EnclavedMicrostate在2022-12-12~2022-12-18的言论

2022-12-18 作者: EnclavedMicrostate 原文 #Reddit 的其它文章

974: Why did Albania Side with China After the Sino-Soviet Split? (Short Anim…, submitted on 2022-12-12 15:10:57+08:00.

—– 974.1 —–2022-12-12 16:11:14+08:00:

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975: Thoughts on the interplay of improvement/reform with destruction in modern european history? (enlightenment, french revolution, russian revolution etc), submitted on 2022-12-12 15:55:47+08:00.

—– 975.1 —–2022-12-12 16:15:52+08:00:

Hi there - unfortunately we have had to remove your question, because /r/AskHistorians isn’t here to do your homework for you. However, our rules DO permit people to ask for help with their homework, so long as they are seeking clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself.

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Alternatively, if you are not a student and are not doing homework, we have removed your question because it resembled a homework question. It may resemble a common essay question from a prominent history syllabus or may be worded in a broad, open-ended way that feels like the kind of essay question that a professor would set. Professors often word essay questions in order to provide the student with a platform to show how much they understand a topic, and these questions are typically broader and more interested in interpretations and delineating between historical theories than the average /r/AskHistorians question. If your non-homework question was incorrectly removed for this reason, we will be happy to approve your question if you wait for 7 days and then ask a less open-ended question on the same topic.

976: Another Pon moment with Miko., submitted on 2022-12-12 22:51:15+08:00.

—– 976.1 —–2022-12-13 03:48:15+08:00:

Given that ‘b-‘ syllables are used to render the ‘v’ sound into Japanese it could be a case of mistakenly misrendering it back.

Or it’s the fact that v is next to b on the keyboard idk.

977: Dunno but I find this terrifying, submitted on 2022-12-13 00:37:03+08:00.

—– 977.1 —–2022-12-13 03:38:43+08:00:

The headline is complete nonsense. Hashem al-Ghaili does have a past as a Youtube science communicator, but he is also a science fiction author, and the most recent videos on his channel have been sci-fi concept videos and a trailer for his new novel. The format of these videos is visibly different, and I don’t see how you could confuse one for the other without being either extremely silly or wilfully disingenuous.

978: Tis the season to miss your oshi, submitted on 2022-12-17 11:39:36+08:00.

—– 978.1 —–2022-12-17 16:36:08+08:00:

I also want to know this.

979: Missing EN? Looking for EU friendly stream times? Give HoloID a chance!, submitted on 2022-12-17 13:08:13+08:00.

—– 979.1 —–2022-12-17 16:42:31+08:00:

I’m here just to say watch Zeta. I am not making this statement under duress or threat of bodily harm, we are not a cult #ZETANISM2022

980: Were the Ming and Qing courts actually unaware of the Satsuma invasion of the Ryukyus and subsequent Japanese incorporation of the islands as vassal states?, submitted on 2022-12-18 04:34:27+08:00.

—– 980.1 —–2022-12-18 17:05:41+08:00:

The ambiguity of the Ryukyu kingdom’s status is an interesting case to tackle because it does really take some getting into the diplomatic landscape (er, seascape?) of the region and period to properly contextualise. We need to set aside Westphalian ideas of exclusive sovereignty and approach post-1609 Ryukyuan statehood in terms of a negotiation between a variety of overlapping interests, which were in conflict in some cases but in concert in some others. What emerges out of that is an understanding that the narrative of continued Ryukyuan independence was not necessarily just a clever coverup: on the one hand, we can see it as a sort of mutually agreed fiction for mutual benefit; on the other, we can also see it as genuinely reflecting an ambiguous status on Ryukyu’s part, where it really wasn’t a clear-cut case of domination by ‘Japan’, however defined.

