We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Let’s go to war over Rockall Nation-states consider the most unlikely trophies to be the heartblood of their culture. Here is the latest example of idiots wasting time and taxpayers money:
The Japanese could hardly have dreamed up a more horrifying way of thoroughly annoying the Koreans.
“We will never consider suspending our efforts for international certification of Korean names for 18 undersea features in the East Sea,” said Song Min Soon, national security adviser to Roh. “The naming issue cannot be linked to Japan’s waterway survey scheme.”
Song got down to basics.
“We don’t need a complicated argument,” he said. “Simply speaking, we’ll never permit Japan’s maritime survey out of our steadfast determination to protect our territorial islets and waters.”
Protect those territorial inlets and underwater features now!
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Isn’t there rumoured to be oil down there?
All together now. One, two, three –
IT’S ALL ABOUT OIIILLL.
Yep, billions and billions of dollars worth of it.
Fish too I think.
And then there’s fishoil!
Oh, the Omega-3 war looms!
There may be oil under Rockall.
Got to admit, that was a hell of a bassline – Nirvana eat your heart out.
And would you stand by idly whilst the Russians surveyed the English Channel with an eye to claiming the isle of man as their territory? The soviets?
We think of the Japanese as civilised sophisticated trading partners and wacky teenagers.
The Koreans think of them as the Nazis temporarily quiescent.
From that perspective, it is less ridiculous than you think, although that perspective itself might be the subject of some legitimate criticism.
If the Russkies were surveying the English Channel with an eye to claiming the Isle of Man, their geography would be even worse than yours 🙂
Is Greenpeace still claiming Rockall?
Patrick queried:
And would you stand by idly whilst the Russians surveyed the English Channel with an eye to claiming the isle of man as their territory? The soviets?
Yes I would. I’d be quite interested in observing them using this superior technology they appear to have…
Names mean something, especially to Koreans.
During the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945), Koreans were forced to take Japanese names while the Korean language was banned in schools and businesses.
This is part of the larger dispute over whether to call the Sea of Japan the East Sea.
It’s probably also about war, or at least about readiness. Waters for which only your pilots hold the charts are a natural defense. Surveying them is aggressive.
If the Russkies were surveying the English Channel with an eye to claiming the Isle of Man, their geography would be even worse than yours 🙂
Well, the Russians once fired on British trawlers in the North Sea, thinking they were Japanese warships. By comparison, hunting for the IoM in the Channel is an inherently sensible activity.
back in the late 1980’s the Defense mapping Agency (DMA, now NOAA) outsourced nautical chart making to a japanese company – and they used minami tori shima for the contested Marcus Islands, and las Islas Malvinas for the Fauklands – names are eternal and important to them
In Confucius philosophy, proper naming is considered of vital importance. Indeed, Confucius said that properly naming events, actions, objects and people was the first step towards good governance. All East Asian cultures place great weight on names in a manner that seems very odd to Westerners.
The degree of bad blood between Koreans and the Japanese is enormous. The miracle of capitalism lets them cooperate economically and they share mutual foreign policies goals but they don’t like or respect one another. The Japanese colonization of Korea and its post-war refusal to deal with the issue honestly has left the Koreans enraged and mistrustful.
Combine these two factors and what seems to Westerners to be a trivial problem becomes locally significant.
The Japanese could hardly have dreamed up a more horrifying way of thoroughly annoying the Koreans.
Oh, I don’t know. Over the decades and centuries, they have dreamed up some fairly horrifying ways.
There is a theory that the Japanese are doing this in part to make President Roh say ever more stupid things, and like a bull being toyed with by a matador he seems to keep on obliging them.
BTW with reference to the above comment
Well, the Russians once fired on British trawlers in the North Sea, thinking they were Japanese warships. By comparison, hunting for the IoM in the Channel is an inherently sensible activity.
In an earler Dokdo post, the Marmot’s Hole had a truly magnificent throwaway line about the Russo-Japanese war:
Remember, last time the Japanese and British formed an alliance, Tokyo followed it up by blockading Port Arthur and relocating the Russian Baltic Fleet to the bottom of the Korea Strait
The issue is potential oil and gas deposits, with rich fisheries as a bonus. The Japanese have a point. Japan territory used to consist of Japan, Korea and Manchuria, which were annexed to Japan much as Ireland, Wales and Scotland were annexed to England to form the United Kingdom. It’s quite true that the Japanese de-emphasized the Korean language, much as the English de-emphasized the various forms of Gaelic spoken by the rest of Great Britain.
Koreans who compare the Japanese to the Nazis have no sense of perspective. The Nazis weren’t interested in civilizing the “inferior races”, as they viewed Jews, Slavs and Gypsies – they were concerned with putting them out of their misery by exterminating them. The Japanese viewed the Koreans as an “inferior race”, much as they viewed the Chinese and the rest of East Asia (and as Westerners viewed the rest of the world until perhaps the last 20 years). But they were interested in incorporating them into Japan proper, not exterminating them. In other words, Japan was merely late to the game of empire, unlike China, Persia, Turkey, Russia and the great empires of the West. Were the Japanese especially brutal? No more so than they were in the wars of Japanese unification – or in the other wars of national unification in Asia.
Zhang Fei,
Well, touche. And that makes it all OK then? The rape of Nanking was merely an attempt to bring civilisation to the natives….
Nick M: And that makes it all OK then? The rape of Nanking was merely an attempt to bring civilisation to the natives….
The underlying assumption here is that we have reached the end of history. In other words, now that the Western powers, the Chinese*, et al, have realized their dreams of empire via some pretty underhanded and violent methods – as is necessary to separate natives from their land, history is at an end. The Japanese may play no further part in altering their territorial boundaries by using the same means employed by their foreign counterparts. That appears to be the assumption here. I can understand why non-Japanese would take this view. But why would a Japanese nation locked out of the fruits of imperialism share it?
That, at bottom, is why rising powers never share the same views about ends and means as established ones. The established powers have gotten their piece of territorial pie, by hook or by crook. The rising powers are watching hungrily from the next table, wondering if they should mind their table manners, as they are told to, by the established powers, in trying to get a slice. And that is why confrontations between the two are unavoidably messy – they have disagreements about both ends and means.
* Note that there have been many rapes of Nanking. Only one was perpetrated by the Japanese. The most notorious (but not the most recent) one carried out by the Chinese was during the Taiping Revolution. The Japanese, like the Chinese, weren’t being hypocritical in slaughtering Chinese while maintaining the long term goal of “civilizing” them – it’s the same thing the Chinese used to do in “civilizing” and absorbing the non-Chinese minorities on their frontiers – “mission civilatrice” was a Chinese goal thousands of years before the French made it their goal. Before the natives can be “civilized”, they must be made to submit – why else would they accept the impositions of a foreign culture? It’s the same process Uncle Sam used to civilize the Germans and the Japanese during WWII – together with the other powers, he killed about 12% and 4% of their respective populations before the lessons of democracy finally took.