RKUL: Time Well Spent 08/08/2024

Dog Days of Summer '24 Edition

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Your time is finite. Your phone and the internet stand ready to help you squander it. Here are my latest picks for spending it well instead. Feel free to add more in the comments. 

Books, what else?

Japan’s recent stock market volatility, which served as a leading indicator for market corrections in the West in the first week of August, reminded me of the reality that the island nation is still an economic behemoth. Its GDP is still third or fourth in the world, depending on which statistic you favor (behind the US, China, and in some calculations, Germany). With 125 million citizens, there are more people in Japan than in any European nation west of the Russian Federation.

But oh, how the mighty have fallen! I’m of an age to remember the 1980’s, and the days when everyone was bullish on Japan Inc., to the point of even expecting that Japan might one day overtake the US. During the Reagan Era, Americans viewed Japan how we view China today, the upstart challenger who seemed to have our number. That ended with the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble in the 1990’s, followed by three decades of slow growth, an aging population and deflationary economy. Nevertheless, Japan is still an essential cog in the world economy. In 2022’s Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology, Japanese companies figure prominently because of their reputation for high quality. 

The nation has long been a conundrum. It is part of the developed world, and extremely integrated with Western nations, but retains its uniqueness. Of the Asian nations, Japan was the first to jump on the modernization wagon by copying aspects of Western society, from a legislature based on the British Parliament and the German Reichstag, to an industrialized economy. But after 150 years of missionary activity, only 1% of Japanese are Christian, and only a minority can speak or write in English. 

When asked, the Japanese will often tell you that their uniqueness owes to their ancient origins on an isolated archipelago. Over the last few years, we are finally starting to understand their ethnogenesis, helping fill in the gaps in our understanding of Japanese prehistory. But luckily there is also a surfeit of Japanese history given both the long tradition of literacy stretching back to the Fujiwara era and the 712 AD project to write down of the Kojiki, a compilation of myths and origin stories.

Richard Mason and J. G. Caiger’s transparently titled History of Japan is incredibly dense, stretching from prehistory down to modern times. Not only does it cover diplomatic and military history, it touches on important cultural changes like the arrival of Buddhism, and the first and second contacts with the West in the 16th and 19th centuries. Mason and Caiger provide a bedrock and framework around which you can understand particular epochs in Japanese history, and cultural peculiarities like the coexistence of indigenous Shinto with foreign Buddhism, in 408 pages. History of Japan is not a deep dive into the topic, but it gives you a reasonable outline you can flesh out later.

While History of Japan covers thousands of years over 408 pages, Marius Jansen’s The Making of Modern Japan takes 1,000 pages to tackle the last 400 years. Jansen begins his narrative with the first decades of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the regime that famously closed off Japan to outside influences for over 200 years. But the reforms of the 19th-century Meiji regime cannot be understood except in light of its reactive relationship to the framework of the previous dispensation, which was anything but backward. When Americans and Europeans opened up Japan, they found well administered cities, a government with a presence across the nation and a populace that was substantially literate. Though Westerners are usually familiar with Japan’s encounter with Commodore Perry in 1853 and the race to catch up with the West, The Making of Modern Japan also highlights intra-Japanese dynamics that came to the fore with the old order’s collapse. The early years of the post-Meiji Japanese regime saw the emergence of leaders and figures from the far western Satsuma region in Kyushu after centuries of suppression under the shogunate; later developments in the 20th century saw Tokyo’s re-emergence as the political, cultural and economic focal point of the nation, as it had been in earlier centuries under the Tokugawa. 

If The Making of Modern Japan excels in telling you how the modern nation-state emerged step by step from the viewpoint of insiders, Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels: Mainland Mirrors - Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands places the Japanese civilization in its broader Eurasian geopolitical context. Though Japan is broadly part of the Sinic civilizational zone, it is far less Confucian than Korea in part because of its greater geographic distance from Imperial China. Lieberman argues that, like Western Europe and Southeast Asia, Japan’s isolation from large steppe-based empires of Eurasia enabled its development of a unique and distinctive national identity. Strange Parallels clarifies that Japan’s high endogenous human capital is the reason that twice in its history, in the 16th and 19th centuries, it could so quickly and effectively integrate and assimilate European technologies and institutions. In 1600, Japan made some of the finest guns in the world, an industry the Tokugawa shut down. Similarly, in the 20th century, the Japanese quickly copied and surpassed American counterparts in many manufacturing sectors, from televisions to cars.

The next book, Japanese Mind: Understanding Contemporary Japanese Culture, might just be as different from Strange Parallels as possible; instead of a vast narrative, Japanese Mind explores narrow subjects like beauty, modesty and marriage. Many cultures feature singular and unique, but who besides Japan could produce internationally recognizable phenomena like Marie Kondo, a guru who synthesizes primitive indigenous animism with a post-modern and post-materialist 21st-century sensibility. It is a culture and nation both primal, still showing reverence for primitive tribal gods like the kami, and undeniably modern and technological, with Tokyo a gleaming metropolis seemingly transported from the future. Japanese Mind is a book that touches upon the core values and practices that produce such a unique nation.