Firstly we need to give a little background on both the Chinese and Japanese sides of things. In Fairbank’s old ‘Chinese World Order’ model, ‘China’, however understood, served as a fount of political legitimacy for the states of East Asia. Tributary states engaged in ritual gift exchange and in a rhetoric of subordination in order to obtain legitimation through recognition by the Chinese emperor. What has emerged since among historians is a counter-argument that the reverse was usually equally, if not more true: Asian regional powers could do without recognition by a Chinese empire, whereas Chinese empires derived considerable legitimation of their own from being acknowledged as being at the nominal centre of the East Asian political order. To use a Ming-Qing example, recent work by Yuanchong Wang has argued that recognition by Joseon Korea was integral to the Qing Empire’s self-perception, as it both signified that the Qing had successfully assumed the Ming Empire’s place in the East Asian order, and also, on a deeper level, served as an exemplar of a superior-subordinate relationship in the Confucian hierarchical worldview, certifying the ‘Chineseness’ of the Qing state within the broader Sinosphere. The Ryukyus can be seen in similar terms: it was important to the Qing that the kingdom was both independent and recognised the Qing state as legitimate, or at least that it appeared so. Of course, the tribute trade also had economic value, through which could be exercised a degree of hard power leverage, but we ought not to take a reductionist approach of presuming that all commerce was conducted through formal tribute arrangements as opposed to private enterprise.

On the Japanese side, we ought to bear in mind that Japan was not a unified state at this time, and indeed would not be until the latter half of the nineteenth century. Satsuma’s status as a ‘vassal’ of the Tokugawa bakufu based at Edo ought to be understood as being one that was not a clear-cut position of subordination. Indeed, many of what the bakufu termed han (‘domains’) saw themselves as kuni (‘countries’), independent states which conceded to a degree of Tokugawa interference. Satsuma formed an extra-special exception within the system, as, unlike basically all the other domains, it had the right to possess more than one castle, and so it maintained its own system of sub-fiefdoms. This autonomy was part of how it ended up able to sustain direct overlordship over the Ryukyu kingdom, such that it exercised its own layer of authority even as it fell within the broader jurisdiction of the Tokugawa bakufu. This did not mean, however, that Tokugawa rule was exercised exclusively through Satsuma: because the kingdom was a Satsuma vassal, it was also a Tokugawa vassal by extension, and the bakufu was able to exercise its own authority over it.

With that now discussed, let’s look at the aftermath of 1609: under the terms of the 1611 surrender agreement whereby the Ryukyu kingdom submitted to Satsuma suzerainty, Satsuma received regular tribute, gained veto power over Ryukyu’s trade policy, and it also required the kingdom to move towards appointing offices by merit rather than heredity. However, while the bakufu permitted Satsuma to receive tribute from the Ryukyu kingdom, it had also maintained that the Shō family of Chūzan would continue to occupy the throne. As a result, although Satsuma suzerainty eventually led to the erosion of the local nobility and Buddhist temples in favour of a new class of Confucian literati, it never managed to dethrone the royal house and establish the region as a direct province of Satsuma’s mini-empire. Officially, the Ryukyus’ agricultural output began to be listed as part of Satsuma’s land value assessment starting in 1634, but this didn’t inherently clear things up. You could, I think, make the argument that part of why Ryukyuan subjugation was never formally declared to the Ming or Qing was that there was a genuine ambiguity as to the relationship was between the kingdom, Satsuma, and the bakufu: was the Ryukyu Kingdom primarily a Tokugawa vassal, over whom Satsuma was granted administrative authority and entitlement to its revenues? Or was it fundamentally a Satsuma dominion, but one where the bakufu drew some red lines so that Satsuma didn’t overstep its authority more broadly? Maintaining this Schrödinger’s Cat state arguably suited all parties, as it allowed the royal line to stay in place, while neither Satsuma nor the bakufu had to risk conceding their part in the power-sharing arrangement depending on how the situation resolved.

Ryukyu would soon be confirmed in a considerable degree of autonomy even within its nominal subordination to its Japanese overlords. A 1624 memorandum from Satsuma stipulated, among other things, that ‘people from other kuni’ were forbidden from visiting the kingdom, which did not necessarily exclude those living in the Tokugawa’s personal fiefdoms, but which did make Satsuma the only vassal han allowed to send its subjects to Ryukyu. While this would affirm that Satsuma was the only domain allowed to exercise authority over the kingdom, the extent of that authority was also more formally delineated: Satsuma renounced any ability to interfere in cases of capital punishment or exile, and in the long run there was the implicit understanding that Ryukyuans who were convicted of crimes in any Satsuma-claimed territory would be tried in Ryukyuan courts, in a massive concession to Ryukyuan judicial autonomy.

