Okay so in class today we had a special guest speaker named Professor Takita-Ishii. She gave a lecture on ethnic and racial minorities in Japan and the particular problems they face in terms of rights and in terms of questions of citizenship. in the lecture she outlined the ways that ethnic minorities in Japan, such as Ainu, Burakumin, and Okinawans, have been positioned in the context of Japanese society. Additionally she spent a great deal of time discussing the positionality of Korean and Chinese living in Japan. Following the resumption of Japan's independence following the 1952 peace treaty, the Chinese and Korean who had been brought over to Japan during the war were stripped of their citizenship rights and to this day are unable to gain Japanese citizenship rights, despite having lived in Japan for generations. This has created a particularly difficult and I would say, unjust, situation that continues to exist to this day.Ironically, I had met Professor Takita-Ishii previously when she was a graduate student at UCLA. During that time I was an undergraduate student, very involved with student activism, and it turns out that she had received hate mail from an unidentified student in one of her classes. The hate mail was loaded with racial epithets and slurs and since I was involved with Asian and Pacific Islander activist groups on campus, I got involved in this issue. The letter had been sent through intra-campus mail, but no action was ever accomplished in identifying the sender. It just goes to show that racism is alive and well in America, even on such supposedly open and egalitarian places as a major university campus.
Aside from the lecture, the only other big event was that Yokohama was kicking off it's annual Hawaii Festival that week, with performances and the like (http://www.hawaiifes.com/). There was a performance in the mall that I passed by on the way home from school. Pretty interesting.
