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argyrocratie · 4 years

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1. For scholars, I’m always interested if there were formative life experiences which led them to pursue their specific field of study. Were there any events or figures which led you to research collaboration and translation between Japanese and Russian Anarchists?

Your question about life experiences is an interesting one. Our memories of life experiences often lead us unconsciously to (re)examine our world in a particular way. We are usually unable and unwilling to recognize this tendency, so we create narratives that allow us to live within such invented narratives. We tell stories that conveniently makes sense afterward, and which continue to change over time as we ourselves change. Our autobiographical narratives would appear to be the most accurate, but they are possibly the most inaccurate form of narrative. We’re all very good at pretending as if we know what led to what… We’re natural storytellers for our own psychological well-being. I guess our death-bound subjectivity leads to such creativity. So to respond honestly to your question, ‘I do not know’ is probably the most accurate answer.

Having said that, I imagine that my interest in Russia and Japan may have had something to do with my unhappiness with formal schooling in Japan back in the 1980’s when I grew up. I have almost no memories of my school life in Japan – it’s like a big blank in my mind, as if it had never happened, probably because I hated it. It became stronger as elementary school progressed. I still remember clearly when I asked in Year 7, which is when children began studying English as a requirement, why we were studying only one foreign language and why that had to be English. I failed to understand why English language should have so much power over us. The teacher answered that that’s the language required to get into high school. I responded, ‘If I don’t go to high school, then I don’t need to learn it?’ His response was that I was a bad influence on my classmates. I was asked to leave the classroom and stand outside. I got beat up by the teachers and had to stand outside the classroom, but none of this served to help me understand – in fact just the opposite.

I began to realize that the problem was too large to solve in one classroom. Of course I threw away my English texts at the time. My schoolmates came to me with admiration and reverence for what I said and did – they agreed with me — yet they themselves did and changed nothing, fearful of saying anything and doing anything. It was as if nothing happened. The best students academically were the wisest, as they knew how to do well in such a system.

That was the pattern of my everyday school years. So I quit and became a school dropout, drinking by myself in the park from the morning, while my peers were preparing for their exams. My confrontation with modern state education had started much earlier, almost as soon as I was asked to go to school, but I won’t go on about that here. This sort of experience, and countless more, probably influenced how I saw the world, and played a part in what I wrote decades later. I was quite seriously concerned about that country’s future.

My early interest in Esperanto language (not that I studied it then) had something to do with this, for example, in that Esperanto is a kind of linguistic solution to all sorts of discrimination.

My interest in Russia was formed in this same way, because Russia was always so hidden in Japanese education. In Japan they never talked about the Soviet Union in school back then, as if it did not exist, or as if it were something bad and scary to talk about. If English had celebrity status, Russian was the opposite. So I ended up doing my undergraduate education in Russia.

Similarly, the military in Japan is always hidden from public sight and scrutiny. ‘The military does not exist in Japan,’ they used to say. So I became interested in military affairs precisely because of that. Of course, the requirement to study English has a lot to do with a longer and broader global history and, more immediately, Japan’s defeat in the Asia-Pacific war. This intertwining of the hidden presence of the Japanese military with the all pervasiveness of English language probably also had something to do with my becoming a cadet at a military university in the US, where I trained in military affairs while learning Chinese and Russian languages— remnants of the Cold War. This university possessed a highly rated Russian language program, including the best summer Russian program at the time. I ended up representing the US military school in the Russian/Soviet city of Tula, a military industrial complex that had just opened to foreigners the year I came. So I was ‘the first foreigner from the West’ (as Russians used to labeled me then) to enter that city since it was closed during the Soviet period.