As argued by Gregory Smits, this round of concessions in 1624 was the result of Satsuma feeling the need to preserve an image of Ryukyuan independence in order to siphon off its continued tribute trade with the Ming. Ryukyu had sent tribute missions to the Ming court once every two years since 1522, but this had been reduced to effectively once every ten years during the period of 1612-22, and the reason was pretty simple: the Ming were not unaware that there had been an invasion, and were attempting to use the cession of tribute as a form of economic leverage to weaken Satsuma control. By restoring measures of Ryukyuan sovereignty, Satsuma hoped that the Ming would again allow a more regular exchange, and this ultimately paid off – the Ming allowed one mission every five years from 1622, and after the 1632 mission the Ryukyu kingdom was again permitted to trade biennially.

What ensued was what Okinawan historian Mamoru Akamine terms the ‘policy of concealment’: a mutual concession between the Ryukyu Kingdom, the Ming/Qing, Satsuma, and the Tokugawa bakufu that allowed all parties to achieve some form of acceptable outcome, despite a common implicit recognition of Satsuma suzerainty over the islands. The Ryukyuan royal house maintained its status and judicial authority, the Ming/Qing were able to continue to cite the Ryukyus as an independent state that accepted their supremacy, Satsuma was able to maintain what authority it could over the islands as well as siphon off Ryukyuan tribute, and the bakufu avoided conflict with China. An extra bonus was that every formal Ryukyuan visit to Edo was followed up by promotions for the Shimazu daimyo of Satsuma, which created an incentive within the bakufu-han relationship for Satsuma to maintain its suzerainty over Ryukyu without antagonising its continental neigbour.

The full mechanisms of the ‘policy of concealment’ came to be hashed out after 1667, four years after the kingdom stopped recognising the Ming (whose last loyalist remnants formed a rump state on Taiwan) and began paying tribute to the Qing exclusively in 1663, although it appears that they had been sending missions to both as early as 1655 with bakufu sanction. Officially, the Ryukyuan kingdom was independent, but told the Qing that they had a commercial arrangement with Satsuma domain on the island of Takarajima, in the same way that Tsushima (a domain ruled by the Sō clan) served as an intermediary between Japan and the Joseon kingdom, or how Dejima served as the intermediary for trade with the Dutch outside Nagasaki. Interestingly, it was Ryukyu’s royal court which promulgated many of the regulations whereby the ‘policy of concealment’ was to be maintained: if a ship was wrecked off the Chinese coast, all Japanese-language documents were to be burned before the crew were rescued, as that would ensure their recognition as Ryukyuans and entitle them to shelter in Fuzhou, and from thence to repatriation. If Ryukyuan crew were part of a Satsuma ship that was wrecked, they would masquerade as Japanese in order to be sent back with the Satsuma crew. If Chinese envoys were present in Ryukyu to present investiture patents, any notion that the islands had a Japanese connection was to be suppressed: Japanese names, language, poetry, calendar, coinage, religious iconography, even Japanese-style tools were to be hidden away for the duration. The envoys were not allowed to leave the city limits of Naha, while Satsuma officials were temporarily relocated to a village outside the city.

—– 980.2 —–2022-12-18 17:05:45+08:00:

The only problem was that the concealment policy only worked so far: it seems to have successfully obfuscated the specific notion that the Ryukyu islands were under Japanese dominion, but it was patently obvious that there was something being hidden. On one occasion there was a slip up in which an envoy noticed a bell that bore a Japanese reign date, but assumed it must have been a Tang-era antique (conveniently, the Genna 元和 era of 1615-24 in Japan shared the characters for the Yuanhe 元和 era of 806-820 in the Tang); a later envoy who had read the proceedings of the previous missions brought this up during a meeting and correctly deduced that it must have been a Japanese object, as he knew that there had been no relations between the Ryukyu Islands and the Tang Empire. Yet nothing came of it. The key thing here was ritual and appearances: whether Ryukyu was ‘actually’ independent didn’t matter, as long as it could credibly appear as such, because from the Qing point of view, there was no inherent benefit to ensuring the kingdom’s independence and territorial integrity. If they didn’t ask for help, then they clearly didn’t need it – compare with the Qing approach to Badakhshan in the late 1750s, where the local ruler asked for help and the Qing envoys decided he was exaggerating the threat. All the Qing wanted was to ensure that a polity that seemed to be taking care of itself recognised Manchu rule as legitimate. And so, in this way, the Qing were able to accept that there had been some kind of disturbance involving the Japanese in the early part of the century, and some kind of ongoing Japanese connection with the islands, but one that really wasn’t worth worrying about.

