Henry Nam

I read an article in the New York Times about Japan's policy of paying blue collar workers to leave the country.  The idea is to encourage foreigners to leave so free up jobs for native Japanese in response to the recession.  The immediate thing that comes to mind is that it seems racist, short-sighted, insulting on several levels, and ultimately, sad in its plethora of implications.  But the newspaper is pretty clear on its bias, so in my usual fashion, I'd like to try and put myself on the policy-maker's shoes.  

First of all, I'd like to establish that I'm coming from an elevated standpoint; I see the effects of our own economic downturn, but I've been fortunate enough that it hasn't had too significant of an effect on my jobs, but I suppose with being a musician and artist, when I have jobs, I'm simply not AS unemployed.  But I digress.  The Henry Rollins article I talked about earlier made pretty clear that I can pass whatever judgment may naturally come to me, but I'll never be comfortable being full convicted in my beliefs since I can't relate to the degree of suffering Japan is going through.  I'm sure the policy makers thought about how to best deal with the issue, and though it seems a lot of people disagree (at least the article makes it seem that way), I think that the policy is reflective of some residual beliefs in the country.

The article suggests that the policy is controversial.  That means that I should be careful in generalizing opinions as "Japan's" sentiment.  It's unfair to really claim that Japan has racist sentiments without mentioning that we have a fairly large, anti-immigrant population here in the US.  Japan is an island.  We have neighbors.  Sadly, the arguments for stricter border control make it seem like they with the US was an island.  However, as far as my history knowledge goes, Japanese decendant never engaged in systematic, mass genocide of the indigenous population when claiming the land.  Not on mainland Japan at least. 

I don't know.  It's just shocking that things have apparently reached a point where the country has adopted a policy of open discrimination in response to the economic situation (once again, not to say that our country is free is policies that are very openly discriminatory).  The thing that surprised me the most when writing through this is that I see so many parallels to troubles here in the US that make it difficult to even begin taking any sort of moral high ground.  

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In other news: busy, busy, busy.  I'm in the home stretch.  A few more weeks and things'll slow down academically for a bit.  I'm proud of my friends who are graduating and excited to see who I can.  My opinion still stands that the ceremonial aspect of my gradutation isn't something that's all too important to me now, and I feel that the celebration aspect of my eventual graduation will be expressed through how I use the education I've gained.  But maybe that'll change.

Freewebs has now just become Webs, and during the transition, it seems like a lot of things have changed.  As a result, a bunch of things on my website no longer work, so I plan on doing a overhaul and redo a lot of things.  Some of the immediate things on my mind:

1. Fix the music player
2. Update the video player/replace it with my YouTube page.
3. Update the links page
4. Update the Art section and fix the broken links
5. Update my gig schedule.