I've re-read book one of the Social Contract by Rousseau as a sort of refresher, misremembering it as having advocated the protection of people in a "state of nature". Or in other words, based on the Hobbesian definition that Rousseau uses, Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
While my memory apparently doesn't serve me well, it was interesting re-reading this after going through a number of primary documents related to the Former Natives Protection Act as there were other points which are directly relevant. Mainly, partly because of the intense wartime fascist propaganda, there's a tendency in academia to look at Japanese Nihonjinron discourses of the "family state" as something far-right and uniquely Japanese. It's interesting to see Rousseau draw the same analogy of the sovereign as the head, the people as the body, and whatnot, more than a century earlier. What's more interesting, however, is Rousseau's assertion that unlike the father in an actual family, the sovereign cannot but look dispassionately about his subjects. This is interesting because of characterizations of the love and empathy that the Emperor has for his subjects. The Ainu are characterized as his "babies" (akago) which he must protect as members of the nation-state. As Rousseau put it himself, the "father may, in their name, make certain rules for their protection and their welfare, but" -- and this is where things deviate a little -- "cannot give away their liberty irrevocably and unconditionally, for such a gift would be contrary to the ends of nature and an abuse of paternal right." I suspect that part of the reason for this deviation from European conceptualizations of the family state is that this metaphor is rooted in both Confucianist or European political thought. However, we might remember Agamben's discussion of jus vitae ac necis, the Roman law which gives a father the power over life and death over his children, as one of the foundations of European sovereign discourse.
We might also consider, however, Rousseau's understanding of man in a state of nature as having a certain shelf life that civilized man does not. Without saying how or why, he states "the primitive condition cannot endure, for then the human race will perish if it does not change its mode of existence". And here, perhaps, Rousseau is much closer to Hobbes view of "Americans" than he's usually characterized as being. Hobbes view of the lives of those in a state of nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" and that of later supporters of the Former Natives Protection Act like John Batchelor viewing the drop in the Ainu population as being due to disease and infighting are perfectly compatible with Rousseau's conception of the natural evanescence of savages.
Rousseau, more than Hobbes, argues against Grotius, the Dutch jurist who defined the limits of the sovereign state in the context of Dutch colonial expansion into southeast Asia whereby sovereign kingdoms were invaded and annexed (though, mind you, without abolishing the full title of local kings). Despite arguing against Grotius' seeming despotism, colonialism forms the explicit backdrop of his own argument. Specifically, how an individual or a state and own private or public property.
One such example, just after criticizing Grotius' views on slavery, is the use of Robinson Crusoe, the "sole inhabitant of his island" as a metaphor, equivalent to "King Adam" or "Emperor Noah" in showing that the subjective position of the sovereign is not simply related to sovereignty over the land, but in relation to the sovereign's subjects over which they have power. Interestingly in this, Crusue was not the "sole occupant", but had Friday, who he had made a slave, and had rescued from cannibals. It's certainly possible Rousseau hadn't read the novel he was referencing, but it's also possible that in this equation, as with the inability of "stupid, limited animal[s]" in a state of nature to make war, the presence of Indigenous people does not count to Rousseau as actual inhabitation in any real sense. Or he simply forgot about them.
And while Rousseau gives an interesting analysis to "right" and "might" as it were, similar to Benjamin's discussion of law-making violence. But it's interesting how easily the "right of the strongest" becomes the "survival of the fittest", historically. And while Rousseau is, much to his credit, careful not to equate force with morality, he does see morality as something simply not possessed by man in a state of nature. Or, in other words, Rousseau sees a social evolution based on man's unequal elevation out of a state of nature and into civil society where the most civilized segments have both, it would seem, the strength of arms as well as the most developed morality. It would be worth looking into social evolutionism in liberal thought as related to social Darwinism and biological racism. It seems in many ways to be more of a redefinition of terms than a radical shift in ideology.
It's also important to consider Rousseau, and those who were inspired by him, as progenitors of the liberal movement as it existed in countries including Japan in the late 19th century. How much were people like Fukuzawa influenced by Rousseau? Would he have been commonly read by all liberals, or simply those particularly interested in Euro-American thought?
