Isaiah Ben-Dasan

This is a weird little piece of nihonjinron. I guess Ben-Dasan was raised in Kobe by Orthodox Jewish parents, and grew up as a quintessential "near outsider" (to borrow a phrase from Martha Pennington), able to make observations that were J enough (I guess I can't say "J" in this particular instance. I mean Japanese enough) to be marketable and foreign enough to seem crunchily authentic.


Premise: the Japanese and the Jews are both unique peoples. Followthrough: 200-odd pages of essentialism and laughably reductive binaries that still manage to say some interesting things, not about the nature of peoples, but about their self-perceptions. Chapter 1: the Japanese, safe on their island, do not understand the cost of security. The Jews do. If you accept the "cost of security" argument in the first place--which I don't because I find the pacifist constitution entirely realistic and good--then this is actually convincing, and I like the idea of bushido/state Shinto as just a really intense game for boys, to be contrasted with the genocides and scorched earth outside.


2: The Jews and the Japanese have different attitudes to animals and the sacred stemming from their status as herdsmen v. farmers. An argument as old as Abel v. Cain. 3: The Japanese, with no religiohistorical teleology, feel the pressures of time in a way the peoples of the West do not. Dubious, unless you're talking Kool-aid compound types. 4: Some very strange observations stemming from the fact that the Japanese sometimes have weird ideas about the outside world, and that Japan is a garden. A lot of exile/return talk about Tokugawa exiles in Jakarta that is even more ludicrous because um, really? you're talking about Japanese uchi/soto and not about the most prominent exile in history, that of the Jews?


5: The peculiar political genius of the Japanese and the political ineptitude of the Jews. Refute this one yourself; it's ludicrous. 6: Divine law v. law of "humanity"--true as far as it goes, but I find it interesting and odd that Ben-Dasan seems to think the proclivity of the Japanese to treat the law lightly is such a recognized and established fact, when most would say just the opposite. 7: They are both unique and exclusive, and then some stuff about the Bible and koans. Whatever. 8: Some stories about Saigo Takamori that say little about the Jews, but introduce "Nihonism"--not Shinto, not nihonjinron, but a putative "religion" based on the general tenets of consensus, sincerity, etc. Of course it's a religion, based on all the good qualities of the Japanese. I wonder if this sold anything in J-town? It does curry favour.


9-10: Contractual v. parental deities and virgin birth v. its lack. The Japanese love sex and accept one another unconditionally, the Jews see it as analogous to animal husbandry and see their relationship with God as a contract. These are old observations, and reductive. Also, um, the song of Solomon? 11-13: The Japanese are now the Jews of the world--its moneylenders and middlemen--so they betta watch out they don't become its scapegoats too. The Bubble scuttled this, so I don't have to take a stand on it. It seems implausible but strangely compelling. Also, some miscellany about Japanese thought and language that is dead silly but fun to read in a Bill Bryson kind of way, the end. And there you have it.… (más)