Nazi Flags and Me

I’ve referenced this event a couple times already, but my second year in Ajimu I was teaching a class and suddenly noticed one student had a large swastika sticker attached to the breast pocket of her school uniform.

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: “ Wait a minute, isn’t the swastika just an inversion of the Buddhist symbol for good luck, which is frequently seen in Japan and other Asian countries? Are you sure you didn’t just mix up the two?”

Well, that’s what I thought at first also. “This is the 21st century. There’s no way a student is wearing a swastika badge in my class. It must be the Buddhist symbol.” But the more I looked at it, the more it looked like a swastika. I tried to remember all the Indiana Jones movies I had seen as a kid. Which way had the points on the swastika been facing? I flipped it around in my mind and did several imaginary inversions of the swastika. In the end I just gave myself a headache and completely lost my place in the lesson I was teaching.

At the end of the class I just went up and asked her. “Where did you get that?”

“From Germany,” she answered.

“You went to Germany?”

“No, Mr. Matsunaga did. He gave it to me as a souvenir.”

Next I asked Kota, the cooperating Japanese teacher. “Um, was there a student wearing a swastika in that lesson we just taught?”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, yeah, Mr. Matsunaga has been handing those out to the students.”

Mr. Matusnaga was the social studies teacher. When we were in the staff room, I asked him about it. “So, I understand you went to Germany recently.”

At this point Kota yelled at him (in a playful way), “Yeah, you son of a bitch, your students have been wearing swastikas in my class.”

And everyone had a good laugh at it. One of the older teachers said, “Really Matsunaga, you should tell the students what those mean. We’re supposed to be doing peace education.” But that was the most upset anyone got over it.

I decided not to make an issue of it. Obviously in the West a swastika has come to symbolize white supremacy, but I was relatively sure that neither Matsunaga nor his Japanese students were adherents to this creed. Japan didn’t have a history of white supremacist movements, and so the symbol carried none of the volatile emotions it would in the West.

And what is a symbol stripped of its context? After all the Nazi swastika is only an inverted Buddhist symbol, and in Japan the Buddhist symbol is well known for representing peace. To the Japanese, I concluded, the swastika must be nothing more than an historical oddity, or something associated with Western punk rock bands.

Besides I liked Mr. Matsunaga. He was one of the younger teachers, and one of the few who made an effort to talk to me in the staff room. He was always laughing and in a good mood. I didn’t want to get him in trouble. And for that matter I really liked the student who had worn the swastika. In a classroom full of troublemakers and punk kids, she was a model student who was really enthusiastic about English. (By the way, Justin, if you’re reading this, she should be one of your 3rd years by now. Let me know if you see any Nazi paraphernalia at the high school.)

So that was the end of that episode. I did get a lot of mileage out of that story though. One day I was at a JET party, and someone said, “Hey Joel, tell your Nazi story!”

So I re-told the story about the teacher handing out the swastikas to the students, and one of the girls at the party got really upset. “Who is that bonehead teacher?” she asked. “I’d liked to strangle him.”

“Yeah, well what can you do?” I said. “The symbol doesn’t mean anything here in Japan. It’s just an historical oddity to them.”

Only much later, after I had left the party and gone home, did I remember that this girl was Jewish. After that I began to rethink the whole incident in a different light.

Maybe I should have made a bigger deal of it than I did. Maybe I should have yelled in the teacher’s lounge, “Damn it, I will not teach another class if the students are wearing swastikas!” I could have thrown something on the ground to make it more dramatic.

…Actually that probably wouldn’t have gone over too well in Japan.

Maybe I should have tried to initiate education classes about the holocaust and the Nazis at the school. They wouldn’t have let me of course. The Junior High School curriculum has no room for deviation, and the teachers I taught with never allowed me any creativity. But I could have suggested it. I could have brought in a copy of “Schindler’s List” and asked if we could make the class watch it. Or asked permission to hand out literature about the holocaust to the students. Just in general made a big deal out of it so that they would say to the students, “Listen, whatever you do, don’t wear the swastika in front of the foreigner, because he takes it seriously and he’ll be bugging us about peace education for the next month.” And if this little message had gotten through, that it is something we take seriously in other countries, than that would have been an education in itself.

The reason I bring all this up again is that last week I was walking through the shopping mall near my apartment, and saw a full size Nazi flag hanging very visibly near the window.