Tuesday, 23 August 2016
Thursday, 18 August 2016
Source analysis: Rule in the Name of "Protection" - On the Former Natives Protection Act
From Sasaki, Masao. Genshi Suru "Ainu". Tokyo: Sōfūkan, 2008.
Written during the heated debate over the future of the Former Natives Protection Act, Sasaki's Asahi Newspaper article, included in the anthology of his work Genshi Suru "Ainu", provides an extremely sharp and concise critique of this law.
Sasaki attacks the law from two angles: one is how the law played a role in racializing the Ainu. The term "Ainu" itself is questioned throughout the article, put into quotation marks along with terms like "kaitaku" (colonizing/'opening up' the land), "Wajin" (ethnic Japanese settlers), or "Nihon" (Japan). This doesn't simply give the impression that Sasaki is trying to express, as one often does with scare quotes, a hesitation to use these terms literally. But rather, he seems to be suggesting that these terms are mutually constitutive ideological constructions and can only exist on conjunction with each other. The imagined community of the Japanese ethnic nation-state is, in other words, constituted in part through the abjection of racialized groups like the Ainu, and vice versa. Moreover, while Sasaki is not entirely clear in his intentions, he appears very self-conscious of the fact that many ethnic Japanese, in or out of Hokkaido, have a particular image of terms like "Ainu" or, worse still perhaps,"kyūdojin" (former natives) as signifying primitive, inferior barbarians. The stigma around the term "Ainu" as it was used by Japanese in the early and mid 20th century led many in Sasaki's generation to reject it outright as an ethnic slur. In this, the Former Natives Protection Act played a key role in racialized subjectification. Those to whom this law applied to could be said to be legally "former natives"/Ainu and those to whom this law did not apply were thereby legally "Wajin"/Japanese. But this isn't to say that there were clear cut understandings of what constituted an "Ainu" at the time this law passed. After all, the first bill of the Former Natives Protection Act failed to pass in 1892 because it wasn't clear to the committee members assessing the bill who and who wasn't Ainu. This shouldn't be overstated, especially given the presence of Japanese descendants of Tokugawa-era settlers whose lineage may not have been clearly traceable by the state, and who themselves may have been, in some cases, quite hybridized in terms of obvious cultural markers such as clothing or language. There was no clear line between Ainu and Japanese, in other words. And, the fear was, most likely, more about labeling Japanese as Ainu than wrongfully labelling Ainu as Japanese. But curiously, in the reading of the second Former Natives Protection Act in the Diet, as Sasaki alludes to, the question of children of unclear lineage came, and how the law would apply to them. When asked whether these children would be considered Japanese or Ainu, Shirani Takeshi simply replies that if the child looks Ainu, they're Ainu. Or in other words, if a child meets the physiognomy of a cliched racist image of an Ainu, that's good enough for the state. Sasaki rightly sees this almost arbitrary racialization as consequentially applying to all Ainu, children or not.
The second key argument Sasaki makes is to attack the enduring idea that the Ainu race had simply lost the survival of the fittest to the Japanese race on an even playing field. This was a key rationale for the need for 'protection': that the Ainu were natural inferior and needed their lives to be directly managed by the state in order to protect them from natural processes by which they would eventually face extinction simply through contact with the racially superior Japanese settlers. Sasaki responds to this by looking directly at laws targeting Ainu hunting and fishing, the basis of their economy and a major source of food for them, as having an absolutely devastating effect on their community. The other effect of these bans on Ainu hunting as well as the encroachment of the forestry industry was that many Ainu lost access to furs and birch bark used to make clothing. This effectively meant the Ainu could no longer easily make their own clothing needed to survive in the frigid northern winters. These laws produced the precarity that many Ainu found themselves in. And the Former Natives Protection Law, in addressing this precarity as rooted in Ainu inferiority rather than the effects of colonial policy, not only did nothing to change the conditions of this precarity, but naturalized and normalized the Japanese settler colonial presence which led to these laws being passed in the first place.
