Saturday 18 May 2019

more kimono thoughts....

Okay, I'm still waiting for any sort of response from peeps who feel we must stop offending Japanese people by using the descriptor "kimono"...

In the meantime I've been up to other mischief....I just posted this to the blog of Emily Ito who is one the people who originally made the call to action that non Japanese clothes designers should stop using the word kimono because it's an unacceptable cultural appropriation. One of the premises she expressed is that it would be way in which contemporary Americans could make amends to Japanese-Americans who were put in US internment camps in WW2.

Debating on grounds of moral equivalence is often a perilous course....

This is the comment I posted, it is still awaiting moderation, and I offer to eat all my kimonos without wasabi if it gets published....


Emily Ito, may I invite you to reflect on the people who were interned by the Japanese govt in WW2? Do you have an opinion about the 130,000 people of non Japanese race who were detained in camps inside Japan at the outbreak of war? Do you have any opinion to express about the substantially larger number of Koreans and Chinese who were held in concentration camps by the Japanese Imperial Army? Do the people of Japanese-American descent who you call on to support your cause, to make the use of the word kimono an unacceptable cultural appropriation, are they aware of the war crime committed by the Japanese army when they stormed St Stephens College in Hong Kong which had been a military hospital and murdered all the wounded allied soldiers? Are they aware of the 600 detainees who had died in the Stanley Internment camp by the end of the war due to malnutrition, physical beatings and starvation?

Can you acknowledge that in the North American internment camps not a single person died of malnutrition or starvation. Not a single internee was forced into slave labour. Not a single Japanese woman internee was forced to become a sex slave for the army. Not a single internee was beaten or executed in public as way of keeping the other internees in fear and well behaved.

I bring up these historical facts because you have suggested that contemporary Americans should make amends for wrongs that were done to Japanese citizens due to their internment in World War Two (a war that ended 75 years ago)

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