participate in it, instead sitting back and letting the British media work itself into a froth over the internal politics of the opposition, leaving the position of the government nigh-on unquestioned. What few facts have been permitted to enter the debate are so nebulous as to be almost laughable; 70,000 moderate rebels are ready to liberate the ISIS positions Britain will weaken with bombing, apparently, but who those rebels might be, where they’ve been up until now, and why British bombs are going to accomplish what could not be accomplished already by American bombs, Jordanian bombs, Canadian bombs, Australian bombs, French bombs, by a veritable fusion cuisine nightmare of international high explosive flavours; these things could not be explained, to the exasperation of even many in Cameron’s own party.

Do David Cameron or his closest advisors honestly believe that British bombs falling on Raqqa are going to make the slightest positive difference to the situation in Syria, or to the security situation in the UK and around Europe? I wouldn’t dare to judge – I’d note that for all his dishonesty, one thing that’s clear about Blair’s intervention in Iraq is that he genuinely, truly believed that it was the right thing to do, his failure not being hypocrisy but rather an egotistical belief that the facts should adapt themselves to his gut feelings. Perhaps Cameron, too, is possessed of a genuine and fervent belief that bombing Syria is the correct course of action; but if so, what a terrible indictment of Britain that a man who graduated from its finest university and now resides in 10 Downing Street is unable to articulate or explain his belief to the people he is meant to represent and lead.

It’s hard to escape the notion that what Cameron is actually bowing to here is the powerful one-two punch of the domestic urge to Be Seen To Do Something, and the international need to Be Involved. The former urge is found in every political system; no matter how intelligent or advisable the “do nothing” course of action may be, conventional wisdom and opinion polls alike prefer politicians to be people of action – even if the action is awful. I compare and contrast the UK with Japan a lot in my research work, and here I’d note that in Japan, Prime Minister Abe’s policies are disliked by the majority of Japanese voters – but the same voters seem to like the fact that he’s doing something, even if they don’t like the actual thing he’s doing. Inaction earns you no brownie points, and no votes, it seems.

As to the international need to Be Involved, this is also a strong drive in some countries, but Britain suffers from it particularly; it seems intolerable to some parts of the British public, and to a much larger swathe of its political classes, for the likes of France and Australia to participate in a military operation alongside the United States while Britain abstains. Is this a legacy of empire? A deep-seated desire to confirm and reconfirm the “specialness” of the US-UK “special relationship”? It’s impossible to say for certain; perhaps a little from Column A, a little from Column B, but the effects are easy to see. Britain, which since bailing out its financial sector has been aggressively tightening the belts of all the children, disabled people, low-paid nursing staff and single mothers who caused the global financial meltdown with their wanton investments in high-risk financial instruments, is never short a few billion quid to throw at putting Union Jacks alongside the Stars and Stripes while the bombs rain down.

Britain is committed now; the first strikes on Syrian targets begin today, though one wonders how many of them will turn back, as bombing flights from some other nations have, upon finding that there isn’t anything but rubble and civilian homes left at their target coordinates to drop ordinance upon. The origins of ISIS are complex and varied – I don’t buy the simplistic account of their creation being a direct consequence of the invasion of Iraq, though that was clearly a major contributing factor. A catastrophic drought in Syria; the malign influence of Saudi Arabian wahabbism; the machinations of embattled Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who nurtured the rise of ISIS as a “common enemy” in hope of restoring Western support for his rule; the violent melting pot of the Syrian conflict itself, in which a rapid evolution towards more and more extreme, aggressive tactics occurred as more moderate leaders were killed off; all of these things have fuelled ISIS’ rise. If you want to go right back to basics, the very borders of the Middle Eastern states, drawn for the convenience of the departing Imperial powers and the puppet governments they left behind, and entirely ignoring religious and ethnic divides across the region, arguably made for a volatile group of states effectively ungovernable by anything but strongmen. The bottom line; it’s complicated, and I struggle to think of an instance in history when a complex Gordian knot of politics, economics, religion, identity and history has ever been cleanly cut by bombing it from the sky.

What, then, should Britain do? This question is the trump card of the pro-bombing argument, one that plays directly into the Be Seen To Do Something urge of the political system. If not bombing, then what? If not attacking the vicious, medieval state that is ISIS, then what would you do about them? (And it’s about here that anyone saying “maybe we shouldn’t be doing anything at all” gets called a terrorist sympathiser.)

