Scary Go Round always has the best written dialect.
Voices from China’s Past: Zhang Banglin on Manchu Assimilation by Jeremiah has some personal relevance to me. Reading articles like these makes me very happy to see the direction my field is going. One of the things that always bothered me about my classes at Rice was the classical Sinological “world apart” argument: “China (the East in general) does not conform to your puny Western views of societal development. ” When has a conquering class ever willing abandoned its own traditions/conformed to the standards of the conquered without an ulterior motive in mind? You see a lot of wish fulfillment and self-legitimizing by Chinese and Western scholars alike on this issue. At least, you used to see it.
Style Deficit (Dis)order by W. David Marx is another great article in the same vein. When has a country that places so much value in commercialism and groupthink, haunted by the specter of immobile hierarchical relationships, ever spontaneously produced “grass-roots democracy, consumer-driven markets, an almost anarcho-syndicalist model of opinion leadership?” The wish fulfillment here, I believe, comes from the masochistic desires of outsiders to find real counterculture in Japan. My opinion: they are about 50 years too late. “The failure of counterculture and the student movement was a huge disappointment to the older generation, and they raised their children to believe that ideology cannot change anything.”
Yomiuri piece on the Bank of Japan Governor debacle is dead wrong: Here is the church, here is the steeple, openitupandhere’salltheWISH FULFILLMENT. The Bank of Japan….does not control the world economy. It… has not been handed control of the world economy. If I’m wrong on this…well I should have probably taken an Econ class at Rice then.
Offending nationalist sensibilities?: Can’t stop won’t stop on the Wish Fulfillment tip. A “black van moment” is a reference to the soundtrucks and black vans that run around Tokeeoh blasting nationalist slogans and eery military marches when I’m eating my box lunches. This is a comment made for the express purpose of appeasing constituents. I understand this. I’m more interested in the wish fulfillment undertones of the Japanese ultraright – the united land of JapanDaiNipponLandofBountifulRiceStalks is and has always been the best place on Izanami’s green earth, and if all these other countries would stop being better than us at quite a lot of things, we’d finally be able to get something done.
You’re right about the Bank of Japan. Still, an econ class might be fun