Sasaki is equally critical of the land 'grants' given to Ainu households as based on the precondition that they farm the land and that the land remains in the family, and can't be transferred outside of the family without government approval. This is both because many Ainu, who were primarily hunters and fishers, were simply not easily able to sustain themselves with vegetables gown on family farms. Moreover, settlers usurping Ainu land continued. As the land was leasable through civil law, many lessees used loopholes to claim the land and, according to Sasaki, and had great success in continuing the land theft that the Protection Act ostensibly aimed to curb.
In all of this, Sasaki is arguing for the abolition of the Former Aborigines Protection Act by attacking the basis on which it was enacted. As an Ainu writing in the late 1960s, he describes the law as "humiliating" for Ainu, and preserving the the racist assumptions from the 19th century that the law is predicated on.
This source is the first of several Ainu critiques of the Japanese settler colonial law targeting the Ainu that I'll be looking at. Sasaki is in some ways the most radical of this group of Ainu writers, but as Mark Winchester demonstrated with his brilliant analysis of Sasaki's long form essays, his almost deconstructive approach to his own racial subjectivity in many ways anticipates post-structuralist and post-colonial politics and can be used quite effectively in critiquing Japanese settler colonialism.
Moreover, Sasaki's discussion of such simple, matter of fact things as the Ainu not being able to collect birch bark to make clothes because of the forestry industry is extremely relevant in any discussion of the effects of these laws on the Ainu ability to sustain their own communities without relying on the Japanese state or, for that matter, becoming more and more integrated into the Japanese capitalist economy as a matter of contingency. Sakaki illuminates in a short article how these processes worked. Cutting Ainu off from resources, or greatly restricting access they had to resources, also freed them up for economic exploitation by both small time capitalist settlers, or more often, it seems, large conglomerates from the mainland. Ainu land, of course, was and remained the object desire of the colonization of Hokkaido, and putting them onto small parcels of farmland kept them off the great majority of their former territories. These laws were just as much about removing the limits of Japanese exploitation of the natural resources of Hokkaido as they were about limiting the Ainu. Sasaki Masao is a powerful voice in revealing this power relationship.
Written during the heated debate over the future of the Former Natives Protection Act, Sasaki's Asahi Newspaper article, included in the anthology of his work Genshi Suru "Ainu", provides an extremely sharp and concise critique of this law.
Sasaki attacks the law from two angles: one is how the law played a role in racializing the Ainu. The term "Ainu" itself is questioned throughout the article, put into quotation marks along with terms like "kaitaku" (colonizing/'opening up' the land), "Wajin" (ethnic Japanese settlers), or "Nihon" (Japan). This doesn't simply give the impression that Sasaki is trying to express, as one often does with scare quotes, a hesitation to use these terms literally. But rather, he seems to be suggesting that these terms are mutually constitutive ideological constructions and can only exist on conjunction with each other. The imagined community of the Japanese ethnic nation-state is, in other words, constituted in part through the abjection of racialized groups like the Ainu, and vice versa. Moreover, while Sasaki is not entirely clear in his intentions, he appears very self-conscious of the fact that many ethnic Japanese, in or out of Hokkaido, have a particular image of terms like "Ainu" or, worse still perhaps,"kyūdojin" (former natives) as signifying primitive, inferior barbarians. The stigma around the term "Ainu" as it was used by Japanese in the early and mid 20th century led many in Sasaki's generation to reject it outright as an ethnic slur. In this, the Former Natives Protection Act played a key role in racialized subjectification. Those to whom this law applied to could be said to be legally "former natives"/Ainu and those to whom this law did not apply were thereby legally "Wajin"/Japanese. But this isn't to say that there were clear cut understandings of what constituted an "Ainu" at the time this law passed. After all, the first bill of the Former Natives Protection Act failed to pass in 1892 because it wasn't clear to the committee members assessing the bill who and who wasn't Ainu. This shouldn't be overstated, especially given the presence of Japanese descendants of Tokugawa-era settlers whose lineage may not have been clearly traceable by the state, and who themselves may have been, in some cases, quite hybridized in terms of obvious cultural markers such as clothing or language. There was no clear line between Ainu and Japanese, in other words. And, the fear was, most likely, more about labeling Japanese as Ainu than wrongfully labelling Ainu as Japanese. But curiously, in the reading of the second Former Natives Protection Act in the Diet, as Sasaki alludes to, the question of children of unclear lineage came, and how the law would apply to them. When asked whether these children would be considered Japanese or Ainu, Shirani Takeshi simply replies that if the child looks Ainu, they're Ainu. Or in other words, if a child meets the physiognomy of a cliched racist image of an Ainu, that's good enough for the state. Sasaki rightly sees this almost arbitrary racialization as consequentially applying to all Ainu, children or not.
