My context is the Cornell Asian Studies program, which is a feeder for/academic arm of the American foreign service/intelligence/military area experts,

kontextmaschine:

So the American occupations rigged the Italian and Japanese post-WWII election systems pretty steeply, as a necessary condition of keeping Communists out of power (who were expected from Iron Curtain precedent to eliminate any possibility of being removed from power and defect to the Soviet Bloc).

If you will remember your economic materialism this is what you would expect from industrial powers without imperial hinterlands. (This is what the WWII authoritarian culture-states were meant to prevent while they assembled empires!)

@youzicha said: Didn’t @xhxhxhx discuss this petty exhaustively, concluding that the Japanese election system wasn’t rigged?

Maybe? My context is the Cornell Asian Studies program, which is a feeder for/academic arm of the American foreign service/intelligence/military area experts, where my professors were like "oh, my grad advisor was at that postwar conference, he told us how they rigged it"

The major elements were

• Orchestrating a merger of the Liberal and Democratic Parties into the pan-establishmentarian LDP, supported by advisors and cash drops
• Multi-member districts in cities, where Communists having greatest strength, 22 individual districts would elect 22 communists but one unified proportional city would send 12 and a smattering of others
• Not updating district borders as rural population flooded into cities, creating "rotten borough" districts the LDP could buy with agricultural subsidies

So I minored in Asian Studies (Japan) but beyond just learning about Japan, it was in part an education in mechanics of postwar American empire.

Huh, is that why my Japanese classes had surprisingly few weebs? Everyone there was planning to go into foreign service and I just didn’t notice?

(I think another factor was that Cornell had a class on Japanese pop culture, and some friends who took it reported that it was full of weebs, so I just assumed that was the quarantine keeping them out of the language class)

That's more at the grad level (and FALCON) really, but those types make it into normal language classes too. (Well, the good 6/7 credit linguistics track sleeved down from FALCON, which is really built for the Defense Language Proficiency Test, not the 4 credit "functioning as a businessman" one built for the Japanese State Department's JLPT).

Oh god, I took the pop culture class the first year it was offered, as one of the last ones leaving class once the nihonjin Anthropology professor wearily sighed that he had NOT expected this (a sophomore girl with striped armwarmers challenging his authority on "being a person living in Japan" based on her dad having been at the branch office there in childhood)

Was Nakanishi-sensei still there when you were taking classes? She was my fave.