"It would be foolish to ignore the anxieties and anger of those who have flocked to Trump with a passion they have shown for no other presidential candidate in decades."
Brandishing the slogan “The Chinese Must Go!” and demanding an eight-hour workday and public works jobs for the unemployed, the party grew rapidly. Only a few white labor activists objected to its racist rhetoric. The WPC won control of San Francisco and several smaller cities and played a major role in rewriting California’s constitution to exclude the Chinese and set up a commission to regulate the Central Pacific Railroad, a titanic force in the state’s economy. Soon, however, the WPC was torn apart by internal conflicts: Kearney’s faction wanted to keep up its attack on the Chinese “menace,” but many labor unionists wanted to focus on demands for a shorter workday, government jobs for the unemployed, and higher taxes on the rich.
Yet populist activists and politicians in Kearney’s mold did achieve a major victory. In 1882, they convinced Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act—the first law in U.S. history to bar members of a specific nationality from entering the country. Two decades later, activists in the California labor movement spearheaded a fresh campaign to pressure Congress to ban all Japanese immigration. Their primary motivation echoes the threat that Trump sees coming from Muslim nations today: Japanese immigrants, many white workers alleged, were spies for their country’s emperor who were planning attacks on the United States. The Japanese “have the cunning of the fox and the ferocity of a bloodthirsty hyena,” wrote Olaf Tveitmoe, a San Francisco union official, who was himself an immigrant from Norway, in 1908. During World War II, such attitudes helped legitimize the federal government’s forced relocation of some 112,000 Japanese Americans, most of whom were U.S. citizens.
Even some populist orators who railed against immigrants generated support for laws, such as the eight-hour workday, that, in the end, helped all wage earners in the country, regardless of their place of birth.
Populism has had an unruly past. Racists and would-be authoritarians have exploited its appeal, as have more tolerant foes of plutocracy. But Americans have found no more powerful way to demand that their political elites live up to the ideals of equal opportunity and democratic rule to which they pay lip service during campaign seasons. Populism can be dangerous, but it may also be necessary.
Good Afternoon and Happy Mother's Day! Congratulations to Tokyo Pride Parade on celebrating your fifth anniversary. I am proud to be the first U.S. Ambassador to speak here and join you in making Golden Week Rainbow Week!
In America, we strive to live up to the promises of freedom and equality on which our country was founded. The fight for full civil rights has been waged by African-Americans, women, people with disabilities, and the LGBT community. The courage of committed individuals who fight for justice reminds all of us that when one person is discriminated against because of what they look like, what god they believe in, or who they love - none of us are truly free. Today we reaffirm that LGBT rights are human rights.
In the United States, in Japan, and around the world, too many LGBT students are bullied, LGBT adults face discrimination, and LGBT teenagers commit suicide in heartbreaking numbers. Today we recommit ourselves to fight intolerance and cruelty, to reach out to those who are suffering.
Young people need to know that there are people who love them the way they are. The elderly should not face discrimination when they visit their partner in a hospital. And everyone should be able marry who they love. When we understand our differences, treat everyone with respect, and celebrate our diversity - that's when we will be able to build a world at peace.
DOING BAD BY DOING GOOD Despite its checkered past on gay rights—the State Department expelled gay employees in the 1950s—the United States under President Barack Obama has dramatically changed its policy. In February 2015, the State Department appointed Randy Berry as the first U.S. special envoy for LGBT rights. At the time, Secretary of State John Kerry emphasized the importance of “defending and promoting” the rights of LGBT individuals to American diplomacy. More recently, the U.S. ambassador to Sweden Azita Raji marched in the Stockholm Pride Parade, and in India, the U.S. Embassy lit up its facade in rainbow colors after the June shootings at a gay nightclub in Orlando.
Yet in much of the Arab Middle East, where populations overwhelmingly oppose homosexuality (including 95 percent of Egyptians and 97 percent of Jordanians), LGBT-rights promotion is more complicated. There, widespread hostility to gay rights puts the United States in a difficult position. One might argue that just as Washington has aggressively advocated for women’s rights and the welfare of religious minorities across the globe, so too should it consistently and publicly back gay rights, even if that means rebuffing foreign governments. Such a forceful approach, however, contradicts the wishes of many LGBT people actually living in the Arab Middle East.
It is important that an Obama visit to Hiroshima send the right message, highlighting the beginning of a new chapter in U.S.-Japanese relations above all else. Therefore it is important that both sides craft a narrative that dispels as much partisanship as possible. To do so, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe should attend memorial services for the 75th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks later this year as a show of goodwill in return for any similar U.S. gesture. For Abe, this would have a number of strategic benefits.
