2020/6/21, Sun.

　（……）マスコットの熊と滑稽なスパゲッティのあいだで、スタジオにいるわれらの民族学者たちは、形式の上でエキゾティックな東洋を公準として立てることに何の苦労もしないだろう。それは、実際には根底において西洋と似ている、少なくとも唯心的な西洋と似ている東洋なのである。東洋人も独自の宗教を持っているだって？　それはたいして問題にならない。そんなヴァリエーションなど、観念論の深奥の統一性にくらべたら、取るに足らないものだ。どの儀式も、そんなふうに、特殊化されると同時に永遠化され、刺激的なスペクタクルと擬似キリスト教のシンボルというレベルに同時に昇格させられる。そして仏教が文字通りキリスト教でないとしても、それはかまわない。なぜなら、同様に仏教にも、剃髪する尼や（尼僧になるという偉大にして悲壮な主題）、師僧に膝まずいて告解をする修道僧がいるわけだし、セビリヤと同じく、仏像を金で埋めにやって来る信徒たちがいるからである。諸宗教の同一性を最もよく際立たせるのは、つねに「形式」であるというのは本当だ。けれども、この同一性はそれらの宗教の仮面を剝ぐどころか、それらを即位させて、さらに高度なカトリックの長所ということにしてしまうのだ。
　いつでも諸説混合[シンクレティズム]は〈教会〉による同化の偉大な技術の一つだったことは、よく知られている。『失われた大陸』がそのキリスト教的な素地を見せてくれているこの同じ東洋において、十七世紀にはイエズス会が諸形式の世界的一致の運動をきわめて遠くまで推進した。それがマラバル式礼拝であったが、ローマ教皇は結局それを禁止するに至っている。例の民族学者たちがほのめかしているのも、この同じ「すべては似ている」である。東洋と西洋、すべては等しい。色の違いがあるだけだ。本質的なものは同一である。それは神に対する人間の永遠の請願であり、この人間の本性と比較すると、地理上の性格はつまらない偶然なものである。人間の本性についての鍵を握っているのは、キリスト教だけである。数々の伝説そのもの、あの「原始的」な民間伝承そのものは、この映画ではわれわれにその異質さが文字通り示されているように思うのだが、もっぱら「自然」を説明するという使命しか持っていない。儀礼や文化現象は、特殊な歴史的次元、明白な経済的・社会的地位規定とは、決して関係付けられておらず、もっぱら宇宙にまつわる紋切り型（季節、嵐、死などなど）の中性的な大規模の形態とだけ関係付けられている。（……）
　結局エキゾティシズムは、ここでその深い理由付けをあからさまにしている。それは歴史の状況をすべて否定することである。ほどよい土着的記号をいくつか東洋の現実に付け加えることによって、その現実を責任ある一切の内容から確実に免疫するのである。ごくわずかでも「状況」があれば、それがこのうえなく表面的なものであっても、必要なアリバイを提供して、より深い状況をなしで済ませてしまうのだ。異邦の人と向かい合ったとき、〈秩序〉は二つの振舞い方、いずれにしても切除であるような振舞い方しか知らない。彼を人形芝居として認識すること、あるいは、彼を西洋のたんなる反映として無力化してしまうことである。いずれにしても、要点は彼からその歴史を取り除いてしまうことである。（……）
　（下澤和義訳『ロラン・バルト著作集　3　現代社会の神話　1957』みすず書房、二〇〇五年、271～272; 「『失われた大陸』」; 初出: 『レットル・ヌーヴェル』誌、一九五六年二月号）


In 2016, the organization became a legally incorporated foundation. This occurred when the Korean Council for the Women Drafted was incorporated into The Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, a legally incorporated foundation that was formed under the Korean Council for the Women Drafted. This Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance was formed in opposition to the Japan-South Korea comfort women agreement, and it qualified as a legally incorporated foundation so that it could engage in independent fundraising activities.

In other words, the current Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance became a foundation by merging with a council of the same name that was in effect a “subsidiary” of the “parent company,” the Korean Council for the Women Drafted.

According to the articles of association, as listed on the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance’s own website, while this legally incorporated foundation has a governing board, it doesn’t have any members. While there are “supporters,” a status attained through donations, they are naturally not constituent members of the organization, but are no more than patrons who have no voice in the organization’s operations. In other words, this organization, despite its high domestic and international profile, is an extremely closed organization that is not open to new members.

So why has the comfort women issue, something of considerable interest to all South Koreans, been led by this closed organization? For an answer, we must go back to the 1990s, when the Korean Council for the Women Drafted, the predecessor to this organization, was formed. At the time, comfort women had yet to attract much attention, and the Korean Council for the Women Drafted was formed as an organization of a relatively small number of action groups. Because of the nature of the issue, it was difficult for the women concerned to share their own stories, and so a small number of activists campaigned on their behalf.

The Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance then inherited this “closed” approach, in contrast to one that might be called ideological and progressive. It is sometimes misunderstood, but the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance is not an organization made up of comfort women. This council is simply a support group. It acts as a representative for comfort women because of the difficulty of the women themselves traditionally had in speaking out.

But South Korea, and indeed the international community, has matured, and there is widespread understanding of the comfort women issue. Now, women can speak out on their own, and we are able to listen directly to what they have to say. In other words, there is no need for a few activists to lead a movement on their behalf.

Three major medical associations recently declared racism and police brutality public health crises. But I had long ago begun thinking of racism as a kind of social disease. I even gave it a name — Racial Diminishment Syndrome. This disease, like the coronavirus, is hard to detect, highly contagious and often deadly. Many of the infected exhibit no symptoms, but may be “spreaders.” When R.D.S. is active in public spaces (almost always), social distancing will decrease the likelihood of extreme illness or untimely death.

