Originally published in Vanguard, September 1989 Print

GOLDEN VISIONS

A quarter of the world's population are Chinese or Japanese. Their attitudes to other races would be crucial to multi-racialist's plans for global race-mixing. JAMES HALL finds little comfort for anti-racialists in the Far East...

FOR SOME YEARS all manner of Western internationalists were having a love affair with China. The financial empire builders were rubbing their hands as they eyed up this hugely profitable future market; the looney left saw it as some sort of spartan socialist juggernaut that would sweep away decadent Westernism, while dreary middle-class liberals wittered about several thousand years of entirely separate evolution, culture and history boiling down to just a question of cute little slitty eyes and a funny sort of sing-songy language. The Sunday supplements have been full of glossy adverts for investment opportunities and holidays in China and the Far East, while articles featured ginseng, acupuncture, futons; Bhuddist retreats and such like, ad nauseam. The recent events in Tiannemen Square, however, did quite a bit to sour the one-world brigade's view of China, which was a pity really since there were two massive problems that they would have had to face up to had the affair continued. It is unlikely that their 'Utopian' view of racial harmony could have survived if the yellow races of the world had been forced to integrate as much as the Black and White have.

The first of the problems was that in complete contrast to the trendy liberal vision of the entire globe becoming just one big melting pot the continual barrage of Chinese culture had made those Chinese actually resident in the West re-interested in their own roots - which could have only led to them fundamentally rejecting liberal Western values. Obviously China could have hardly been portrayed as 'progressive' and internationalist if the Chinese that most people actually saw were not.

As if this would not have been a big enough blow for futon-bed buying Hampstead trendies then the second would have hit them right between the eyes.

For the bald facts are that while Blacks are thought of by all Orientals as merely human brutes, Europeans are widely admired for their skin colour, hair texture, round eyes and tall physiques. When the French sent the Venus de Milo for display in Japan in 1964 they were astounded to learn that nearly two million Japanese came to admire it, a world record. The novelist Endo, one of Japan's greatest writers, wrote before the exhibition;

'I do not know why and how the standard of human beauty ... stemmed from the white body of the Greeks and has been so maintained until today. But what I am sure of is that, in respect of the body, those like myself ... can never forget miserable inferiority feelings in front of people possessing white skin, however vexing it might be to have to admit it'. He also had to admit, after sleeping with a French girl, 'I suddenly thought of a yellow muddy coloured worm clinging to a pure white flower'.

Nordic Europeans, especially, are constantly used to advertise and promote luxury goods, even, ironically, when the goods themselves are Japanese made.

The most popular cosmetic operation in that country is to have the eyes Europeanised. Winning a Japanese national election was assured when one party used the face of a model of mixed racial parentage (half Japanese, half American) on its election posters. She was chosen for her 'striking and refreshing beauty' they said, and even though the opposition screamed that it displayed an 'inferiority complex toward white women', it was still Nakasone's Liberal-Democratic Party who won the day.

The Japanese are so racially conscious that when the Vietnamese Boat People were at sea their Government would only accept refugees of Japanese ethnic origin.

In total contrast their perception of Blacks and sundry other Browns (even unmistakably Asiatic ones) is entirely negative.

Taisuke Fujishima, for instance, talks of 'the sickening body odour at Nairobi airport' and claims that the root of anti-black racism is 'the physiological repulsion caused by this stinking odour' in a work entitled 'We Cannot Marry Negroes'.

It is no oversight on the part of the Japanese and Chinese that immigration into their countries is all but barred to Blacks and Brown Asians. Nor is it a question of ignorance about their existence either. Stupified Japanese had their first glimpse of Blacks when going abroad on visiting Portuguese ships during the 16th century. It is recorded that they thought them 'stupid, uncivilised and vicious'. Four hundred years have done little to change racial perceptions. When Barnes and Blisset, two Black footballers, played in Peking during Watford's tour of China some years ago they were jeered and booed every time they touched the ball. Martin Amis, who covered the tour, reported that the mass reaction was 'selective and unmistakable'.

Such is the racial consciousness of the Japanese that practically all the half-black babies born there (via negroes in the American occupying forces of the late forties) went to live in Brazil - they were rejected out of hand by Japanese society. Half-white ones, could stay.

This physical hostility is in marked difference to our expectations of their inscrutable cordiality. The main reason, in fact, for the highly formalised politeness with which the Japanese and Chinese treat their foreign guests is the impossibility they feel in treating them like one of their own. The courtesy of the Eastern orientals that the middle class Great-Wall-of-China package tour mob find so endearing is actually based on racialism!

Since at least one quarter of the world's humanity, 1,120 million or so individuals, are Yellow, then what they think of the other two major races, the White and the Black, will be crucial to any conception of a multi-racialist heaven-on-earth. It is one thing for a White to say they prefer other Whites to Blacks, it is, however, quite another for some other race to say it. Judging by the literature, history, politics, present day attitudes and desires for the future of the "golden races" I could almost feel sorry for the multi-racial Utopianists.