Well, maybe Britain shouldn’t be doing anything at all. Maybe, bluntly, it’s not Britain’s place to do anything at all; maybe the share of the responsibility for the godawful mess in Syria which is borne by the UK (for some of it most certainly is) is not best assuaged with high explosives, or bullets, or terrifying close encounters with Russian jets in foreign skies. Maybe what Britain should be doing instead is helping those who need help – providing support to refugees in the region, and finding the moral courage and backbone to assist those who have come to Europe fleeing the very Islamist terror it claims to be so committed to defying. Maybe, instead of sending British bombs plummetting after the American ones already raining on Syria, Britain could do far, far more to secure itself and help the Middle East by bringing its diplomatic and economic strengths to bear – by putting actual pressure on Saudi Arabia to pick a damned side and pull its weight against ISIS; helping the embattled Kurds could be accomplished by convincing the UK’s supposed NATO ally, Turkey, to stop attacking them.

Doing these things would require a long overdue reconsideration of Britain’s role in the world, and its relationships with some deeply unsavoury countries (particularly Saudi Arabia) with which it’s altogether too cosy. Far easier, then, to Be Seen To Do Something; to be the Prime Minister who set his jaw, Took The Tough Decisions and decided to drop bombs on some people in Syria. After all, any grumbling in the media will be easily eclipsed by their ongoing hounding of Jeremy Corbyn, whose role in the vote on bombing has been discussed in far more depth than Cameron’s own. There will be a legion of armchair war experts to mumble adages about eggs and omelettes in the event of any unfortunate images of dead civilians being circulated. Finally, should this all go terribly wrong, as Iraq did, and merely spread further extremism across the region and put more lives in the UK and Europe at risk, the proponents of war can always suck at their teeth, shake their heads and wonder out loud why some Muslims are so violent. The utility calculation is a no-brainer. Cameron has Done Something, and for now, at least, he’ll be rewarded for that – even if there’s no sense or reason to what’s actually been done.

Control, Freedom and the End of China’s Boom

30/11/2015
china, economics, politics

Yesterday’s New York Times featured a well-written and quite balanced article looking back over eight years of a China-based correspondant’s experience of the country – “Notes on the China I’m Leaving Behind” (hat tip to Peng Jingchao for the link). Ignoring the uncomfortably convenient anecdote in the last paragraph, the author’s description of the evolution of Chinese society in the 21st century is one that strikes a lot of interesting notes.

I work with two fantastic researchers who are investigating the Chinese media and the systems through which control is exerted over media narratives at a state and regional level in the country. In essence, they are trying to lay bare the cogwheels and levers that the New York Times piece hints at – the mechanisms that allow the shaping of narratives and belief systems, even while encouraging the outward appearance of more freedom, more marketisation and more democracy. It’s tricky research; most of these systems are not formal or legislative, but conducted through mutual understandings, through winks and nods and carefully coded speech, and can only be uncovered by looking at the fine detail of the outcome in the form of actual reporting of events across the country’s various media outlets.

What I’ve gleaned from watching their work progress, and from talking to other researchers who engage with Chinese social media and the control of information on China’s separate, mirror-world version of the Internet, is a sense of just what an extraordinary and darkly impressive enterprise the Chinese government is presently engaged with. It is committed to market capitalism, to economic growth (at almost any cost) and to the advancement of living standards and growth of the middle class; it is also committed to keeping the Chinese Communist Party firmly in control of the nation, and as such, its objective is to decouple democracy from capitalism, severing economic freedom from political freedom. In a philosophical sense, what China is doing right now is an utter repudiation of the beliefs that underpinned the West during the Cold War; by advancing capitalism without democracy, markets without freedom, China would prove that these things were never inextricably linked, that one can happily thrive without the other.

That’s not exactly news, of course. Countries like Singapore – which, I suspect, China’s leaders have viewed as a hugely instructive model – have effectively managed to combine fantastic economic growth and high standards of living with deeply undemocratic regimes for many years. They provide just enough of the trappings of democracy to keep international relationships nice and smooth (democratic countries often make uncomfortable noises when dealing with undemocratic states) and to allow their comfortable middle classes, enjoying the benefits of economic growth, to dismiss the complaints or unrest of less-advantaged groups as mere “troublemaking”. China is this socio-political experiment writ large upon the canvas of the world’s largest state; an attempt to generalise the model successfully implemented by the ruling elites of Singapore and elsewhere upon a population of well over a billion people. Its tools in this enterprise range from the blunt force of arrested and imprisoned activists to altogether more subtle and powerful techniques of information control – through education, through media and, increasingly, through the very Internet tools that activists so often lionise as harbingers of democracy.

