I can tell you what else I have written in the meantime (Lu Xinghua, assassination politics, Xinjiang film)
[I appreciate paid subscriptions. They mean a lot to me. But this venture is still in the red. It serves as an outlet for what work that is experimental, personal, or completely unmarketable. It produces only indirectly, by serving as a sketchpad, work that can be invoiced. This is a look at some of what I have written in the past month or so.]
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YAMAGAMI TETSUYA’S REVENGE ||| PALLADIUM
I know I’ve said this elsewhere, but it’s been a strange phenomenon to experience the assassination of the former Prime Minister from Japan, while also being exposed to the discourse around the topic from English-language media. Foreign commentators seemed much more passionate. In the hours before their attention was captured by something else, they informed their readers about the accomplishments of Abe Shinzo, the great friend of America. He was the “visionary architect of a vital security alliance,” David Frum told Atlantic readers. Meanwhile, in Japan, it seemed far less important. Despite Abe being the most successful politician in postwar history, he was not beloved. His promises of reviving the Japanese economy were mostly a fiction. He had failed to deliver, too, on the promises made about amendments to the postwar constitution, delivered at gunpoint by the United States.
After the upper house election two days later, news finally broke in the local media that the shooter was upset about Abe’s ties to the Unification Church (now known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification). This broke the taboo. The Communist Party’s Akahata had previously been the only old media outlet to report on LDP-Unification Church links, but now they were joined by everyone else. All of this excavation of Abe and the LDP’s history helped to open up contention over the state funeral. Those were bigger stories than the shooting itself.
I was fascinated, too, by the legendary status granted Yamagami Tetsuya. There are plenty of spree killers and misanthropes taking revenge against society, but they never seem to occasion much celebration. Yamagami didn’t kill any children, though. He didn’t stab commuters. He took a shot at a powerful man with a security detail. It was excusable, if not justified, let’s say, if I could sum up a certain segment of public opinion. I am talking about the people that have flooded the detention facility with gifts. I am talking about the people that have signed petitions for leniency.
It was cathartic. That’s about it. It didn’t mean much. It didn’t change anything for anyone in this country. The rules brought in to control the Unification Church are weak. Nobody that resigned will face more severe punishment than temporary public shame.
I went to Nara. I tried to get a feel for Yamagami, as best as I could. I read all of the interviews with family members.
And, finally, I wrote something that is not really about Yamagami, exactly, and not about the discourse around the assassination. It has a different thesis, that there's a postwar order that has decayed and been reconfigured and undermined, but which seems immoveable, and little is possible without toppling or completely subverting it—and Yamagami did not dent it, but he pointed at the force that might be capable of striking a critical blow, which is the the new religious movements. The Unification Church can’t be among them; it belongs to the postwar order, and its durability has been compromised by the scandal around LDP links. But the blending of politics and religion is powerful.
The LDP already rules in coalition with another wealthy and powerful new religious movement, in the form of Soka Gakkai’s allied Komeito. It remains to be seen whether they will be a transformative force, but the future belongs to groups like them, I believe.
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THE WORLD ACCORDING TO LU XINGHUA, CHINA’S RENEGADE PHILOSOPHER ||| THE CHINA PROJECT
I would like to say something, first, which is not about this piece.
Late last year, the China Project (formerly SupChina) was being smeared by American and Australian think tankers and journalists as a pro-China outlet. It was ridiculous. And it came within months of Chinese outlets attacking it for being anti-China. I don’t think much of the idea that good writing should enrage both sides of a particular debate, but, here, there is not really a debate taking place, and we’re not talking about a particular piece of writing. The virtue of the China Project exposed here is that it will host thoughtful writing on nearly any topic, with any ideological bent.
I have pitched Anthony Tao, Kaiser Kuo, and Jeremy Goldkorn on pieces that would not find a home anywhere else. Outside of specialty fertilizer industry journals, there is nowhere else to sell a piece on Chinese potash mines in Laos. I think it’s a story worthy of analysis, however. They agreed. There is nobody else I could convince to run an obituary of Er Housheng, an itinerant errenzhuan singer who had his eyes gouged out for messing with the wrong woman (I never got paid for this because I was too ashamed to submit an invoice for something that I’m sure has the most limited audience).
I think of this piece on Lu Xinghua as being of a series with the article on Liu Zhongjing (although it was quite popular and got translated into Chinese by his fans, who praised my grasp of the scene or accused me of being a self-hating overseas Chinese liberal [they guessed my surname must be a transliteration of Jīn 金, much as 4Chan commenters once accused me of being Jewish for my middle name], I am a bit embarrassed by this article, since it is forced to draw a parallel between Liu and incompatible figures), another fringe intellectual, but also being a sequel to the Er Housheng piece, since it covers a figure that people don’t think of as existing in China—even if one is a blind funeral singer and the other is a college professor.
I have translated Lu Xinghua in three previous entries (his tribute to Osama bin Laden, as well as later writing on digital governance).
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PICTURING XINJIANG ON THE BIG SCREEN ||| THE WORLD OF CHINESE
We get into less essential pieces here… I mostly work on translations for World of Chinese. This is a chance to write about 1980s Tianshan Film Studio productions, and the films of Guang Chunlan, but it is necessarily about a more recent picture, which I am not particularly interested in.