The second key argument Sasaki makes is to attack the enduring idea that the Ainu race had simply lost the survival of the fittest to the Japanese race on an even playing field. This was a key rationale for the need for 'protection': that the Ainu were natural inferior and needed their lives to be directly managed by the state in order to protect them from natural processes by which they would eventually face extinction simply through contact with the racially superior Japanese settlers. Sasaki responds to this by looking directly at laws targeting Ainu hunting and fishing, the basis of their economy and a major source of food for them, as having an absolutely devastating effect on their community. The other effect of these bans on Ainu hunting as well as the encroachment of the forestry industry was that many Ainu lost access to furs and birch bark used to make clothing. This effectively meant the Ainu could no longer easily make their own clothing needed to survive in the frigid northern winters. These laws produced the precarity that many Ainu found themselves in. And the Former Natives Protection Law, in addressing this precarity as rooted in Ainu inferiority rather than the effects of colonial policy, not only did nothing to change the conditions of this precarity, but naturalized and normalized the Japanese settler colonial presence which led to these laws being passed in the first place.
Sasaki is equally critical of the land 'grants' given to Ainu households as based on the precondition that they farm the land and that the land remains in the family, and can't be transferred outside of the family without government approval. This is both because many Ainu, who were primarily hunters and fishers, were simply not easily able to sustain themselves with vegetables gown on family farms. Moreover, settlers usurping Ainu land continued. As the land was leasable through civil law, many lessees used loopholes to claim the land and, according to Sasaki, and had great success in continuing the land theft that the Protection Act ostensibly aimed to curb.
In all of this, Sasaki is arguing for the abolition of the Former Aborigines Protection Act by attacking the basis on which it was enacted. As an Ainu writing in the late 1960s, he describes the law as "humiliating" for Ainu, and preserving the the racist assumptions from the 19th century that the law is predicated on.
This source is the first of several Ainu critiques of the Japanese settler colonial law targeting the Ainu that I'll be looking at. Sasaki is in some ways the most radical of this group of Ainu writers, but as Mark Winchester demonstrated with his brilliant analysis of Sasaki's long form essays, his almost deconstructive approach to his own racial subjectivity in many ways anticipates post-structuralist and post-colonial politics and can be used quite effectively in critiquing Japanese settler colonialism.
Moreover, Sasaki's discussion of such simple, matter of fact things as the Ainu not being able to collect birch bark to make clothes because of the forestry industry is extremely relevant in any discussion of the effects of these laws on the Ainu ability to sustain their own communities without relying on the Japanese state or, for that matter, becoming more and more integrated into the Japanese capitalist economy as a matter of contingency. Sakaki illuminates in a short article how these processes worked. Cutting Ainu off from resources, or greatly restricting access they had to resources, also freed them up for economic exploitation by both small time capitalist settlers, or more often, it seems, large conglomerates from the mainland. Ainu land, of course, was and remained the object desire of the colonization of Hokkaido, and putting them onto small parcels of farmland kept them off the great majority of their former territories. These laws were just as much about removing the limits of Japanese exploitation of the natural resources of Hokkaido as they were about limiting the Ainu. Sasaki Masao is a powerful voice in revealing this power relationship.
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