Plural Identities

More bloody gaijin

Further to my previous post about the Ichigo investment fund, it turns out that NHK, the Japanese public broadcasting company, has a drama on at the moment on Saturday evenings called Hagetaka (meaning Vulture),  which features a foreign investment fund (often known in Japan as a vulture fund) Horizon (half Japanese personnel with trendy glasses, half perfect Japanese speaking foreigners with scary suits and haircuts), squaring up to our hero, at Mitsuba Bank (presumably meant to be Mitsubishi Bank or rather what is now clumsily called the Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ), for majority ownership of a Japanese company called Sunday Toys.  The President of Sunday Toys spends company money on designer handbags and shoes and makes the employees do her gardening.  Mitsuba is what is known under the Japanese financial system as the 'main bank' for Sunday Toys, and our hero is torn between wanting to defend Sunday Toys from evil greedy foreigners, for the sake of its noble employees, and loathing Mrs Sunday Toys.  Being NHK, there has to be an educational component, so the website gives a glossary for each episode - 'bulk sales', 'due diligence', 'buy out' etc.  At least it seems slightly more fair minded towards foreigners than this magazine front cover which says "Bad foreigners are devouring Japan!!"

Zero gero

Apologies if this requires some kind of Japanese Windows Media Player download to see it, but if you can, I can recommend this Japanese TV ad featuring some cute frogs (click on the left hand most image　on the page I've linked to), which has some tenuous connection to this blog being about integration and language and stuff but basically is just an ad with cute frogs.

Bloody gaijin everywhere

Back in Japan again, hence lack of postings.

I'm struck by how many more 'foreigners' there are both in Tokyo and Kariya, just outside Nagoya, particularly in the client workplace I have been doing my training in.  Partly this is explained by it being Chinese New Year, so a lot of tourists from China and Korea, but also an increase in the numbers of foreigners working in Japan - a deliberate policy on the part of my client. 

The latter is clearly leading to some questioning of what conditions should be set for long term residence in Japan, including education of immigrant children.

And tonight on the news a newscaster said, "interesting that it takes a foreigner to point this out", not in a hostile, more in an off-the-cuff way, about Scott Mallon, ex-Morgan Stanley, 18 years in Japan, heading up an investment fund called Ichigo Asset Management Limited, who has led the first successful shareholder revolt in Japan against a proposed acquisition.  I just saw him on the news and he played it well, perfect polite Japanese, saying he was doing it on behalf of the 40 million shareholders in Japan.

Bonnes Nouvelles

A Prospect magazine 'web exclusive' review of a book about Muslim immigrants in France by Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse points to some encouraging findings, as well as giving some figures on the French headscarf issue:

Only about 1,200 schoolgirls wore a headscarf before the ban was passed, in early 2004; on the first day the law was enforced, 639 girls showed up in a headscarf at school. A year later, the figure had dropped to 12.

The conclusion:

None of this is to deny that the rise of Islamist extremism remains a serious concern. The problem of the re-Islamisation of disaffected young French Muslims seems particularly daunting, especially when there is no quick fix for the broader economic problems that afflict them and the rest of France. Of course, as Laurence and Vaisse point out, the revival of faith need not lead to radicalism. But it can. And when it has, a report by the International Crisis Group suggested last spring, it has been because hardline Salafi groups have filled the vacuum left after Muslim civic groups created in the 1980s and 1990s failed to mobilise their constituents. This is a bleak observation, but it carries an implicit recommendation: get young Muslims involved in mainstream politics.

BBC ID

Helen Tse spoke at the SIETAR (Society for Intercultural Education Training and Research) conference at the weekend.  She has just launched her book "Sweet Mandarin" about three generations of women in her family.  "Sweet Mandarin" is also the name of the restaurant that she and her sisters started in Manchester.

Apparently Ken Livingstone attended the launch in London, so it's good to see that he recognises that there are other minority ethnic groups in the UK besides those of a Muslim faith, despite the nature of his recent multiculturalism conference. She calls herself "British born Chinese", which seems to suggest that the Chinese-ness is the important factor, and that BBCs just so happen to be born in the UK, purely as an incidental detail, but it seems to have become an an accepted label.

I asked her what helped or triggered her 'establishment' success (Cambridge University and then a City lawyer), from being the only Chinese origin person at her school in Middleton, Manchester, working in her family's chippie in her spare time.  She said there wasn't anything specifically, and that she had always assumed that it was her right to go to Cambridge.  Also that her father threatened her with having to stay working at the chippie if she didn't go to a good university. Apart from a pushy dad, I suppose it is more 'automatic' to integrate if you are not part of a large minority group, rather as with the human rights lawyer Zia Haider Rahman, about whom I have previously blogged.