Funnily enough, nearby Tula is also the Russian writer Lev Tolstoi’s estate home. I first encountered Tolstoi, who was to become an important part of my book, while I was living in Tula as an undergraduate. But it was not through the front gate of the Tolstoi Museum that I encountered him, but through a back way, when my Russian friends and I went to ‘gulyat’, walk around aimlessly to smoke and joke, to rest, or to swim in the same pond that Tolstoi used to swim in. The water looked filthy, smelly and green, but nevertheless… That was my first real encounter with Tolstoi – imagining him swimming in that pond on the estate neighboring the city that decades later would become a Soviet military industrial complex. When we did go to the Tolstoi house and museum for no particular reason, I did notice that his house had preserved a surprising number of books and letters in Japanese, which made me curious. Also, I realized then that the microbiologist Ilya Mechnikov and other scientists befriended him, despite his embrace of a pastoral, simple life of manual labor. I became curious about these people who were from such different backgrounds and professions, and yet appeared to be networked in multiple ways to one another, directly or indirectly. So yes, my curiosity was there then. But frankly, at that time, just to make my body move was tiring at the end of the Soviet regime. Especially being the first foreigner ‘from the West’ as a first-year undergraduate, without any family or friend connections, with endless shortages of everything, my primary focus was finding food to survive however I could — not scholarship.

Before my university studies, I had also become homeless for a good while in a number of countries. While I slept on the street, I was still holding on to my 9th-year school completion certificate as if that was going to help me. But quite the contrary, the certificate was of no value at all. I didn’t realize it then. While I slept on the street, I had many encounters with other homeless, as well as certain ‘tribes’ of outcastes (whether ethnic, racial, immigrant, social, intellectual or otherwise) in various countries. In the US, some of these ‘teachers’, as I used to consider them, were often the disposable and hurting veterans of America’s various wars. Some of them told me about America’s de-institutionalization policy, which released patients, many of whom were vets, from mental and other hospitals onto the streets. I am not an Americanist or sociologist and have no idea what led to all this homelessness among folks with war injuries in both mind and body. I have no idea if what they told me was true either. This type of experience, nevertheless, also helped lead to my interest in the problem of seeing like a state, not only in Japan, but internationally, creating a global if not transnational ‘underground’ world. On the streets of New Zealand, I encountered people of various ethnic and national backgrounds. I was wanted to learn more about what tied certain Maoris to the Malaysians, and Indians to others underground, with various ethnic and religious backgrounds, who made themselves invisible and escaped such national labels.

Ultimately, while homeless, I started speaking to God without an ‘o’ — not ‘God’ as a historical artifice, in the narrative sense, but Gxd without Being, without church, Bible, preacher, etc. It was just me and Gxd, always and everywhere, in an intimate relationship. I had lost utterance being alone there. I didn’t want to be a part of capitalist modernity (I didn’t call it as such then, it was more like ‘the money-centered empty culture of post-war Japan’ or some such expression I had), but to avoid being part of it had made me homeless. There was no one other than myself to justify my derailment. I felt then that if no one followed me, even if they agreed with me, then at least I should act alone. When you have no one else to talk to on the street, you naturally develop a conversation with Gxd about right and wrong. Without that experience, I probably couldn’t have thought about ‘anarchist religion’, a term that I invented, then discovered in historical reality, as a term to make sense of what was in fact there. Then I had to make sense of the space-time that had necessitated such an idea.

So this might have been an influence on my interests. It probably led me to be curious about the history of thought and practices that overturned the existing culture. My skepticism about any institutionalized knowledge that was in the interest of the state within the rigid departmentalization of modern institutions, and the accompanying politics of knowledge, all made me want to think outside them. Applying that to modern Japanese history many years later has at least partly led me to disclose anarchist modernity as a major cultural and intellectual current in Japan. All this is in hindsight of course. Until you asked me, I hadn’t thought about such links. But my attempt to create new approaches to study the history of modern Japan outside the fold of ‘West’-, Soviet- or Japan-centric historicity to make sense of the intellectual phenomena captured in my book, in hindsight had something to do with some of these ‘life experiences’.

(...)

#russia #japan #sho konishi #anarchism #long post

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shinobicyrus · 6 years

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My Christmas Truce fic for @rainosa, who asked for “Danny & parents angst.” I angsted the best I could manage this close to Christmas.

“...You redecorated.”

Tucker turns around and furrows his brow at him. It’s a stupid thing to say, but it’s the first thing Danny can think of as he stands in the doorway to Tucker’s room, the strap of his duffel digging into his shoulder.