Jumping back to the macro-scale, Chalmers Johnson’s MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975 is a survey of a period of massive catch-up economic growth when Japan seemed certain to be the future. More precisely, Johnson highlights the role of MITI, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, in dictating industrial policy and tightening the economic focus of Japanese firms. These were the bureaucrats who gave the captains of industry goals and targets, and shaped the priorities of Japan Inc. Written in the early 1980s, MITI and the Japanese Miracle felt like an extremely dated work between the 1990’s and 2010’s, the age of globalization and free trade. But today its lessons return to relevance, as the US attempts to re-shore, defend strategic industries and become less dependent on the worldwide “just in time” economy that can grind to a calamitous halt when a single choke point tightens.

Thought

Intel to Cut Jobs and Suspend Dividend in Cost-Saving Push. Technology is one of those fields that can see years of stasis, and then you blink and everything has changed. The rise of artificial intelligence and the field’s reliance on GPUs (graphics processing unit) has resulted in the marginalization of Intel and its old line of CPUs. And, to be frank, according to an old friend who has worked at Intel for 15 years, the last decade has seen a marked decline in human capital, as go-getters leave the firm, which had grown complacent and more focused on social engineering than microchip engineering.

Hindus in Bangladesh Face Attacks After Prime Minister’s Exit. Right now, Bangladesh doesn’t have a functioning police force, which means many areas are being subjected to vigilante operations. Members of the former ruling party, the Awami League, are being targeted. Because the Awami League has a secular and anti-Islamist stance, Bangladesh’s large Hindu minority has always backed it to a greater extent than any other party. The fall of the Awami League was naturally going to result in collateral damage to Hindus, who, if politically involved, were almost always in the Awami League. Nevertheless, some attacks are explicitly sectarian in motivation. Many Muslims are now banding together to protect Hindu temples, but that, of course, tells you the state of the culture and society. It’s never a pleasant thing when police disappear (read what happened during a police strike in Montreal in The Blank Slate), but that so many Bangladeshi Muslims engage in attacks on Hindus and Hindu temples opportunistically when the authorities are not there to punish them underscores major failings in values and norms across society.

The most ancient human genome yet has been sequenced—and it’s a Denisovan. We only have a handful of Denisovan genomes, so it’s essential to increase that sample size. Additionally, a high-quality genome allows us to explore the functional variation in the Denisovans with much greater confidence. Twenty-four years ago, we didn’t even have a single human genome. Now we have a high-quality genome from a human who died 200,000 years ago.

From Vikings to Beethoven: what your DNA says about your ancient relatives Scientists are using consumer-genomics databases to link living people to ancestors from the recent and not-so-recent past. But the meaning of these connections isn’t always clear. Yes, a lot of this is “genetic astrology.” But in some cases it can work well to identify real and culturally important lines of descent; for example, on the Y chromosome where I suspect we will be finding direct male descendents of notable historic figures more and more over the next decade.

Khanversation. Some of you have asked me to talk about more timely topics (this newsletter’s podcasts skew strongly to the evergreen). So Josiah Neeley and I have started a weekly podcast where we talk about news, politics and culture.

Data

Long shared haplotypes identify the Southern Urals as a primary source for the 10th century Hungarians. This is confirming what we always suspected, but methods relying on genetic relatedness can nail down with certainty that the Maygar conquerors descended from Ugric peoples who left the southern Urals (as opposed to the earlier Huns).

Whole genome sequencing of 76 Mexican Indigenous reveals recent selection signatures linked to pathogens and diet adaptation. There are so many papers on the landscape of natural selection in British people. That’s all well and good, but it’s not a barometer of relative importance, just a function of resources. Now that genomics and ancient DNA is more democratized we can look forward to more interesting results from non-European populations. The Americas are particularly interesting because they’ve witnessed extensive admixture, disease and changes in diet over the last 500 years.

A draft Arab pangenome reference. The lack of a Middle Eastern population in the 1000 Genomes Project was always a shortcoming. Luckily Arab nations are stepping up and creating their own resources. This is important because a lot of work on recessive diseases in Arab countries should be in the offing given high rates of cousin-marriage in Muslim nations.

Ancient tree-topologies and gene-flow processes among human lineages in Africa. Instead of continuous gene flow across populations, this model of ancient African evolution (before the “out of Africa” migration) posits repeated isolation and then large scale gene flow in pulses. Seems a rejoinder to A weakly structured stem for human origins in Africa. In this field the “model wars” look like they will continue until there’s some critical volume of ancient DNA.

