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I appreciate the discussion around Trump lately, but I've had this idea in my head that I can't shake, so I guess I have to post about it now. It's about liberalism again.
When I get bored at work, I tend to surf Wikipedia for historical and cultural tidbits. One of the things that dizzies me is taking a look at the various ethnic groups of Asia. There are an insane amount of them in India, in China, in Russia, in Southeast Asia, and most of them have their own language. A shocking amount of diversity. Even more shocking is learning of the occasional huge impact of former ethnicities -- I had never heard of the Circassian genocide before bumping into it on Wikipedia, nor of the Moriori genocide in New Zealand, nor of most of the stateless peoples fighting for their own nation. It makes a nation like Japan seem somewhat boring, since it was mostly one ethnicity just interacting with itself instead of duking it out with dozens or hundreds of other ethnicities in a massive historical cultural bloodbath.
Where this ties into America, and liberalism: America, for the most part, has had all its ethnicities jumbled together. It was really, really great at integrating people in the melting pot. I am, by blood, Irish mixed with German, but I hold no allegiance with Ireland or Germany. I, and most white people I know, would describe themselves as American, if anything. But seeing this culture war flare up and the value differences becoming obvious makes me think: what if the rise of social justice politics has absolutely nothing to do with liberalism? Maybe we're seeing the rise of a new ethnic group, not based on shared genetic traits, but on certain cultural traits being emphasized more than others, as has happened thousands or millions of times in history?
If that's what's happening, then we might say that liberalism is not entirely at fault for the rise of progressivism (or whoever you blame for causing this rift). Liberalism is more of a new thing, but diversification of ethnic groups is far older. I would argue that this stratification has been intensified by the internet and television and other mass communications enabling people to self sort into their own groups, regardless of geographic distance. Perhaps you might also say that liberalism gave more of an equal playing field for cultures to fight it out amongst themselves, thus accelerating such diversification. But it may have been inevitable.
I'm going to nitpick that I don't think this is a historically accurate picture of Japan.
Firstly, Japan has historically possessed non-Yamato ethnic groups which were driven out, destroyed, or assimilated by the Yamato. The Ainu are the most famous one still extant, but historically you might consider the Emishi, the supposed 'shrimp barbarians' of northern Honshu who appear to have been either wiped out or assimilated into the Yamato whole.
Secondly, we should not assume that the Yamato specifically constitute a single 'ethnicity' who historically understood themselves to be a single united people. Modern Japan is the product of several generations-long processes of nation-building - the Tokugawa shogunate wanted to tamp down on regional identities and clan loyalties, and promoted a pan-Japanese identity, and the imperial government after Meiji took over intensified that process even further. Even today the process is not entirely complete or successful, and you will find very strong regional rivalries, including different languages and customs.
Go back a few centuries and I suspect that if you asked a group of people from northern Honshu whether they are 'one ethnicity' or 'one people' with a bunch of people from Kansai, and then you asked both groups whether they are 'one ethnicity' with a group of people from southern Kyushu, they would all say no. They might realise that they are more similar to each other than any of them are to Koreans, or to Han Chinese, or heaven forbid the Nanban, but I don't think they would see themselves as one homogenous group.
And just in general - I'm not sure how a person could look at the history of Japan and say that it's striking for lacking a "massive historical cultural bloodbath". Surely the history of Japan is a history full of distinct regional groups slaughtering each other? It feels like a form of special pleading to say "oh, that's different clans within a single cultural/ethnic group", rather than recognising that as different cultural groups. Perhaps they were all Japanese, in the same way that, say, the different states of the Holy Roman Empire were all German, but there is definitely a history there of rivalry, warfare, and bloodshed between groups that spoke differently, behaved differently, and felt themselves to be meaningfully different to one another.
In contrast to the previous comment, I DO disagree. Japan's only ethnic groups are the Yamato and the pre-Yamato "barbarians" (and the Ryuukyuuans, although those were annexed much later and are not in the main archipelago).
The Yamato did historically understand themselves to be one people organized under the priesthood of the Imperial family, which performed a yearly ritual to ensure good rice harvests for all. They used one language, with various dialects - similar to the way most languages work, like English. They shared an overwhelming proportion of their material culture and religion (local cults and the abortive Christian movement notwithstanding). For multiple extended periods of Japanese history they were united under central rulership, although in earlier centuries this was pretty distant rulership.
Modeling Japanese conflict as regional is nonsensical - the better model would be family (or clan) conflict, with only a few interesting exceptions like the militant Buddhists around Osaka during the Sengoku period (or the rising of the farmer-samurai, same period). The closest thing I can think of to a strictly regional conflict was the east-versus-west conflict of the Genpei war - which is, once again, even named after the two families in conflict. The regions in question are mostly important as the places where the warring parties have their farms.
If you want the clearest evidence, consider that every group that succeeded in WINNING one of these conflicts sought out the SAME goal: entitlement to lead the Japanese people, typically as Shogun but in one memorable case as Emperor. (On the small scale, it was the right to rule over a local group of Japanese in a pretty typical Japanese fashion, which is to say with high taxes.)
