Is My Mother a Nationalist?

Yesterday my mother told me that she dislikes China and North Korea. Her statement surfaced against a backdrop of the radio news about North Korea’s nuclear activities. She added that she doesn’t want to buy products made in China and criticized her relatives who have bought Chinese pumpkins. (My mother is obsessed with quality products. She seems to believe that the made-in-Japan are always the best.) When I asked her why she doesn’t like China, she expressed her disdain for the recent violent anti-Japanese protests.

Coincidentally, while I was writing my blog last night, my father was watching a TV show (called “TV Tackle”) hosted by the well-known film director Takeshi Kitano. This week’s topic for the show was about Japan’s war responsibility. A Chinese professor and a German (I couldn’t catch his occupation) who live in Japan were debating with a Japanese politician and a professor. They exchanged fierce arguments and assertions regarding history textbooks in Japan and China, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki vis-à-vis other war crimes, differences/similarities between Germany and Japan in terms of war responsibility, apologies offered in the past by Japanese prime ministers to Asian peoples, etc.

One of the Japanese said that Germany and Japan are different because while Germans were able to attribute war responsibility entirely to Nazis and move on (which I think is a totally inaccurate description of the postwar German history), Japanese were not “lucky” enough to enjoy such a clear-cut recourse. To turn his assertion against itself, however, Japanese could have simply condemned the emperor for the war. But they didn’t, and none of the guests on the TV show mentioned the emperor in discussing responsibility for WWII. In a sense, the emperor in the Japanese public discourse of war responsibility is the Barthesian “zero signifier” that structures a given discursive economy through its absence or the Lacanian Real that frames the Symbolic through its absolute resistance to symbolization.

Anyway, I went to F Junior-High School today and met with the principal Mr. S. I also discussed logistics of my research activities with Mr. I who took responsibility for coordinating my research with the school schedule. We decided that next Monday I should introduce myself to students and teachers at a school assembly as well as at a stuff meeting.

Tomorrow I will visit a board of education and try to make arrangements that allow me to use two educational research facilities in the city. (One of the facilities houses videotapes of classroom activities that the city has complied over years.)