That said, it would be remiss not to at least briefly discuss the rather complicated status of Ryukyu in the period of 1644-1683, after the fall of the original Ming state but before Qing rule was completely undisputed. This revolved especially around the affairs of the Zheng family, which had already been powerful regional strongmen in Fujian well before their conquest of Dutch Taiwan in 1662, and had some ties to Japan. Zheng Zhilong, its patriarch until his defection to the Qing in 1646 split the family between pro-Ming and pro-Qing camps, had been a privateer for the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and had by extension built up a network of contacts on Kyushu, which included his primary wife, Tagawa Matsu. Tagawa’s eldest son, Zheng Chenggong, better known as Koxinga, took over most of the Zheng family’s assets after his father’s defection (though not without a period of struggle with a rival, Zheng Cai), and his agents, along with those of other Ming claimants in southern China, sought for some time to get Japan involved against the Manchus. These hopes were pretty optimistic: Tokugawa Iemitsu had considered dispatching troops in 1645 and 1646, but Zheng Zhilong’s defection to the Qing served to dissuade him from getting involved. After Koxinga and Zheng Cai failed to gain Japanese support directly via a mission to Japan in 1648, they attempted to use the Ryukyus as an intermediary the next year, to no avail.

As noted, Ryukyu would begin shifting its tribute missions to the Qing from 1655 onward, but did not formally cease recognition of some kind of Ming successor until 1663. This was not taken lightly by the newly-established Zheng kingdom on Taiwan (also known as the Kingdom of Dongning), which, amid deteriorating relations with the Tokugawa bakufu, attacked a Ryukyuan merchant vessel – plausibly their tribute ship – in 1670, seizing the cargo and massacring most of the crew. However, the three or four survivors who were imprisoned in Taiwan managed to make their way back to Okinawa some time later, so that in 1672 the bakufu finally caught wind of the attack and ordered officials in Nagasaki to seize three Taiwanese ships docked in Nagasaki until the payment of a 30,000 tael fine. Starting the next year, the bakufu’s annual instructions to the representatives of the VOC declared the Ryukyu Kingdom a fuzoku no kuni (‘attached country’) and its ships to be under constant Tokugawa protection, perhaps to pre-empt attacks by yet another maritime polity. For its part, the Zheng kingdom did not take things lying down, and essentially blockaded the Chinese coast in 1673 against any attempts to trade with Japan; while an envoy, Wu Peng, was sent to negotiate for the release of the seized cargoes and crews and did so successfully – to the point of receiving a 2000 tael gift – he was arrested on returning to Taiwan for having been too conciliatory.

Things rapidly changed in 1674, as the outbreak of the Three Feudatories revolt in southern China again directly embroiled the Zheng kingdom in the affairs of the Chinese mainland. Desperate to reopen commerce with Japan, a document probably authored by King Zheng Jing, but attributed to a minor official for plausible deniability, was presented. In it, the Zheng kingdom refused responsibility for the attack on the Ryukyuan vessel, citing the kingdom as a hostile state by virtue of its recognition by the Qing, and so by implication refused to recognise Japanese protection of Ryukyuan shipping – perhaps an indication that the ‘policy of concealment’ had worked on the Zheng kingdom as well. However, the document professed to good relations with Japan and returned Wu Peng’s gift, and it seems as though the non-apology was quietly accepted, such that Taiwanese trade with Japan resumed until the Zheng kingdom’s fall to the Qing in 1683. In the meantime, Ryukyu played both sides: during the feudatory revolt, it wrote paired tribute letters addressed to both the Ming and the Qing, and destroyed the inappropriate one depending on who controlled Fuzhou when the tribute ship arrived; on this basis, it again secured some status as a potential Ming recogniser and thus rendered its tribute ships safe from Zheng attacks.

