No man, it’s got nothing to do with cultural value judgement and everything to do with progressiveness that can be measured in objective terms based on the freedoms that people do or don’t enjoy. It’s not racist to pass judgement on a nation’s legal norms if they are demonstrably not fair.
Homosexuality is not a choice. People in Japan are massively disadvantaged if they are gay anywhere outside of the entertainment industry. Discrimination and ridicule are a normal part of life for Japanese homosexuals. That’s not okay. I can comfortably tell that aspect of Japanese culture to grow the fuck up. It is behind.
There are numerous aspects of Japanese culture that can be ridiculed such as its blatant sexism, racist discrimination of Koreans, Chinese and the entire continent of Africa and continued use of the death penalty. The claim that Japanese culture doesn’t play identity politics is false, considering there are periodic revivals of nationalism. The dudes that park their vans in Shibuya or just cruise through traffic in convoy blaring their idiocy from loudspeakers doesn’t bode well for your argument.
I understand that you are replying from your perspective but I’ll repeat myself and point out that Japan is not the West. Societal change there is not societal change here and the perspective here is not the perspective there.
You assume that what makes people happy or miserable is the same. Again, not so. This goes back to the point of how in the West the priority is on the individual where as here the priority is on the group/society as a whole. Yes I’ve over simplified for the sake of brevity, but to put it a different way, people here are generally happy when they know they are doing what is considered right for the group even if what they personally want is different.
If we use the word “right” to mean a permission granted by law then your statement is correct. There is no legal concept of same sex marriage in Japanese law thus that right is not granted to persons of the same sex who wish to marry here. If we use the word in the broader concept of “human rights” then we kind of get back to cultural difference as that particular idea was mostly introduced to/imposed upon Japan by SCAF Gen. MacArthur and the GHQ legal team which wrote the current Japanese constitution. While the idea has caught on somewhat broadly, it sill is not understood here today in the same way as many in the West or particularly those on Boing Boing use the term. To give an unrelated but understandable example, there simply is no concept which parallels Miranda Rights here.
I seem to recall this sort of thinking used in regards to Manifest Destiny as well. Social trends can be “good” or “bad” but are not always universal or right for all.
Please understand that I am not doing down the “your opinion is bad and you are bad” path or the like, I’m simply sticking to my original point that Western liberal thought is not shared everywhere.
Most certainly. See my above reply to @anon50609448 on the matter of civil vs human rights.
What I believe is not at issue here. I am pointing out some facts about a culture which you seem to be unfamiliar/have no experience with. It is most certainly a verifiable fact that some countries which did not in the past, currently give legal recognition to same sex relationships and unions. As I’ve pointed out however, whereas historically and at present, Japan has had no significant cultural issues with same sex relationships the matter of same sex unions in the sense of legally recognized family units was and is alien to the culture. Again please refer to my replies to @anon50609448 earlier on the difference between love and marriage.
Plenty of things about laws anywhere are not fair. As far as whether or not we are talking about cultural value judgement or not, unless we are talking about results of societal change which can be objectively measured, I’d venture to say that yes it is about cultural value judgement. There are clearly measurable economic advantages to social norms which permit workplace participation at the same level by individuals of any sex/race/religion/sexual orientation/etc. There may well be clearly measurable societal benefits to legal recognition of same sex family units. To the best of my knowledge, if these exist they are not part of any discussion on the topic here in Japan nor anywhere in this thread. I personally suspect it would not be so hard to find evidence to support this idea but whether it would be convincing enough here is another matter.
No argument there from me.
Not sure I’d agree with that as stated. If I may go so far as to bring more anecdotes, over the last 17 years, I’ve known homosexual men and women in IT & finance who have reached management level positions here. One important difference between them and those in entertainment is that these people did not make their sexual orientation part of their public persona. I’d venture to say that this probably relates to the identity politics issue I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
Anyone who makes the personal more important than the social norm here can be subject to the same. I’d say its related to the saying “the nail which sticks up gets hammered down” or the idea of “mura hachi bu” which doesn’t translate directly but describes ostracism of someone who refuses to follow social custom.
I make no apologies for racists on the Left or Right. However racism seems to be found anywhere.
Nationalism can certainly relate to identity politics in terms of racial superiority ideologies but honestly even amongst the far right wing sound truck guys thats not a common agenda even some do use racist language. This is of course something you don’t see written about much at all on the Web because people would rather write articles about the fringe guys who stir up trouble in the “Little Seoul” area of Shinjuku rather than make the effort to talk to enough of the “ultra right wing” people and hear them out.