Methods for detecting “missing” dimensions in genetic covariance matrices. Bit inside baseball, but some of you are into that: to do modeling of quantitative evolution you need to figure out genetic variance-covariance matrices. I’ve read some of the older papers cited in this preprint; if you want a window on this literature, this is a good place to start.

My Two Cents

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall. Since last month I’ve reflected on lessons from immigrant societies both classical and modern in two pieces. First, You can’t beat us if you join us: Strategically minting new citizens: lessons from Rome & the US:

Gone were the days when the likes of Arbogast or Stilicho rose to positions of power and influence, barbarians by blood, but speaking Latin and entirely assimilated into Roman custom and religion, the first to leap to their Empire’s defense. Aside from the Church, the commanding heights of power and privilege in 7th-century Lombard-ruled Italy were the domain of the new barbarian rulers; the Romans were now just simple peasants. In southern Gaul, where a Gallo-Roman nobility maintained itself in the face of Frankish rule, young Roman nobles adopted the fashion of mustaches and donned trousers like their barbarian rulers. The end of the Roman state meant the end of Roman coin, of professional armies and of both grand new architecture projects and straight roads. Early medieval feudalism, with its bloodthirsty kings, the collapse of the market economy and the contraction of literacy solely to monasteries, inverted the old maxim; now it was when in Rome, do as the barbarians do. 

In a continuation to this piece, I conclude by examining immigrant societies and assimilation dynamics, first in 19th and 20th century America and then in today’s France. When in (the) America(n century), do as the Americans do:

Though both Left and Right have levied criticism against the assimilationist framework in the 21st century, most Americans still subscribe to it. After 1990, less than 50% of American citizens’ aggregate ancestry dated to the 1790 census or prior; genetically in the aggregate, we passed from being a majority settler and slave nation to a majority immigrant one in the last decade of the 20th century. In 2020, all four candidates on the major party presidential tickets were products of the American experiment in its immigrant phase; Donald J. Trump’s mother was an immigrant, as were his paternal grandparents, Joseph Biden and Mike Pence both descended entirely or overwhelmingly from the mid-19th century Irish and German migration, while Kamala Harris’ parents were both immigrants. This status was a non-factor, beneath notice, even in an election where immigration and nativism were points of discussion. For all its faults and factions the American system works, and it indeed offers the blueprint of the implicit mission civilisatrice, that many developed nations must decide whether to follow, if their societies are to endure into the future in any recognizable form. Yes, the US is an immigrant nation, but crucially it is also a deeply traditional one, with the world’s oldest continuous constitution and a broader culture whose tone was set by the Anglo-American settlers who arrived in the 17th century (and the Africans they enslaved). Like it or not, globally ours remains a very American century. And when in America, for the longevity of their societies, perhaps it would behoove the proud, aging nations of the world to do as the Americans do.

And now I am in the middle of a couple pieces about the outsized Indian immigrant impact on American public life recently. The first piece is out, Everywhere you want to be: Indian immigrants in America (part 1 of 2):

While Ashkenazi Jews in the US succeeded and flourished just as they had in Europe, flooding the professions and starting firms, many Indian Americans saw qualitatively new opportunities from in their parents’ homeland and have made radically different choices than their parents, abjuring safe options in academia or the professions to enter the business world. Official intra-ethnic endogamy rates of 70% mask the reality that many embrace the opportunity to marry across communities, and across ethnolinguistic boundaries, in the process creating a new ethnicity of pan-Indian racial and civilizational origin distinct from anything that has ever existed in the subcontinent (in India, astonishingly, genetic inference finds that historical outmarriage rates across jatis remained at or under just 1% for at least 1,500 years, and probably longer; even in urban areas they are no higher than 10% today). Whereas their recent ancestors in India would not have been able to meaningfully communicate, except perhaps in liturgical Sanskrit, Vivek Ramaswamy and his wife, like so many Indian Americans categorized as sharing a single ethnic origin, have but one common language, English. Even Ramaswamy’s eccentric interpretations of Hinduism, asserting that it is a monotheistic religion, just like Christianity, also fit into the paradigm of American assimilation and reconfiguration of outsiders.

Discussion

All my podcasts go ungated two weeks after their Substack release. So I encourage subscribers on the free plan who’d like to automatically get them to subscribe to that podcast stream (Apple, Stitcher, and Spotify). If you want to listen on YouTube, please subscribe.

Here are my guests (and monologue topics) since the last Time Well Spent:

• Louise Perry: overcrowded Britain and the ennui of a post-imperial nation

• Aria Babu: pro-natalism in the shadow of empire

• Eliah Overbey: the birth of bioastronautics

• Sarah Haider: activist to podcaster and public intellectual

• Christina Buttons: navigating the gender wars

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Over to you

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