H-Japan MJHW (Online Meeting) on Rightward Pragmatic Drift among Tibetans in Japan - Friday, September 10th

Discussion published by Joelle Nazzicone on Wednesday, September 1, 2021

Please join us for the next meeting of the Modern Japan History Workshop onFriday, September 10th at 6 pm JST. Our presenter this month will be Stephen Christopher (Tokyo Metropolitan University), who will present his work on rightward pragmatic drift among Tibetans in Japan (details below).

This month’s session will be held online through ZOOM, and can be accessed using the following sign-in information:

Meeting link: https://u-tokyo-ac-jp.zoom.us/j/81798418359

The password for the meeting will be posted at the top of theMJHW website from September 6th onwards.

The workshop is open to all, and no prior registration is required.

Please direct any questions to Joelle Nazzicone at [email protected]. We hope to see you there!

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Rightward Pragmatic Drift among Tibetans in Japan

Stephen Christopher (Tokyo Metropolitan University)

In the 1960s, five Tibetan schoolboys were relocated from India to Saitama, near Tokyo. The story of their relocation and subsequent role in Japanese Anti-Communist cultural politics has received almost no scholarly attention. The most prominent first- and second-generation Tibetans are still alive and their narratives are unique when juxtaposed with the Tibetan diaspora settled in western countries. In the case of Japan, many of the sponsors were Japanese rightists who exerted considerably influence; moreover, between the 1970s-90s, Tibetans struggled to belong (and garner political support for Tibetan independence) because many Japanese leftists were opposed the ‘Dalai Lama clique’ and shared sympathies with Chinese Communism. Tibetan narratives, full of loss and potential, show how the Tibetan diaspora in Japan were (and still sometimes are) pragmatically drifting rightward to accommodate their patrons: Japanese rightwing, militaristic, pas-Asianist and anti-Han groups. Through ethnographic findings with Tibetans and Japanese supporters, I argue that while political self-identification is messy in Japan, the contemporary Left/Right political polarity of the Tibetan support community has its roots in post-war anti-Communist politics. I argue that Tibetan rightward pragmatic drift mirrors the niche positioning of Tibetan Buddhism in Japan--and impacts everything from Chinese propaganda, Japanese volunteerism, transnational patronage and Tibetan sociality.

Citation: Joelle Nazzicone. MJHW (Online Meeting) on Rightward Pragmatic Drift among Tibetans in Japan - Friday, September 10th. H- Japan. 09-01-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/20904/discussions/8178404/mjhw-online-meeting-rightward-pragmatic-drift-among-tibetans Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1