“Huh?” Tucker looked around for confirmation. “Oh! Right, yeah. I moved some things around like...last semester? I think?”

Last semester? Has it really been that long since he visited Tuck at his house? New anime scrolls have replaced the last of the posters that had been around since middle school. The bookshelf has been moved to make space for a brand new desk, where Tuck’s computer is humming and idle. At least that was the same- unless Tucker’s been replacing its innards again.

No, except for the bed in the same old corner, Tuck’s room is practically unrecognizable. It’s been a lot longer than just one semester since Danny’s stepped foot in his best friend’s room, and he never even realized.

Too busy with ghost-drama, probably.

Tucker opens his arms to indicate the room, still littered with rumpled old clothes, comic books, and tech magazines. “Well, mi casa and whatever, I’m failing Spanish.”

“Tucker, you speak fluent Esperanto with Wulf. How are you failing Spanish?”

“Can never find time to finish the homework. It’s okay, I’ll just ace the final and squeak by.” He sweeps aside some t-shirts to excavate the carpeting underneath. “Uh...you can put your stuff here. Sorry, I wasn’t expecting-”

“It’s fine.” Danny throws his duffel bag down on the cleared floor space and braces for the inevitable question.

Instead, Tucker asks: “You want to watch a movie or fight off a demon-invasion on Mars?”

Danny releases a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “Maybe just a movie. Scientists accidentally opening a portal to hell sounds a little too...”

“Relevant to our current situation?”

"Yeah. That.” Danny sits down on Tucker’s bed and winces when he feels something very not-cushiony or bedlike. He rummages underneath and pulls out a thick comicbook with a werewolf-looking woman in frayed clothes on the cover. Tucker practically dives across the room to snatch it out of Danny’s hands as he just starts flipping through it.

“Ha-ha that’s not a movie what’s this where did it even come from what a mystery.” Tucker quickly banishes it to his bookshelf.

Danny raises any eyebrow. “The Den of Empress She-Wolf?”

“I am invoking the ‘no-judgements’ clause of our friendship.”

“Wow, it must be really bad.”

Tucker scowls in a vain effort to hide the blush coloring his cheeks, making Danny laugh. It feels good, feeling the tension from the past few hours dissolve in a short fit of giggles.

Yeah, coming here had been a good idea.

He lets Tucker choose the movie, and they both sit down on the bed with their backs against the wall. At least the TV hadn’t been moved since the last time Danny had been over.

He doesn’t really pay attention to the movie. It’s difficult to focus on anything for too long. At some point, Tucker’s Mom knocks softly and shows up with a gigantic bowl of stovetop popcorn. Danny doesn’t know what cover story Tucker fed his parents, but it had to be close enough to the truth, judging by the concerned look she thinks she’s hiding.

“Thanks, Mrs. Angela.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble. Just made a little too much, is all. You boys are settled in for the night?”

“Yes, Mom,” Tucker groans like he’s suffering.

“Fine, fine, I won’t keep bothering you.”

Danny’s phone pings in his pocket. Without even looking, he reaches in and silences it. He doesn’t need to see who it is- all of his friends have their own ringtone.

Tucker looks at him, wearing the exact same look his mom just had. “Are you gonna check your-”

“Hit play, we’re in the middle of my favorite scene,” Danny says. It’s not a lie; Andrew Garfield really shines with classic Spider-Man sass against that carjacker.

Tucker looks like he wants to say something, but finally relents and starts the movie back up again. Danny releases another breath he’d been holding.

He doesn’t remember falling asleep. The room’s dark when he jolts awake; still muddled, Danny briefly thinks just for a moment, that he’s home.

Tucker is sitting cross-legged at the end of the bed near Danny’s feet, the light from his laptop screen painting deep shadows and harsh digital. The memory of where he is and why he’s there settles back into his headspace like a sharp slap of focus. Danny knuckles at the crust and dark circles around his eyes. “What time is it?”

“A little past one.” Tucker keeps his gaze on the screen, keeping the manic tempo of clacking computer keys. Danny has no idea how that didn’t wake him. Maybe he’s gotten too good at grabbing whatever sleep he can, or his subconscious finds unmistakable Tucker-noises comforting.