Buried in the New York Times article is, I think, the most important truth about this whole process – that the Chinese authorities are afraid, primarily, of one thing, namely the Chinese people. In discourses about China, at least those taking place outside China (and especially here in Japan, a country which by and large doesn’t know quite what to think of the huge, vastly important neighbour with whom it shares such a complex and contested history), there’s a tendency to emphasise China’s external relationships. A great deal of focus is placed upon territorial disputes with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines, on the curious and difficult relationship with Taiwan and on the complex, inter-dependent and occasionally belligerent jostling for power with its fellow superpower, the USA. When people talk about internal relationships in China, they talk of Tibet or the Uighur people, about the contested status of Hong Kong, or about the treatment of prominent activists like Ai Weiwei. I’m not a China specialist by trade (though as mentioned, I work with several), but I can’t help but feel that these foci miss the point; they’re chosen through the lens of what people outside China care about, and miss the reality of what people within the country, and people within the government and the CCP, care about.

I’d contend that the most important relationship within China, the one that really matters, is none of those listed above – it’s the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and the huge, burgeoning Chinese middle class. These are the people who have benefitted from China’s economic growth, who enjoy a quality of life undreamed of by their parents or grandparents and who are deeply proud of China’s rise in the world (but who also still tend to see China as being bullied, disrespected or put down by powerful rivals like the USA and Japan). They are also a generation far more educated than their parents’ generation, far more exposed to global influences – and thus far less likely to accept the “elites know best”, top-down rule of the CCP. If the CCP ever loses power, it will not be because of Tibetans, Uighurs, human rights activists or interventions from its neighbours; it be because the Chinese middle class demands democracy en masse, either violently or otherwise.

Right now, that isn’t happening. The majority of the China experts I speak to see no deep wellspring of democratic sentiment, no silent majority wishing for democratic freedom. They see a middle class that’s far more interested in its freedom to consume than in its freedom to vote; a population lifted in the space of a single generation from rural poverty to urban comfort. They have flat-screen TVs, smartphones, cars; they take holidays abroad, eat well, often consuming exotic food their parents would never have tasted, buy consumer goods and electronics, and each year sees an incremental increase in quality of living which, in almost any country you care to mention, easily quenches any thirst for democratic freedom. When life is so materially better today than it was ten years ago, why risk it all by speaking out for something so abstract, so removed from your own daily existence, as democracy?

Why, then, are China’s elites afraid? Because sustaining power through economic growth can’t be done indefinitely. Economies slow down or go into recession, and the meteoric growth of a country transitioning from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, high-tech economy is largely an exercise in picking low-hanging fruit. Giving apartments, cars and TVs to a billion people who didn’t have them before is pretty heady stuff, economically, but as the rest of the developed world has been discovering for the past decade or more, eking out growth becomes a hell of a lot harder once all that low-hanging fruit is picked. China, too, is slowing down; it has announced much lower growth numbers over the past year than in previous years, and many good economists even question those numbers, suspecting that the figures are being artifically inflated to keep things looking good. If growth stalls or, worse, starts to go backwards, it will create two major sources of unrest within China – firstly, those still in poverty who have been anticipating that economic growth will reach them eventually, but now fear that they have ended up on the wrong side of a permanent socio-economic cleavage within the country; and secondly, the new middle classes, who have become accustomed to rapid improvements in their quality of living and now find this movement stalled. Oddly, history shows that it could be the second group who are most dangerous to China’s authorities; a concept called “revolution of rising expectations” emerged in the 1950s (though Alexis de Tocqueville had explored similar ideas as far back as the mid-1800s) which showed empirically that it’s not the impoverished and hopeless who rebel against governments, it’s the segments of society that have seen rising standards of living and abruptly find their raised expectations unfulfilled.