A strange coda to this is the surprising paranoia that the bakufu, Satsuma, and the Ryukyu kingdom had about a potential Qing invasion of Japan. While none of these three states wanted to antagonise the Qing outright, neither were they eager to abase themselves before the ‘barbarian’ Manchus, but because of that it seems they were also convinced that a potential Manchu attack was imminent, whether over the Ryukyus or just as a punitive act. The beginning of tribute exchange with the Qing had been done at Tokugawa behest to forestall a potential attack by the Qing like what had happened with Korea in 1627 and 1636; during the Three Feudatories revolt, basically all decisions relating to Ryukyu’s foreign relations were passed up the chain by Satsuma for bakufu review, to ensure all parties were on the same page. When the Kangxi Emperor later commended Ryukyu’s apparently unwavering loyalty during the Feudatory uprising (having, it seems, never discovered the ruse with the dual letters), the relief was palpable: Shimazu Mitsuhisa, daimyo of Satsuma, ‘was barely able to contain his happiness’ in his correspondence with the Ryukyuan king, Shō Tei. And yet, despite the apparent success of the various obfuscatory policies, paranoia continued as late as the 1720s. Bakufu advisor Arai Hakuseki, prompted by concern over a possible Qing attack in connection with the Ryukyu Kingdom, researched Ryukyuan history extensively, publishing his findings in the Ryūkyūkoku jiryaku in 1711 and the Nantōshi in 1720. In 1712, Tokugawa officials contacted Satsuma officials, requesting that they compile information about the Qing military, especially armour and weapons. Satsuma forwarded this request through the Ryukyuan royal government, requesting that the next tribute mission specifically seek out books with information on Qing equipment. What became of this is unclear, but it suggests that as far as the Japanese authorities were concerned – both in Kagoshima and in Edo – the ‘policy of concealment’ had succeeded so far, but there was no guarantee it would do so forever.

To condense everything into a neat summary, the best way to put it is that the Qing knew something was up, but they were also aware that whatever it was wasn’t preventing Ryukyu from maintaining its tribute relationship, and if that was the case then the Qing weren’t interested in trying to find out what. While there was never a formal meeting between Qing and Japanese officials on this matter, the notion of a still-independent Ryukyu was essentially a mutually-constructed fiction in which the Qing quietly acquiesced to whatever chicanery the Ryukyuans were engaged in and chose not to rock the boat. Yet I would also note that there was a meaningful degree of continued Ryukyuan sovereignty, thanks to how the complex web of relationships panned out: the bakufu, wary of granting too much power to Satsuma, acted to prevent the islands’ complete subjugation, while the need to project the image of Ryukyuan independence towards China entailed genuine concessions towards maintaining at least some of the power of domestic royal institutions. Granted, there were notable domestic changes, particularly in the erosion of Buddhist institutions and the emergence of a much more Confucianised society, but this was not an explicitly intended dimension of Japanese policy: if anything, it was the result of a uniquely Ryukyuan negotiation between Satsuma’s demands for a meritocratic system of appointments on the one hand, and connections to the Qing intellectual world on the other. In the end, the Ryukyu Kingdom managed to sustain a certain degree of agency in its international relations, in such a way that its ambiguous status was not a failure of contemporary classification, but rather an accurate reflection of an intentional vagary that allowed all involved parties to negotiate between each other’s interests.

—– 980.3 —–2022-12-18 18:53:02+08:00:

Sources and Further Reading:

  • Gregory Smits, Visions of Ryukyu: Identity and Ideology in Early-Modern Thought and Politics (1999)

  • Mamoru Akamine, trans. Lina Terrell and ed. Robert Huey, The Ryukyu Kingdom: Cornerstone of East Asia (2017, originally published in Japanese in 2004)

  • Patrizia Carioti, ‘The Zheng Regime and the Tokugawa Bakufu: Asking for Japanese Intervention’, in Xing Hang and Tonio Andrade (eds.), Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai Maritime East Asia in Global History, 1550–1700 (2016)

  • Xing Hang and Adam Clulow, ‘Restraining violence on the seas: the Tokugawa, the Zheng maritime network, and the Dutch East India Company’, in Erica Charters, Marie Houllemare, and Peter H. Wilson (eds.), A Global History of Early Modern Violence (2020)

981: Of the Kim dynasty, are any of the three distinctly more totalitarian than the others?, submitted on 2022-12-18 12:00:39+08:00.