Your requirements for a given people being "one ethnicity" appear utterly unattainable anywhere. What standard could possibly be met? If there's ever a conflict between two groups, isn't that - from the argument as you have stated it - sufficient proof that these were not coethnics in the first place?
But didn't the people in those states agree that they were German? Or else what was the pan-Germanism movement that arose in response to Napoleon's invasions?
I'm not sure that shifting from regional to family-based conflict makes the distinction you want here? Ethnic or group identity can be tied to family or clan just as easily as it can to region. In fact it's usually a nexus - families or lines of ancestry, habitation in particular regions, shared language, shared cultural practices, and so on. What makes an ethnicity an ethnicity is a kind of overlapping Venn diagram.
Further I'm happy to say also that ethnicities can be fractal - contained within each other, going down level by level. 'Slavic', 'Germanic', or 'Turkic' are 'large' ethnicities, but they all contain within them smaller ethnicities. 'German' is a subset of 'Germanic', and then of course 'German' contains within it even smaller ethnic tribes. All Bavarians are German, all Germans are Germanic, and so on.
Likewise in Japan. All Satsumans are Yamato, but am I willing to say that Satsuman is a different ethnicity to Choshuans? It feels like asking whether Bavarians are a different ethnicity to Prussians or Saxons. It's largely in how you define 'ethnicity', and you can move that around however you like and I can't really argue.
What I would argue, though, is that regardless of whether we think the word 'ethnicity' is appropriate or not, historically Japan has been often divided, and people from different parts of Japan understood themselves to be meaningfully different to one another - certainly to the point of fiercely conflicting with one another.
The primary question was whether conflicts in Japan can be classified as ethnic. If you want a definition, here you are: coethnics recognize themselves as the same "kind" of people. An ethnic conflict is a struggle between mutually recognized "kinds," where the direct competition between the "kinds" is driving everything involved. The groups in conflict will directly reference the underlying cultural or genetic differences (especially material) in identifying the group they oppose. Think slurs here.
The modal ethnic conflict is Israel/Palestine: two self-identified groups competing over specific territory and resources. When one wins, they move the other off the territory entirely. When they win they enforce their cultural habits and obliterate the practices of the losers in any ways they care about.
I'd go so far as to say that NO internal Japanese conflict maps to that, except the conflicts with the barbarians, which the Japanese very explicitly labeled as a conflict between their "kind" and the barbarian "kinds." (Maybe the stuff with the Christians could be labeled as an abortive ethnogenesis.) Japanese conflicts are typically one of the following: jockeying for position under an accepted sovereign power; attempting to overthrow the sovereign power; attempting to create an independent hierarchy parallel to the sovereign power (this never worked outside of the Sengoku period; they all got cleaned up and subdued by the start of the Edo period). One group of elite warriors fights another, vassalage agreements are reordered, anyone who doesn't fit in gets killed, and the village headman starts paying taxes to someone new.
You know what doesn't happen? The people of Satsuma expelling farmers from the outskirts of Kumamoto and settling the territory, destroying the local art and buildings and replacing it with their own. The Japanese do that to the barbarians, sure, but not to each other. Therefore, not an ethnic conflict.
Only somewhat true. Let's start from prehistory and round dates aggressively:
So, adding that up, when was it divided? Maybe in prehistory, but if we start from the appearance of writing, we have around 600 years of general unity with a single period of civil war oriented around who gets to lead the government. Following the appearance of samurai, things get a lot more spotty, but there's a couple of unified governments, and even in the rough times nobody is arguing that one cultural subcategory of Japan should exterminate another. Still, from 1150-1600, you have about 150 years of unity and 300 years of disunity. Following that, you have one (1) more internal war (which I will overestimate as 25 years of serious internal instability) in the 400 years leading to the present and otherwise total unity.
Across this time period, although I have no idea what is sufficient in your eyes to be "meaningfully different" - perhaps it's the Edo-period complaint that the Kantou or Kansai eat their noodles like fucking animals, perhaps not - no people in Japan felt their "meaningful differences" were good reason to start a war. Directly competing ambitious elites certainly had a reason to start wars with one another, and did so frequently, but just as frequently took vassals and intermarried and felt no particular need to enforce one way of producing miso over another. That was the concern of peasants, after all.
The thing that irks me about your initial comment isn't that it implies Japan was ever violent. Certainly it was violent! Certainly there was great discord and strife! Coethnicity is no panacea against human conflict. The second story in Genesis is about someone killing his very brother. What irks me is that it seems to be based on a definition of "ethnic" that has no meaningful subject, or else is based on a representation of Japanese history which is not reflected in reality. The reality of Japanese history, and Japanese conflict, is something I've found deeply interesting, and it has its roots in petty court intrigues and the powerful and chaotic dynamics of feudal vassalage. But there is no ethnic side to these conflicts, and they do not need an ethnic side to be interesting. Trying to color them as ethnic loses the real hue of that history, which is what changes as conflicts cease to be feudal and begin to be ethnic - which, incidentally, is a good description of what happened over the course of the Napoleonic Wars.
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