Consider recent cases like Ahmaud Arbery and Atatiana Jefferson: Cause of death — R.D.S. by way of jogging near white people and standing in a window where the police could see you, respectively. George Floyd’s alleged offense was passing a fake $20 bill at a convenience store. Corporate barons rob the American people daily to the tune of millions, but it was Floyd who got a knee to the neck.

　　　　　＊

In 2007, my wife and I moved to Charlottesville, Va. Before arriving I had been heartened by its electoral map — bright blue surrounded by socially menacing red. Once there, I soon learned that a blue town is in some ways worse than a red one because everyone is possessed of the conviction of their own racial virtues, and they’re almost all very wrong. My first three years in Charlottesville were spent coldly coming to terms with its radical segregation and the absence of a black middle class. I observed as the police harassed homeless black men on the beloved Downtown Mall while the white frat boys got to shamelessly litter the streets surrounding the University of Virginia with beer kegs. Dionysus surely considered these misfits his chosen ones.

By 2010, nine years after the day I could have died, I was hardly leaving the house. When I did venture out, I kept to myself, avoided small talk, went straight home after doing what I needed to do, grateful when I finally made it back to the safe comfort of my own home. Nothing in particular was happening in the world other than America just being America.

With middle age looming on the horizon, my tolerance for being a social other and possibly in danger just by walking out my front door was atrophying. The equation was becoming clearer in my mind: Me + white spaces = precarity. At the University of Virginia, where I was an assistant professor, I received lessons from senior colleagues who had the power to make or break my career on the need for humility in work I sought to publish. Then there was the time that a colleague, upon learning my wife and I had accepted positions at Yale, saw fit to walk into my office and quip, “If I were angry at you, I would tell you to go [expletive] … but I’m not!” He was angry, and he did effectively just tell me that. Social distance was needed; this man was a vector of R.D.S.

When the Black Lives Matter movement took hold in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, it was almost as if an incantation had been whispered into the ether, because for the next five years America turned into what looked like a sizzle reel for a black snuff film, as images of shot black body after choked black body after broken black body after dragged on the sidewalk black body after violently removed from the public pool black body made their way to our computers and phones. But this was just the most grotesque presentation of R.D.S. My own experiences on the ground were more mundane, but terrifying in ways one can’t quite put into words.

The northwestern edge of Yale’s campus is rimmed with expensive shops. The highlight of these is an Apple store. One especially sunny and optimistic-feeling day, as I was walking back to my office from grabbing lunch I witnessed a scene that triggered my subway memory. About 10 police officers and six vehicles, some of them vans big enough for several suspects, had converged on the body of a lone weeping young black male, about 20 years old by my guess. The police had him sitting in full display on the curb instead of in a car or wagon, thus a large white audience of Yale students were learning just how dangerous the New Haven natives were.

As I passed, I heard this young man sob: “What you expect me to do? I’m tired, I’m tired!” Maybe his onlookers were confused about his fatigue but I wasn’t. He was tired of a mega-rich institution that thrived despite the black poverty that circled the institution like a Trumpian wall. He was tired of things like Yale building two new residential colleges at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, yet to look at the construction crews at the building site right next to one of the blackest areas of New Haven, you’d swear someone had said, “Hire anyone except those black people over there.”

I didn’t care about whatever property he allegedly lifted from the Apple store because I know what had been lifted from him and others on the social edges — a sense of being full and fully respected members of the richest nation on earth. As I walked by this young man I could only wish he had kept his social distance. R.D.S. will get you.

By the time I reached my present job at Johns Hopkins University, I had essentially given up. When the small number of my black colleagues decided to challenge the university’s wish to establish an armed police force on campus, one likely to be staffed by former officers from the Baltimore Police Department — one of the deadliest in the nation — I never bothered to join them. Valiant as their attempt was, I know this: When fearful whites and co-opted blacks decide the scariest people on earth are poor blacks, absolutely nothing can stop them from putting the police between them and the black folks they help to keep scary.

The resolution went forward despite opposition and passed, but last week the administration decided to delay the arrival of the armed force by two years. In the face of entire cities defunding or disbanding the police, this can’t help but strike me as a hedge for a return of the status quo, rotten as it is. If these black people won’t stay in their designated spaces, the police will help remind them. It will be a great surprise if I am not driven to my keyboard within the next few years writing about our campus’s very own George Floyd moment. In the meantime, I keep my distance — I don’t want to be a candidate for such a moment.

  • 概ねだらだら遊んだ休日で、大したことはやっていない。一応日記は四時間弱書いたけれど、それは六月一九日と二〇日の下書きに過ぎない。
  • 六時前にアイロン掛け。スプレーボトルでシャツに水を吹きかけながら丁寧に行う。その後、食事の支度は母親がほとんどやってくれていたので、茹でてあった小松菜を切り分けて瓶詰めのなめ茸や辛子および醤油と混ぜた和え物だけ作って、夕食に。
  • テレビは『題名のない音楽会』。原田慶太楼という指揮者の人が出演している。この人は一か月ほど前におなじ番組を見たときにも、Toshiと共演するオーケストラの指揮者を務めていた。今回は指揮ではなくて、仲間を連れてサックスの合奏をする。原田氏自身はバリトンを吹いており、ほか、ソプラノからバスまで七、八人いたのではないか。バスサックスというものをはじめて見たけれど、かなり大きかった。曲目は"Sing, Sing, Sing"と米津玄師の"パプリカ"と、King Gnuの"白日"とかいうやつと、"上を向いて歩こう"。最後の曲は中村八大という作曲家が書いたものだが、この人はたしかジャズ方面の仕事もしていた人で、（……）図書館に彼の曲を取り上げたアルバムがひとつあったような覚えがある。
  • ほかのことは特に記憶していない。