japanamania: permutations of us and them

Last weekend my roommate had a little party, spur of the moment, for a friend that was getting married, also on the spur of the moment. I stopped in on the roof, where his chic Japanese-style room is, to check it out when I got home. The guest of honor had not yet arrived; I was given to understand he was still pacifying the kinfolk. Medium-loud Brazilian music was playing on the stereo, and there were a couple of Brazilians dancing crazy in the corner (I like the music but I can’t catch the crazy in it, and tend to be in awe of, and to stare at the bare midriffs of, those who can). Among other guests was one guy I responded to in Chinese who turned out, hours later, to be Japanese (oops); two rosy-cheeked boys who had just bought a repossessed office for about two and a half songs in the busy Taipei train station district and were living and working there, in the process of opening “a business” which would be in the area of “trade: we’ll go out and find things, and buy them, and then sell them to other people;” a tall skinny guy working for a Japanese company and ragging on the Japanese for thinking that spending more time at the office made them seem more industrious even though in his opinion they were not very efficient,[1] but who positively bowed when he left a little while later (the normal Taiwanese way is more a kind of apologetic shrugging and bobbing of the head); and a goateed and bespectacled man of around forty who gave the most common response to my statement that I was studying Taiwan: a disbelieving “What’s interesting about Taiwan?”

Don’t be so self-deprecating! I joked. “It’s not self-deprecation,” Skinny corrected me, “it’s modesty.” Meantime Goatee was thinking. No, he said, slowly, actually Taiwan is pretty interesting. I can see it. For instance, in Taiwan you have this interesting phenomenon, this very strange phenomenon, where a bunch of people—say maybe 70% of the people—want to be Japanese. They just want to turn into Japanese. But then there is another group of people—say around 30%—who absolutely with all their hearts hate the Japanese. So isn’t that an interesting thing? Here you have a group of people who want to be what the other group of people hates.

Already in Nanjing, a long time ago, a bunch of us had noticed the 70/30 split phenomenon. Our teachers (professors at Nanjing University) taught us things like: we used to say that Chiang Kai-shek was 70% bad and 30% good; but now some people are starting to revise their opinions and say that he was 30% bad and 70% good. And, we used to say that Mao Zedong was 100% good, and then many people said that he was 70% good and 30% bad; but now some people are revising their opinions and saying that he was 30% good and 70% bad. Having heard it a couple of times in class, we started realizing that we were hearing it all over the place: something was 70% savory and 30% sweet; the people of some nation were 70% bastards and 30% decent. For some reason, anything that didn’t have actual proportions attached to it could always be reproportioned 70% : 30%, especially if the object were values or other non-percentilizable things. I’ve found this to be a pretty robust trend across both the mainland and Taiwan, though it seems to come up less here, and I felt a moment of delighted recognition when Goatee came out with it. Especially since it doesn’t correspond to the ethnic makeup of the population, which is usually quoted as from 16% to at most 20% mainlander, 80% to 84% Taiwanese, and 2% aborigine (which people tend to forget about).[2] And yet somehow I suspected that this was, at least to some extent, what he was talking about.

There was probably a more clever way to ask what he meant than by making myself feel like a racist, but none occurred to me right away, so I asked, with a shy duck of the head, if he was ‘this-province registered’ or ‘other-province registered’—that is, if he was Taiwanese or mainlander.[3] He answered, with unusual coyness, “I myself am Taiwanese [this-province registered], because I was born in Taipei.”[4] Well, I thought, that’s very Gricean of you.

As far as I know the census no longer distinguishes on the basis of this-province and other-province ji—at least the statistics published by Taipei city don’t. But in everyday conversation, people whose paternal ancestors (or who themselves) came from the mainland after retrocession (1945) are mainlanders; while those whose paternal ancestors came from the mainland before that, and stayed, are Taiwanese (very few people came from the mainland during the Japanese colonial era, 1895-1945, so it usually is paternal ancestors and not selves).[5] Nobody who was categorized as Taiwanese in common parlance would give such a precise delimitation of their ji, so, like a good racist, I prodded him: and, where was your father born? And his father? Turns out his paternal grandfather[6] is from Liaoning, one of the northeast Chinese provinces that was occupied by Japan before the second world war.

At this point Skinny, who had been standing along with us, interposed to explain to me, first in English and then in Chinese, that “Taiwan has a lot of different ethnicities and so it is very complicated. The biggest problem on Taiwan is national identity.” He sounded like he had memorized something from his textbook, which, given that he had been a political science major, he very well might have. However, it came out his paternal grandfather was also from the Japanese-occupied northeast part of the mainland, so it may have been more heartfelt than it sounded.

Someone coming from the Chinese northeast in the middle of the last century—in the case of Goatee’s grandfather, someone running from it while conscripted into the KMT army—would have pretty good reasons to not like the Japanese.[7] And in fact tensions over the status of the Japanese are widely held to have contributed to the mutual mistrust of mainlanders and Taiwanese after retrocession. For Goatee it seems to still be a source of tension, though a minor one: he said he’d recently talked to someone who had insisted that the Japanese invasion of China was justified. (I’m not sure if he was talking about the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, or the 1937 invasion of Shanghai and points west. Neither of them sounds very nice, but the second one was famously brutal, rape and murder and flaying and so on.) It wasn’t someone old enough to have been educated under Japanese colonialism; it was someone Goatee’s own age who’d read a history book published in Japan, which surprised me.