I may not agree with all their politics but on some stuff like wanting Russia to return the territory it stole at the end of WWII I consider to be reasonable. I am glad that their demonstrations are legal here (even this group). Here as in the US, “bad” speech is given equal legal protection as “good” speech.
I don’t claim it does, just presenting an anecdote from my life here.
And as I’ve already pointed out, the social consensus for what’s “right for the group” could easily mean (and often has meant) that women are denied the right to vote or that people of different races are forbidden to marry or that certain groups have more legal rights than others. Cultural norms and civil rights are two sides of the same coin, especially when those norms are codified in law.
No, a slightly different kind of discrimination does. If “what’s right for the group” can’t be used to exclude (for example) interracial marriage, why is it an acceptable rationale for excluding same-sex marriage?
when somebody suggested that Japan was behind the US in the acceptance of same-sex relationships, so “Western liberal thought is not shared everywhere” does not seem to be your original point, and it’s rather a pointless point to make as it’s rather obvious. What your point seems to be is, “and we shouldn’t call it wrong if they want to discriminate against gays in marriage (and other) laws.”
Well, sorry, I’m going to call it wrong anyway.
You can’t “not play” the “game of identity politics”, as long as there are people who identify differently than you do… all you can do is preemptively declare those in your society who DO want to play the game as the losers and enforce that judgement with law or custom. There are almost certainly people who want to marry people of the same sex, to identify themselves as homosexual. Maybe it’s less prevalent than in the west because “sacrifice for the group” is a higher cultural value, maybe not (though a quick Google says that roughly half the people in Japan believe same sex marriage should be recognized, and, just as in the west, the younger they are the more okay with it they are).
But the very thought that “the group is better served by not allowing anyone to have same sex marriage” is itself an artificial imposition, and if they have that idea, then again, I’m going to call them behind us (on that particular issue).
EDIT: You know what, all the stuff beneath is fluff. We will know that Japan is “behind” on this when they go ahead and legalize same-sex marriage (or some BS compromise on civil unions). Opinion polls currently put support for either same sex marriage or same sex civil unions at over 50%, and up 15% from five years ago (May 2013 Ipsos Reid international study). Those are Japanese people who live in Japanese culture. So what the hell are you talking about?
I tend to overwrite and give people a lot of things to disagree with, so I’ll reiterate the problems with what you are saying here:
I believe there are gay people in Japan who wish they could marry and honor that idea of family continuity while still being who they feel they are. You haven’t disputed this, so I assume we are in agreement. As long as that is true, you are trying to argue about why a culture is oppressing homosexuals, not about whether they are.
I don’t see how you reconcile this with divorce rates in Japan being around the same as in Europe. Obviously there are people who are causing significant discord in groups for personal happiness (if one partner cheats and the other asks for a divorce, at least one of them has done this) and if your contention is that a gay person who is in a straight marriage is not more likely to want a divorce or to cheat… I’m not sure what cultural difference you can ascribe that to.
But also:
What on earth? Are you quoting and replying to random sections of unrelated sentences I’ve written?
Maybe the Japanese should give Hokkaido and the disputed islands to the north back to the Inuit people from whom they stole the lands in the first place? How about Okinawa and the chain of islands between there and Kyushu which the Japanese also stole from its native peoples? Where they enforced Japanese as the only language to be spoken (thereby killing local languages which are now only understood and spoken by the extremely elderly). Or are we only including theft that happened in the last century?
I love Japan too man, but you’ve gotta be a bit more realistic about the failings of their society and less of a champion of their political causes while ignoring the counter-arguments. You weigh in defensively on just about any post that mentions Japan in any way and it doesn’t go unnoticed.
…One that’s demonstrably wrong on every ethical level.
Japan is gonna be freaking sweet once the old guard is dead. Japanese youth DGAF as a general rule. They may have opinions but they don’t insist others live by them.
Yay? Its my home, I know enough and theres plenty of whargarbl about it so I speak up.
Honne and tatemae? I dunno. See the youth doing the very same ostracizing/othering as the old folks. This was really evident every year when we got a fresh crop of new graduates at my last company.
Just so ya know, in real life I’m not a total contrarian and I don’t love everything about life here.