It is inevitable that this will happen in China – which is why the authorities are so determined to explore every other avenue of control available to them, before the economic honeymoon period comes to an end. This is the most powerful and important motivator of the behaviour of the Chinese state right now, and I don’t think it’s extreme to say that almost every single action taken by the Chinese state can be read and understood in the context of this desire to control its own middle class. Its international disputes – over mere rocks and reefs in the South and East China Seas – are often explored in economic or military terms, but are arguably far more important in internal propaganda terms, by setting up minor conflicts with Japan, America and their allies which can be easily exploited for nationalist propaganda purposes. The suppression of activists and the international condemnation it attracts is played as the cultural imperialism of the West directed against China and its system of values. Trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership are presented (not entirely unfairly) as evidence of China’s rivals trying to contain its economic growth; and of course, historic disputes with Japan, over everything from Nanjing to Yasukuni and back again, are used to stoke nationalist sentiments and give the Chinese people a sense of facing a common enemy (a strategy which Japan’s own hapless nationalists fall over themselves to enable, over and over again, like particularly unintelligent dogs in a Pavlovian experiment).

Not everything that the Chinese authorities are doing to secure their position in the post-boom years is bad, of course. The country’s economic growth has vastly improved the standards of living of hundreds of millions of people. The nation’s lack of democracy shouldn’t disguise its extraordinary achievements; the sheer number of people who have jumped in single generation from village peasant lives barely changed since medieval times to being urban, college-educated professionals is staggering and hugely impressive. Nothing has moved the needle on the world’s problems with poverty in the past decade as much as China’s advancement. Under Xi Jinping, the country has also started to tackle the political corruption that was endemic at local levels, an effort largely designed to stamp out a likely source of future unrest in the Chinese people.

It’s anyone’s guess whether any of this – the information control, the stoking of nationalist fires, the careful shrouding of the harsh machinery of totalitarianism in the soft language of democracy and freedom, or even the laudable crackdown on corruption – will count for anything when China’s economic growth finally stalls badly enough for its middle classes to feel the pinch. But this is the context in which we need to read what’s happening in China today. The authorities know that the stability and security of their position has enjoyed a blessed existence under the protection of the country’s economic growth, but they see the end of that protection in sight. Extending economic growth is a priority, of course, but building the structures that will protect their position in a post-growth world is the motivation that drives China’s authorities today – and this is the only analytical lens that makes sense of the country’s actions towards its neighbours, its trading partners and its own people.

Praying for Paris; Fearing for the Future

14/11/2015
politics

Waking up to the horrific news coming out of Paris – as yet formless and confused – and watching it coalesce and take dreadful shape over the course of the day has been a grim and unsettling experience. There is a horrible deja vu; the gunfire, the police on the streets. Paris, cradle of civilisation, of culture, of democracy, under attack from forces of barbarism and darkness who strike not so much at the people of the city (though this they also do, lethally and tragically) as at its soul – at its cosmopolitanism, its liberalism, its decency and its tolerance. 

All of those things are going to be sorely tested in the weeks and months to come. Overclouding the gut-wrenching sense of empathy for those murdered and their families, and for a city stricken (a feeling I recall well from the London bombings a little over 10 years ago) is a hollow sense of fear for what this means. For what’s going to happen next. 

I don’t know who perpetrated the Paris attacks. Nor do you, no matter how strongly held your beliefs may be. We’ll probably find out in due course how this atrocity was inspired, planned and executed, but our shared ignorance hasn’t stopped plenty of people from taking to social media (or worse, TV and newspapers) to deliver the stirring verdict that best fits their favoured prejudices and world views. The briefest flick through social media today is tremendously depressing; outnumbering the messages of sadness and condolence, it seems, are those blaming either ISIS, Refugees, Muslims, or all three of the above – and demanding awful revenge against their chosen targets. 

Maybe ISIS was involved – I don’t know, and not do you, but it’s worth noting that despite media-induced fear, ISIS has never before shown any inclination to engage in international terrorism, being content to confine its special brand of hellish evil to its own “state” in the shellshocked remains of Iraq and Syria. Perhaps some terrorists smuggled themselves in among refugees; I don’t know and nor do you, but every shred of evidence for this popular xenophobic meme thus far has been proven to be a laughable hoax, and the refugees themselves are risking everything to flee Islamist violence, not to incite it. As to “Muslims” being to blame; sure, maybe that’s so, but only if you’ll also accept that “Catholics” were responsible for all IRA bombings, that “Christians” bear the burden of all Klu Klux Klan murders and that “Buddhists” need to shoulder the blame for the indiscriminate slaughter of the Rohingya people. Hell, let’s pin Stalin’s purges and the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields on “Atheists” while we’re at it?

