I am starting a blog for the “Social Movements in Postwar Japan” class now, so that our guest speakers and others could see how this class is going throughout the quarter.
March 31, 2007
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Celebrating Protest
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Hello all,
I just saw an article in Chicago Free Press (distributed in bookstores etc.) “Harris’ civil unions bill passes committee vote in Springfield”–Illinois might become the fifth state in the union to legalize civil unions for gay and lesbian couples.
Just for your interest/info.
Comment by norikoy — April 1, 2007 @ 7:21 pm |
As Noriko delivers good news, I have disturbingly bad news. You may have already seen this, but the NYTimes reports that Japanese textbooks are taking another step in revising its history.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/world/asia/01japan.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Comment by makiko — April 2, 2007 @ 2:31 am |
And here’s a big article on the historian who produced archival documentation about the Japanese military’s involvement in the comfort women/military sex slave issue (I use both terms because I have to ask myself what the women themselves prefer to be called–not that I assume they have a uniform opinion)–
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/31/world/asia/31yoshimi.html
Comment by normajeanne — April 2, 2007 @ 4:18 am |
Hello, all–Like many of you, I’ve been thinking about the experience of having Nori visit us.
I’m still overwhelmed. There is so much to sort out.
Here are some of the things running through my mind:
Well, all of them circle around what feels like an encounter with history: something terrifying was triggered in Japanese society as the hostages came home, and they were subjected to an experience that by all accounts seems to have been more traumatic than the original captivity–or at any rate, overshadowed it.
I think about how easy it is in the US, and in some ways, in Japan, too, to psychologize and medicalize it (PTSD), and I have about three impulses–to politicize this act–i.e., to pursue the sociopolitical strains that can inform PTSD; to try to understand the psychological burdens of this episode better; and to resist psychologization/medicalization altogether, and to see how singular an event combining identifiable historical and contemporary factors this was.
Another tension is the wish not to make Nori a “case.” I never want to reduce anyone to that, and yet we tacitly or actively do so in so much academic work–or perhaps in our everyday lives. But to try to understand someone–including ourselves–is surely to grapple with the structural factors informing us, making us the individuals we are.
Is there a way to write and speak so that we can properly respect both the particular and the structural–to try to grapple with a person or event as fully as possible, to be as respectful as possible to a person who has been willing to risk sharing difficult life stories with us–by understanding him as carefully as we can?
I think my syntax is falling apart.
Good night, everybody. Good morning, Nori.
Thank you all for being part of this exploration.
Norma(jeanne)
Comment by normajeanne — April 2, 2007 @ 4:31 am |