When I first came to Taiwan, I was struck by the multiplicity of opinions I heard here. People you didn’t know at all would tell you their views on whatever—politics, culture, whatever you happened to stumble upon—and there seemed to be a great variety of them. Big change from my experience on the mainland, which was a constant rerun of the same conversation in two lines: party line and anti-party line. (There are many reasons for this, I’m sure, among which are not only lack of access to alternatively viewpointed media but also my sucky Chinese at the time, and the fact that I was having mostly run-in conversations with strangers rather than long-term conversations with friends.) That feeling decreased with increased familiarity; there will always be a limited number of positions out there for people to choose from, and it doesn’t take long before you start to get a sense of the range.

I’ve never before heard anyone enter the topic of ethnic difference via conflicting attitudes toward Japaneseness; but the lights in that circuit started flashing as soon as he started talking. Maybe it’s exactly when someone sets off a known circuit from a new plug that you become aware of the way that the lights flash, the sequence of it and the way one word or topic leads naturally into some particular other.[8] The way that a division of the people on Taiwan into some percent who feel X and some percent who feel Y will always at least potentially suggest ethnic difference—and in a few minutes, Goatee was talking about a fight he’d had with his wife over the proper way to say “boiled meat dumplings” when calling their daughter to dinner. Where he comes from (a military village whose adults, when he was growing up there, were born on the mainland) it’s jiaozi (dumpling + nominalizer); but for “you Taiwanese” it’s shuijiao (water + dumpling). “But we can’t fight about it all night, we’d starve to death; and besides we don’t like our daughter to see us fighting.” The way that the mention of any kind of identity issue will potentially suggest the issue of independence versus unification—and a few minutes later, Goatee was talking about how lame the current presidential party is for always yelling about independence but never presenting a viable plan for it. “If you gave me a plan, I would consider it, I’m not dead set against independence. But you can’t constantly be using the issue for your own political gain and never give us a realistic way of doing it.” And the way that a discussion of ethnic differences and national identity problems often (though somewhat less predictably) ends in the assertion that all these things are figments “fried” or “stirred up” by politicians every time there’s an election, just to get votes: “I hate elections.”

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[1] I did not mention that at least the statistics that everyone here quotes have the Taiwanese spending more time in the office than any other nationality on earth. I also didn’t bother to describe my one experience working for a private Taiwanese company, which was when I helped edit an English-Chinese dictionary for one of the major publishers here. This was the state of the dictionary when I got there: they had gone out and compiled all the entries from all the English-Chinese dictionaries they could find. Then the project head, who speaks pretty decent English, went through and edited what she could, eliminating some of the more outrageous entries. Then her boss (who speaks pretty terrible English despite having a master's degree from some US university) wanted to publish it. After a protracted lobbying period, the project head convinced her boss—the son of the company’s founder and its current C Something O—that they really should get a native English speaker to look the thing over before going to press, and they really should include something to give some indication of the circumstances under which different words should be used (the boss was dead set against giving example sentences: they take up too much time, money, and space). Her boss finally found an American girl he knew, who went through and edited the whole thing. The project head looked it over and felt that the girl had not done very much editing, so she introduced two Americans—a former student of hers and me (a student of her friend’s)—to her boss and asked if we could look it over again. She had been right: the other girl had barely corrected any mistakes and had even added some of her own. So then this guy and I each spent a couple of months editing it and providing usage ‘hints’ (using, it turned out, completely different standards). And then, as far as I know, it was published. So the thing went through at least four different total edits, each one with its own, articulated or unarticulated, approach, and each one using different, more or less equally unqualified, people; which is pretty much all I can say about efficiency. Although I should also say that I’m very grateful for this inefficiency: there are, it turns out, few more pleasant ways to spend Sunday mornings than having brunch in Jennifer’s bar and correcting dictionary proofs. Getting drawn into this sort of thing is a consolation for being a short, dark-haired foreigner; if you are tall and blonde you eventually end up on TV.

[2] Caveat: this "usually" is based on my vague sense of what people say (and people do not use percentages very frequently) and what I’ve seen written.

[3] 本省籍 benshengji and 外省籍 waishengji. 籍 ji, location of one’s family or ancestral household registration (as well as record, census registration). I may be wrong but I have the impression that, especially in the case of this-province/other-province or other potentially tense ethno-national situations, using ‘ji’ is a little more PC than saying 人 ren, person.

[4] “我自己是本省籍, 因為我在台北出生.”

[5] There are some confusing cases like my friend’s mom who grew up in a Taiwanese immigrant community in Malaysia and came to Taiwan after the war; the fact that she grew up speaking Taiwanese seems to push her into the this-province category.

[6] Several this-province ji people have told me that only other-province ji people regularly use the kinship terms that distinguish maternal from paternal grandparents. In Mandarin it’s 爺爺yeye and奶奶 nainai, specialized terms, for father’s father and mother; and外公 waigong and外婆 waipo, outside-(kin-)man and outside-(kin-)woman, for mother’s father and mother. In Taiwanese it’s ah-gong and ah-ma, nickname-form + (kin-)man and nickname-form + mom, for both sides; people I know tend to refer to their grandparents in these terms even when speaking Mandarin, regardless of what ji they themselves are.

[7] Can you say that on the radio?

[8] Or when you learn that something you thought was an off-the-wall comment was actually part of a circuit, like, for me, George Bush’s apparently whacko insistence, in the second debate, that he would not nominate a judge who would support the Dred Scott decision, which I later learned was not whacko at all.