Attending the Pearl Harbor memorial services would also help Abe deflect attention from some of his more controversial actions, such as his December 2013 visit to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine. Abe ignored stern warnings from the United States and touched off a historical row with China and South Korea by visiting the memorial to Japan’s war dead, which also honors convicted war criminals who committed atrocities against Chinese and Korean citizens. Beijing and Seoul lodged diplomatic protests, and officials in China summoned the country’s ambassador, Masato Kitera. It could also help silence the criticism that Abe encountered when he convened a government panel in 2014 that needlessly reexamined Japan’s landmark apology to comfort women in 1993. The official purpose was to take a thorough look at the research and diplomacy that led to its creation, but the action created the perception that Tokyo wanted to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the policy, even though Japan said it would not recall the statement.
Laïcité Without Égalité Can France Be Multicultural? By Jonathan Laurence “Imagine” by John Lennon has become the impromptu French anthem after a pianist’s moving performance in front of the blood-soaked Bataclan concert hall the morning following last week’s attack in Paris. It is not hard to hear strains of “La Marseillaise” in this secular prayer for “a brotherhood of man.” But beyond such fraternité, Lennon also imagines a world without religion, and that is something few French agree on. French Christians, Muslims, Jews, and others are as angered as everyone else by the “holy war” being waged by the self-proclaimed Islamic State (also known as ISIS). But they do not necessarily subscribe to the idea of a post-religious society, as France sometimes appears to be, any more than they embraced Charlie Hebdo’s brand of satire. They heard “Je suis Charlie” not as a defense of press freedom or a right to offend, but as a barb directed at them. On Sunday, a former senior government official gave a scathing interview demanding that Muslim representatives stop “shirking responsibility.”
等身大の人形が住民より多い徳島の集落 ドイツ人制作のドキュメンタリー、海外でも話題に【画像】 The Huffington Post | 執筆者： 中野渉 投稿日: 2014年06月06日 06時49分 JST ドイツの映画制作者フリッツ・シューマンさんのドキュメンタリー映像「Valley of Dolls（人形の谷）」が、海外で話題となっている。徳島県の山あいの限界集落で等身大の人形を作り続ける女性と、人形を捉えた作品だ。
I visited Nagoro in November 2013 to film my documentary, Valley of the Dolls, and to introduce Tsukimi’s strange creations to a Western audience for the first time. When I arrived, Nagoro was eerily silent. There were no murmurs or conversations, no humming of machines, and no shouts of playing children. Only the Iya River made a steady noise, gushing down its valley. The lone road to the town is just a single lane, twisting and turning alongside the mountain and shrouded in complete darkness at night. A visiting car is a rare sight in this village, situated high in the mountains and one hour away from the next traffic intersection. Yet, almost all travelers who pass through stop once they see the dolls. Tsukimi made all her dolls by hand out of wood, cotton, old paper, and donated clothes. She says that for her, the lips are one of the hardest parts to get right. “A little tweak and they can look angry,” she told me. But, “I’m very good at making grandmothers. I pull the strings at the mouth and they smile.” At least 70 of her dolls sit, stand, or crouch just outside her house and she has placed another 20 inside her living room. The rest are scattered throughout the village and the eastern side of the Iya Valley. Altogether, Tsukimi believes she has created at least 350 dolls over the last eleven years. But she hasn’t kept count and isn’t sure that number is right. The dolls, which initially served as scarecrows, last up to three years, so she has had to fix and replace them quite often. Sometimes, she even forgets where she has put them.
The Japanese government has been aware of the looming ghost-town problem—of shrinking communities in mountain regions or islands—since the 1960s, when mass urban migration first began. Over the years, Tokyo has passed a number of laws and reforms to address the lack of development in remote areas. But most of them failed or were shortsighted.
The government’s initial approach in the 1960s was to create self-supporting communities that do not require outside aid or labor to survive. In the case of Nagoro, a dam was built to power the valley, which largely lacked electricity even late into the second half of the twentieth century. For a time, the concept of self-sustainability worked. Several hundred people moved back to Nagoro and the town thrived. But after construction wrapped up, they all left for the cities again. The dam still stands.
Since the self-support era, Tokyo has introduced at least one new plan a decade to improve rural development. Ideas have ranged from providing financial incentives to attract returnees to creating more construction projects. The current approach, introduced by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s administration in the early 2000s, harks back to the idea of self-sustaining communities. This plan promotes local agriculture and food production. The concept is to use empty spaces for farming, which could create jobs, generate tourism, or, at the very least, provide a pastime and livelihood for senior citizens. That would, in turn, create a market for healthy, locally produced food, in which urban areas might show interest.