—– 981.1 —–2022-12-18 14:57:46+08:00:

This submission has been removed because it violates our ‘20-Year Rule’. To discourage off-topic discussions of current events, questions, answers, and all other comments must be confined to events that happened 20 years ago or more. For further explanation of this rule, feel free to consult this Rules Roundtable.

982: The Three Fates and Norns origin?, submitted on 2022-12-18 12:51:14+08:00.

—– 982.1 —–2022-12-18 17:15:02+08:00:

Hi there - unfortunately we have had to remove your question, because /r/AskHistorians isn’t here to do your homework for you. However, our rules DO permit people to ask for help with their homework, so long as they are seeking clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself.

If you have indeed asked a homework question, you should consider resubmitting a question more focused on finding resources and seeking clarification on confusing issues: tell us what you’ve researched so far, what resources you’ve consulted, and what you’ve learned, and we are more likely to approve your question. Please see this Rules Roundtable thread for more information on what makes for the kind of homework question we’d approve. Additionally, if you’re not sure where to start in terms of finding and understanding sources in general, we have a six-part series, “Finding and Understanding Sources”, which has a wealth of information that may be useful for finding and understanding information for your essay. Finally, other subreddits are likely to be more suitable for help with homework - try looking for help at /r/HomeworkHelp.

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983: who is the person on the banners held during Rudi Dutscke’s International Vietnam Congress speech (1968) (link in the text)?, submitted on 2022-12-18 16:37:47+08:00.

—– 983.1 —–2022-12-18 17:18:47+08:00:

Please repost this question to the weekly “Short Answers” thread stickied to the top of the subreddit, which will be the best place to get an answer to this question; for that reason, we have removed your post here. Standalone questions are intended to be seeking detailed, comprehensive answers, and we ask that questions looking for a name, a number, a date or time, a location, the origin of a word, the first/last instance of a specific phenomenon, or a simple list of examples or facts be contained to that thread as they are more likely to receive an answer there. For more information on this rule, please see this Rules Roundtable.

Alternatively, if you didn’t mean to ask a question seeking a short answer or a list of examples, but have a more complex question in mind, feel free to repost a reworded question. Examples of questions appropriate for the ‘Short Answers’ thread would be “Who won the 1932 election?” or “What are some famous natural disasters from the past?”. Versions more appropriate as standalone questions would be “How did FDR win the 1932 election?”, or “In your area of expertise, how did people deal with natural disasters?” If you need some pointers, be sure to check out this Rules Roundtable on asking better questions.

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984: What was the name of the country made by a polish person in between China and Russia in the 18th or 19th century?, submitted on 2022-12-18 18:58:34+08:00.

—– 984.1 —–2022-12-18 19:21:23+08:00:

Please repost this question to the weekly “Short Answers” thread stickied to the top of the subreddit, which will be the best place to get an answer to this question; for that reason, we have removed your post here. Standalone questions are intended to be seeking detailed, comprehensive answers, and we ask that questions looking for a name, a number, a date or time, a location, the origin of a word, the first/last instance of a specific phenomenon, or a simple list of examples or facts be contained to that thread as they are more likely to receive an answer there. For more information on this rule, please see this Rules Roundtable.

Alternatively, if you didn’t mean to ask a question seeking a short answer or a list of examples, but have a more complex question in mind, feel free to repost a reworded question. Examples of questions appropriate for the ‘Short Answers’ thread would be “Who won the 1932 election?” or “What are some famous natural disasters from the past?”. Versions more appropriate as standalone questions would be “How did FDR win the 1932 election?”, or “In your area of expertise, how did people deal with natural disasters?” If you need some pointers, be sure to check out this Rules Roundtable on asking better questions.

Finally, don’t forget that there are many subreddits on Reddit aimed at answering your questions. Consider /r/AskHistory (which has lighter moderation but similar topic matter to /r/AskHistorians), /r/explainlikeimfive (which is specifically aimed at simple and easily digested answers), or /r/etymology (which focuses on the origins of words and phrases).