One thing I do know about these attacks is that they shared a common objective with every terrorist attack; to provoke, to outrage and to drive a wedge between sectors of a society. Assuming this is an Islamist attack – home-grown or international – it is inspired by a belief that Muslims cannot and must not live within the rules of a secular society, and a willingness to attack that society and destroy its harmony in order to make that awful belief into a reality. 

The fear hollowing out my heart today is that it’s going to work; we will give these evil bastards everything they want, because their attacks will push us where we are weakest. European Muslims, many of them resident for generations, will be attacked and further marginalised (turning the more volatile among them towards the arms of jihadis, just as incidents like Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland sent countless new recruits to the IRA; but hey, who needs real, sustainable security when you can have misdirected revenge and self-righteousness instead?). Refugees fleeing Islamist violence – whose plight we should understand better than ever today – will see doors slammed even more firmly in their faces. Cosmopolitanism, the greatest threat to fundamentalism and violent ideology ever devised, will see a sunset as voices entreating for engagement, for compassion and for the upholding of European values in the face of evil are held in contempt as “soft”, as “appeasers”, as “friends of the terrorists”. It happens already – a standard part of the US political narrative, a common line of attack on the UK’s left wing – it will happen even more often in the weeks to come. 

These battles will have to be fought; evil has struck once again at Europe’s soul, and we must now contend with those who would respond by ripping out that soul entirely and replacing it with a heart of tin. But not today. Please, not today. Save your blame for when we know who to blame; save your hate for tomorrow, and express instead your love and sorrow to the people of Paris today. I’m very afraid of what happens next; but I know that what needs to happen now is love, support and space for grief. 

Cries of “Misandry!” didn’t sink Himozairu

28/10/2015
gender, japan, politics

Acclaimed manga author Akiko Higashimura (famous for Kuragehime, or Jellyfish Princess, a series about female otaku) this week cancelled her latest series, Himozairu, after just two chapters, following an online outcry. The publisher, Kodansha (it was being serialised in their Morning magazine) announced the author’s decision on their website, noting that it was in response to various feedback received over social media.

There was some discussion over what had happened in the Japanese language press – here’s the Asahi Shimbun, Jiji Press, Mainichi Shimbun (all traditional news providers), Blogos and NicoNicoNews (portal news sites), and Joshi-Spa and Cyzo Woman (online women’s magazines). Some TV news sites devoted short segments to getting talking heads to give their views on the manga and its cancellation. It was all fairly civil, low-level stuff – there’s certainly no indication in these accounts or on Higashimura’s own Twitter account to suggest that she was facing some awful, GamerGate-esque campaign of hatred (though don’t get me wrong, those things do happen in Japan and they’re spectacularly horrible).

Then the Asahi Shimbun translated its story into English, and it spread from there to fansites (here’s AnimeNewsNetwork’s take) and eventually to the mainstream media (here’s the Washington Post). The narrative as it’s reached the Washington Post, and hence a wider audience, is that Kodansha and/or Higashimura have been forced to pull the series due to a “torrent of criticism” from people who think the comic is “demeaning to men” because it shows them “doing laundry, cooking and washing dishes” – and that suggesting that men should learn domestic skills in Japan is “close to sacreligious”. The Post concludes that in Japan, “there’s no room for women to even dream about a world where men might whip up dinner and pick up their own socks.”

Those of you who read Japanese might now find it interesting to flick through the links provided above and contrast the tone and content of the Japanese articles with that of the Washington Post piece. The Post’s narrative is that this is a backlash from the patriarchy to the mere suggestion of men doing housework; Post writer Anna Fifield links the manga’s message to the likes of Sheryl Sandberg and Anne-Marie Slaughter and accuses the manga’s critics of rallying to a call of “misandry!”. It’s a strong message, not least because it fits so neatly with the established narrative; we know that Japan is a sexist place that’s far behind other developed countries in its treatment of women and in the workplace opportunities which they are offered. We know that career women in Japan are criticised for failing to have babies and stay at home to look after them, and that women who do have babies are forced out of their workplaces. Fifield’s account in the Post fits that narrative neatly and gives us something straightforward to feel outraged about for a few minutes of our coffee break.