I had further discussions about what helps or hinders integration with one of the other speakers, Ram Gidoomal, who, after a successful entrepreneurial career, now chairs a charity to help refugees find employment,The Employability Forum.

Slightly simplistic Enlightenment Fundamentalist?

From an an interview in the Observer with Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

For Hirsi Ali, the problem is one of self-definition. If Muslims want to assert a religious text as the basis of their public identity, then they have to accept public debate of that text and its ideas with all the discomfort and offence that may involve.

(Hat tip to Butterflies and Wheels)

The Protestantisation of Muslim belief

I did gulp rather when I ripped open my copy of Prospect this month to see that the cover article was on Identity and Migration  and was written by Francis Fukuyama.  I knew I needed to give it (as with all Prospect articles  - of course!) due care and attention, read it in full and make note of it in this blog.

So, I finally found some space, albeit interrupted by Harry and his Bucketful of Dinosaurs and the new (look Mummy, I told you, it's NEW Scooby Doo!) Shaggy and Scooby-Doo Get a Clue, to take a proper look at it.

It certainly answers many of the questions I had been asking and trying to answer in this blog.

Is there anything in the Muslim religion which encourages Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, above and beyond other religions?
Fukuyama implies not, although he says it is an open question.
There have been many points in history where Muslim societies have been more tolerant than their Christian counterparts.  Fukuyama sees contemporary radical Islamism as a product of identity politics (happiness lies in the recovery of the inner identity), and a problem we have seen before with young people who have become anarchists, Bolsheviks, fascists or members of the Baader Meinhof gang.  It is 'modern' because the question of identity does not come up at all in traditional Muslim societies, where an individual's identity is given by that person's parents and social environment.  To the question 'who am I?' radical Islamism answers - you are a member of the global umma, defined by adherence to universal Islamic doctrine, stripped of all its local customs etc.

How do we solve the problem of jihadist terrorism?
Not by bringing modernisation and democracy to the middle east ('good' though that may be in its own right) - this might even increase rather than dampen the terrorism problem in the short run.

His answer seems to be a more energetic effort to integrate non-western populations into a common liberal culture, and at the same time a recognition that liberalism cannot ultimately be based on group rights, because not all groups uphold liberal values.  He points out that asking Muslims to give up group rights is much more difficult in Europe than in the US, because many European countries have corporatist traditions that continue to respect communal rights and fail decisively to separate church and state.  In the UK this would be state-funded faith schools, for a start. Even France, he argues, has not been consistent in this respect and the "religious symbols at school" ban of 2004 was actually a belated attempt to reassert older concepts of republicanism.

Ultimately, he says, post modern societies need to assert positive values and shared beliefs more vigorously than before, which is difficult given that we cannot agree on the substance of the good life to which we aspire in common.

Read, as they say, the rest, preferably without Scooby, Shaggy and Harry's background commentary.

Different glasses

So it turns out that not only is Barack Obama black but not "black", he is also a Third Culture Kid, having spent four years of his formative years living in Indonesia and going to local Indonesian primary schools (not a Madrassa, despite smear attempts to the contrary).

"Indonesia taught Berry a culture of tolerance, of community co-operation," says Dwi Asmara Oetoyo, one of his classmates at the Besuki primary school he attended for two years.

"His four years here is a part of his history he can't forget. He'll look at the world through different glasses as a result."

Chewy Brits

Some chewy bits from the recent British Social Attitudes survey as reported in the Financial Times :

The proportion of the public who say that British is "the best or only" way to describe them has dropped from 52 per cent to 44 per cent in just a decade, the survey found.

That is more because a sense of Englishness is rising than a sense of being British is declining in Scotland and Wales.

There has been no decline in the proportion of people who identify themselves as belonging to a particular class. Many more, however, now define themselves as middle class, reflecting actual changes in the class structure of British society.

Although hasn't social mobility declined recently?

Social class "is no longer related to a distinctive set of values", said Anthony Heath, professor of sociology at Oxford and one of the study's authors.

On the radio (BBC Radio 4) the morning the survey was announced, I heard one commentator saying the main thing that differentiated British social classes now was the way they spent and invested their money, specifically the proportion the middle class spend/invest in their houses.  Although I sensed, when I was living in the East End of London in the 1990s, that thanks to the 'right to buy', certain more prosperous parts of the working class were just as keen to spend/invest money on their houses as the middle classes.

Religious identity, however, still produces markedly different views to the non-religious majority on issues such as pre-marital sex and abortion, even if membership of a religion or attendance at religious services remains in decline.

In 1964, three-quarters of the population said they belonged to a religion and attended services, and only 3 per cent said they did not belong to a religion. In 2005, a mere 31 per cent belonged and attended services while 38 per cent said they did not belong at all.

Microwaved coffee

Tom Freeman does all the necessary for Cameron's speech on 'uncontrolled immigration'.