Danny sits up and reaches out blindly for his phone, but this isn’t his room and Tucker keeps his nightstand on the other side, so he just ends up slapping his hand against the wall. Tucker wordlessly pulls Danny’s phone from someplace and hands it to him, somehow still typing one-handed.

“Thanks.” He looks at the blanket pooled around him that wasn’t there before. “I took your bed,” He says it like an apology.

“S’okay. You looked like you needed it. That thing was buzzing up a storm, by the way.”

He’s right. The lockscreen says Danny has fifteen new messages. Sighing, Danny plugs in Sam’s birthday and checks them. Text messages from Jazz and Danielle, updating him and asking if he’s okay. No missed phone calls from his parents, thank God.

The last call made on the phone was technically yesterday, when he called Tucker and asked if he could stay the night. Thirty seconds was all his voice could manage, at the time.

Even though Tucker had told him the time, it hadn’t registered until Danny’s looking at the clock on his phone and sees the missed notification he scheduled. Danny sits up straighter. “Patrol!” He blurts out. “I completely-”

“Already taken care of,” Tucker keeps coding. “Val and Sam are handling it.”

“Those two...together?”

He shrugged. “I dunno man, I think they had a secret meeting and hashed out their differences when we weren’t looking.”

Danny double-checked his messages, but there wasn’t anything from Sam or Val.

“So...uh.” Tucker clears his throat. “Jazz filled me in. While you were asleep. Actually, before you got here, too.”

“She...did?”

“Yeah....her, Sam, and me kinda had this planned out for a while, now. For when it happened.”

“Oh.” He can’t quite look Tucker in the eyes. It’s...he guesses he shouldn’t be surprised. He’s actually really touched, that they had his back when he didn’t ask for it- that they were ready for whatever happened and never told him so he wouldn’t feel any more pressure than he already was.

“You told them.” Tucker says it not like a question.

“Yeah.”

“And...now you’re staying here.”

“It...didn’t go well.” Danny finally drags his eyes up to Tuck’s. “How much did Jazz tell you?”

“Just that shit went down and Operation We-Never-Decided-On-A-Name was in effect. She didn’t think it was right to say anything more unless you were ready.”

He should have guessed Jazz wouldn’t just blab about everything. His big sister was a lot of things (see also: meddling, anal, way too cheery at seven a.m.) but she’s been surprisingly good with boundaries and keeping his secrets, after the first few hiccups. “Wanna know the funny thing? It wasn’t the half-ghost thing.”

“But...what else would it be?”

“Don’t get me wrong, it just about gave them a heart attack, but things didn’t get bad until I told them everything.”

Tucker’s eyes widen. “Everything, everything?”

Danny chuckles sadly. “Turns out, finding out your best friend from college is secretly a ghost-monster trying to kill you and/or destroy your marriage is one thing, but your own kids knowing about it and lying about it?”

“Ooohhh.” Tucker nods. “That.”

“Yeah. That. And since things couldn’t possibly get any worse, I thought: ‘why not just rip off the filthy band-aid that is my life all at once and tell them about their clone-daughter, too?’”

Tucker winces. “Ooohhhh crap.”

“And that’s when the yelling started.” Danny changes his voice in a poor imitation of his mother. “’She’s just a little girl, how could you let her run away on her own!’ I mean, yeah, I definitely deserved that- but she had Valerie looking after her, and it’s not like I could force Danielle to do anything she didn’t want to do! And with Vlad I tried to explain how I had it under control, like, we had a mutually assured secret identity thing going on- he stopped trying to actively murder Dad years ago. All our stuff was strictly foiling evil plots and him beating the crap out of me sometimes.”

“And the cloning.” Tucker adds.

“Okay yeah that too, which is sort of how Danielle got name-dropped by sorta accident in the first place, but then they had the gall to berate me for not trusting them!” It’s like being back in the living room all over again. Danny’s fist is balled so tight his nails are biting crescents into his palms, and in the dark he can tell his eyes started blazing green again, which probably hadn’t helped things with his ghost-hunter parents, much.