I debated briefly what to do. My failure to take strong action the previous time had been nagging at me ever since. However I reminded myself that this flag does not have the same charged emotions in Japan that it does in the West, and the people who run the store probably didn’t mean anything by it. Then again, a lot of my students go to this shopping mall, so I thought I should say something.

I bought a candy bar as a pretext for talking to the shop clerk. “So I see you hate Jews,” I said.

He had no idea what I was talking about, so I pointed to the flag. “That? No that doesn’t mean anything,” he responded.

“So you don’t want to kill Jews or anything like that?”

He responded with a nervous laugh. “No, that’s just something we sell.”

“So you sell it to people who hate Jews?”

“No, no, no. It has nothing to do with any of that.”

“Do you know Nazi history?” I asked.

For whatever reason, his attitude changed from nervous friendliness to annoyance at this point. Maybe it was just the final question that broke his patience, or maybe he sensed a lecture coming on if he didn’t end the conversation. He simply answered, “Yes, I know,” then deliberately looked away. I thanked him for the candy bar and left.

I didn’t want to be too hard on the guy because I understand the difference in how the flag is perceived. I felt I had made my point, and badgering him further wouldn’t have been productive.

However if other people were to ask about the flag, I think that would help to get the message across.

So, I sent the following message to the local JET list-serve:

Subject: Nazi Flag in Riverside Mall
Monday night I was in Riverside mall and saw a Nazi flag displayed very prominently from the Village Vanguard shop. It is hanging on the wall by the cash register, but clearly visible from the window.

I realize of course that for a variety of reasons this flag does not carry the same emotions in Japan that it does back home. But, especially as a lot of my junior high school students frequent this shop, I think it is a good idea to politely bring to the attention of the shopkeepers that this flag carries strong negative connotations outside of Japan.

I had a small discussion with the shopkeeper. I don't think he's a bad person, but this could be an educational opportunity for him and the rest of the shop if we bring these issues up.

If you are passing nearby Riverside mall, perhaps you could stop in and have a small talk with the shop clerks as well. I think the more people that bring these issues to their attention, the more they will realize perhaps the strong reaction this flag has for foreigners.

Just an idea.

(PS--It's not the Buddhist symbol, I checked. That was my first thought as well. This is the real Nazi flag.)

Joel

So far I’ve gotten a lot of positive responses from this e-mail (“thanks for doing this”, “Good for you”, etc). Someone even jokingly commented that the tone of the e-mail was typical of my tendency to act like everyone’s big brother. (Which is news to me. Do I really act like that?)

Whether anyone will actually follow up on my suggestion and talk to the store clerk remains to be seen, but obviously many people talking to him will be a lot more effective than just me.

For what it’s worth, Shoko thinks I went about this all wrong. I related to her my discussion with the store clerk. “Did he laugh or did he act troubled?” Shoko asked.

“He seemed pretty uncomfortable,” I said.

“Now why would you deliberately trouble the store clerk when you know that symbol doesn’t have any meaning in Japan?” she asked.

“Because I wanted him to realize that it has meaning outside of Japan.”

“Lots of people in Japan wear Crosses or the Star of David, but it doesn’t mean we’re religious. Japanese people just think they’re cool designs. It’s the same way with the swastika.”

“It’s not cool,” I said. “There are people dead because of that flag.”

With her usual patience, Shoko calmly responded, “I didn’t say it was cool. I said some Japanese people think the design is cool. And you knew ahead of time that no one cares about the meaning, so why did you bother the sales clerk? Would you be that rude back in America?”

I like to think that I would be. But I do understand her point. You have to choose your battles, and, as I said above, what power does a symbol have stripped of its context?

My Japanese tutor said the same thing. In Japan no one thinks about the meaning, so the shop clerk was probably caught totally off guard by my questions, and thought I was just some strange foreigner.

One final thought before I wrap this entry up: I’m not the only one to notice the strange acceptance of the swastika in Japan. Within weeks of first arriving in Japan, my successor Josh remarked to me how surprised he was to see a Japanese teenager on the train next to him with a swastika tattooed on his arm. I retold my story. We came to the same conclusion. He probably wasn’t a white supremacist. He probably associated it more with punk rock music than with National Socialism. But he had severely limited the number of foreign countries he can now safely travel in. (Josh writes about the event on his weblog here.)

Link of the Day
Suppose you were just thinking to yourself, "I really wish there was a pornographic movie that combined arousing sexual situations with the tomes of Noam Chomsky". The Japanese movie industry has got you covered. Read more here.