The Realm Of The Senseless

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,,
It is probably a bad idea for the Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan to make available its in-house magazine. Persons such as yours truly can read articles like this one printed therein.

An editor, and you would think the FCCJ would have one, would normally send the piece back to the author on fire with the warning, "Contextualize this stuff, or every woman or Japanese member of the club will be chewing our arses off."

The publication of this set of anecdotes, rather than causing an explosion, as it likely will, would serve better as an introduction to a suppressed discussion of media and knowledge-industry colonialization of postwar Japan -- where what were by local standards insanely well paid Caucasian, mostly American, males, both straight and gay, found in the defeated nation a sexual playground, one that seemed a world away from their crabbed and intolerant hometowns. That ex-pat spouses, for economic but also racial reasons, could be complicit in the dominance relationship ("Our is cuter"? "Ours" - possessive pronoun article?!? "OURS"?) is staggering, seen from the present day.

That much of the foundation of what is known about Japan was laid down by persons enjoying vastly greater incomes and personal freedom, particularly in the sexual realm, than the persons whom they reported on and studied is a fact of life -- but not necessarily a fatal flaw. Anthropology would not exist as a discipline if inequalities in income and freedom were criteria for exclusion of research done.

However, to deny that reporting and writing about Japan is not haunted by the ghosts of sexual inequalities past would be idiotic. That is why seeing the names of so many women -- Yuka Hayashi, Isabel Reynolds, Linda Sieg, Sachiko Sakamaki, Lucy Craft, Anna Kitanaka, Michiyo Nakamoto, Hiroko Tabuchi -- on the front lines of reporting on Japan is such a heartening development.

Because there are still a lot of very confused folks out there.

And yes, I know "colonialization" is not a real word.