“Trust? I’m like, Trust?! How can ever really trust people that have tried to shoot me on sight, before? That have spent whole family meals talking about dissecting me ‘molecule by molecule.’ How can I trust people that build a goddamn portal to the netherworld in their basement and put their family and the whole freaking town in danger every. Single. Day?!”

They’d been appalled when he exploded on them, even Jazz looked uncomfortable, even if it was all thing’s she’d been saying for years- if a bit gentler. Looking back on it- replaying the whole thing over again- made his heart pound with residual panic.

But Tucker? Tucker just nods and listens.

Danny has to swallow down the sudden dryness squeezing his throat. “I blamed them.” He manages, throat hoarse. “I blamed everything on them. I told them their stupid portal turned me into this, and I looked them in the eye and said I saw the first accident, the one that made Vlad, and I said that if they wanted to angry at anyone, they should look in a mirror first.”

“Ouch,” Tucker says. “Not exactly inaccurate, but ouch.”

“It was around then I decided staying there was probably a bad idea and packed a bag.”

“That’s...probably for the best.” Tucker nods. “Get some distance, clear your head.”

“You and Sam kind of came up too.”

“We did?”

Danny makes sound resembling a laugh. “They asked if you guys knew. I don’t think I laughed harder in my entire life.”

Tucker blinks at him, slowly processing what he’d said, then bursts into a shoulder shaking laugh. “Oh my God. They actually asked if we knew?”

Danny chortles. “I know, right! I was like, ‘how do you think I even survived this long without going crazy’?”

Tucker’s so far gone he’s slapping his eye and wheezing desperately. “You literally yell ‘I’m Going Ghost!’ in the hallways at school! Even if you didn’t tell us, we’d have figured it out in like, a week!”

“I know!”

“Jazz figured you out!”

“I knooow!” Danny keels over with laughter, tears streaming down his face.

Tucker wipes a tear from his eye. “And-heheh- and I think Sam would have noticed that her boyfriend’s eyes freaking glowed whenever they- wait- did you tell them you and Sam are-”

“God no, are you kidding? What am I, nuts?”

That just ignites a whole new round of laughter- they’re probably too loud, Tucker’s parents are two rooms away and might be wondering what sounds like a pair of cackling lunatics coming from their son’s room. But Danny and Tucker surrender to it and fall together in a heap on the bed, still shaking with little leftover giggles.

They lay there quietly in the dark on the bed like they used to in grade school. Back then staying up into one-am was a huge deal, devouring junk food, playing video games, and watching gory age-inappropriate movies action movies.

Now they usually stayed up this late hunting ghosts and cramming what little homework they could manage before falling asleep in exhaustion.

Danny suddenly feels very tired.

“What are we supposed to do now, Tuck?”

He didn’t even hesitate. “Stay here the rest of the weekend, eat unhealthy shit, and bingewatch bad anime from my hard drive?”

“God yes. You’re the best.”

“Hahah, hell yeah. Who’s best friend now?”

“Still Sam, but for completely different reasons.”

“No fair, I think I’ve proven I can totally pull off that same skirt.”

“I love you, Tuck, but that was so wrong.”

“Don’t shame me I got fifty bucks outta that deal and my legs looked great.”

Danny snorts back a laugh- and freezes when his phone buzzes.

Tucker waits a few moments for Danny’s head to stop pounding quite so fast before asking. “That Jazz again?”

“...no.” Danny’s shaking fingers fumble the password twice before he manages to bring up the single text message:

Mom [1:37am]: Never forget you’re my baby boy and I will always love you

Tucker might be right about the best friend thing after all. He doesn’t say a word while Danny cries quietly on his bed. Just sits up, pulls the blanket over the both of them, and starts typing a comfortable rhythm on his laptop again.

#christmas truce 2017 #rainosa #danny phantom #tucker foley #merry christmas #hope you enjoy it #i did my best to angst #but about 50% of how *i* deal with personal crisisies is to ignore them and sleep until they go away #(spoiler: that usually doesn't work)#also sorry i guess my subconscious solution to angst is friend-bonding and laughing to make the hurt go away #i make a terrible #phantomrose96 #my writing #my fanfiction

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