Yet in the original Japanese news coverage, the story is quite different. Sure, the Asahi piece notes that critics disliked the manga for “putting down her male assistants” (“mocking” or “looking down on” might also be reasonable translations), though I note that the “and other men” part added to the English translation of the piece is not in the Japanese original. Other stories give lots more context to the criticism, though. Jiji Press cites a critic saying that the manga “doesn’t show consideration for house husbands” (literally, men engaged in work in the home). The Blogos piece notes, alongside a sense that the manga ungently mocks its subjects, criticism of the manga’s conflation of “himo” (parasitical men who live off their spouse’s earnings) and “house husbands”. The Joshi-Spa piece accuses the manga of looking down on unmarried women and house-husbands alike. Only the Cyzo Woman piece implies that the gender-related nature of the manga earned it unwarranted bashing, suggesting that Kodansha’s staff should have realised it wasn’t suitable for free publication online (make what you will of that – I think it’s rather condescending, personally).

So which is it? Did Himozairu fall to a hate campaign by thin-skinned men horrified at this assault on traditional gender roles? Or, on the contrary, did critics who disliked its very support for traditional gender roles and mocking of men who fall outside those roles derail it by convincing the author she had made an error in her depiction?

Though it’ll be hard to say for sure until such time as Higashimura makes a further statement on her decision to suspend publication, I lean towards the latter interpretation. Firstly, because the former interpretation seems to have crept in when a (dubiously translated) Asahi Shimbun article was picked up and spun into quite a different narrative by the Washington Post, seemingly without reference to any other original sources (seriously, the WaPost story cites the translated Asahi story and the AnimeNewsNetwork story, which itself solely cites the translated Asahi story, and not a single other source – I found the seven articles above in under five minutes on Google!). Secondly, because the content of the manga itself is genuinely uncomfortable not from a weird Men’s Rights Activist perspective but from a progressive perspective. Its essential contention is that “loser” men who are no good at getting ahead in “proper” careers should learn household skills in order to attract a career woman who’ll marry them as a “kept man”. This is incredibly problematic; it implies, all at once, that only “loser” men should do household work; that house husbands are men who have failed at other things; and that the relationship between a career woman and a house-husband is an unequal, “kept man” situation. Looked at from another angle, it’s also not saying anything progressive or praiseworthy about women who become housewives and their relationships with their husbands.

Honestly, the problems with this manga start from the word “himo” itself, which the Washington Post gently translates as “string”, implying that it refers to a man who lives off his wife’s purse strings. It’s got far more negative connotations than that; it also means “leash”, for a start (and the manga refers to women who marry “himo” men as their “owner”), and more troublingly means “pimp”, in the sense of a man who lives off a woman’s (immoral) earnings. It’s a term utterly steeped in regressive, traditional and unpleasant gender connotations. Perhaps Higashimura intended to challenge those connotations and reclaim the term; if so, she went about it entirely the wrong way, starting from the very moment when she described (in the pitch line for the manga!) her “training” for housework and chores as being aimed at “men who have dreams, but have no money, no job, no popularity and no style”.

Japan has huge problems with gender; roles are traditionally constructed and strongly socially enforced, which contributes to a lack of opportunity for women (slowly but surely being overturned by a combination of policy and economic reality) and a relentlessly sexist media environment, not to mention being a major factor, I believe, in both the low birth rate and the high suicide rate (especially among men). There is, however, progress occurring, both on a policy level (criticise Shinzo Abe’s motivation for Womenomics all you like; the policies are real and they’re slowly, all too slowly, starting to move previously intractable business culture in a good direction) and on a cultural level (the outcry over sexist heckling in the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly about a year ago would probably never have happened in the recent past, because nobody would have thought it untoward). It’s important that we don’t try to pigeonhole gender issue related news events into our own pre-selected narrative for convenience, because doing so risks missing the important detail of the picture. In the case of Himozairu, my sense of what has happened is not that the patriarchy has lashed out and silenced a woman’s voice, but that a very talented young author has reconsidered her stance on an issue of gender following progressive criticism. If so, it’s a good thing – and I for one would love to see Higashimura return to the issue in future with a more thoughtful approach.