That said, you’re probably looking for Jaxa, a state which Wikipedia alleges to have existed based on unlinked Polish sources from the 1970s and 1980s. There is some scholarship that confirms that Nikifor Chernigovsky briefly maintained a force of fugitives based in Albazin in the 1660s, but the notion that it was called ‘Jaxa’ seems to originate solely in the Polish scholarship on which the Wikipedia page is based. See Vincent Chen, Sino-Russian Relations in the Seventeenth Century (1966), and his source on Chernigovksy, Ernst Ravenstein’s The Russians on the Amur (1861)

985: [Hobby Scuffles] Week of December 19, 2022, submitted on 2022-12-18 23:00:17+08:00.

—– 985.1 —–2022-12-19 09:09:48+08:00:

So, while this was mentioned briefly further up the thread, I don’t think the short-lived controversy involving hyperpop producer umru was really properly elaborated on, because it was A Little More Complicated Than That.

Based on the general sort of timeline of events we have, umru was approached by Universal Music Japan (Mori Calliope’s label) to compose a track, which ultimately went on the song ‘Death Sentence’. The album released on 16 December (well, sort of 15 December, but it was 16 December in Japan!) and umru promoted their track… and then posted the following somewhat cryptic tweet:

hey everyone, I’m sorry about the mori calliope song - I was asked for instrumentals by universal japan and didn’t look into the artist or know about what she said. I won’t promote it further and I’ll do better at fully researching the artists I work for in the future.

Now, this was a fascinating Tweet to drop with zero further context, because it wasn’t just vaguely accusing Mori of doing… something, it was also implicitly accusing Universal Music of being complicit. But what was the something in question? Nobody at this time actually knew for certain, but there was one major – and ultimately affirmed – speculation, which is that it had to do with things she had done on her indie persona, >!Demondice!<, back in 2014 (when she was 17, by the by). More specifically it was probably one or both of two things: a tendency to not-infrequently use the n-word (albeit in 3- and 5-letter variants and never hard-r) on Twitter, and a deeply insensitive song >!called ‘Snake Eyez’!<. Now, as the even older thread (linked in the linked thread) noted, while she has never explicitly apologised for either of these, she has since deleted both, such that the only remnants of either are through archived screencaps and downloads. What you attribute for this distancing (genuinely apologetic, pure embarrassment, public image) is up to you to speculate on, but what is clear is she has done what she can to publicly distance herself from it without explicitly acknowledging it. But you know who hasn’t forgotten? 4chan.

It is probably no exaggeration to say that 4chan and its related facets on other social media have lain at the heart of most of the Mori hatedom, and it seems pretty likely that it was people in that extended hatedom who were ‘tipping off’ umru. Indeed, as it turns out that is exactly what seems to have happened: after umru privated their Twitter they then tweeted out some of the 2014 screencaps, which it would not have been possible for them to take themselves. Now, obviously the person making the Tweets being a literal teenager is not an ironclad defence. What a shame for umru, who in 2016 (at the age of 17, funnily enough) once publicly referred to someone as a ‘japanese looking ass’, as some users were quick to point out.

All that being said, umru is fully within their rights to rescind any promotion for or association with Mori Calliope for any reason. But it’s pretty clear that that reason is that someone showed them screencaps of deleted tweets from 2014, which again, can be a legitimate reason for cutting association, but hardly counts as ‘full research’. Indeed, ‘full research’ would probably show that this is what the Mori hatedom does every time she has a new release, and that maybe trusting 4chan should probably not be your first instinct. What’s more bewildering is that umru decided to immediately throw everyone under the bus on Twitter rather than trying to reach out to either the label or the creator, which you’d think might be a useful clarifying step to take beforehand.

As for the album? I liked it on the whole, but not all of the songs, and I didn’t think it played to her strengths, but it’s not something I’m too worked up about. YMMV.

—– 985.2 —–2022-12-19 09:30:19+08:00:

Ooh a hard pick, but I think ‘Resting Power’ off UnAlive is an underrated highlight from that album.

—– 985.3 —–2022-12-19 09:45:54+08:00:

The only way that it became general knowledge is because 4chan had been holding onto it, and arguably 4chan – or more accurately its broader ecosystem – is about the only group that cares enough to keep banging on about it. That’s not to say there isn’t a segment of 4chan that is pro-Calli, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t active hatedoms, though perhaps related more to the >!Demondice!< side of things.

—– 985.4 —–2022-12-20 10:53:20+08:00:

Tweets and an album that they had since retracted anyway? Written at the same age when umru had, themselves, posted weird racist stuff on Twitter?

—– 985.5 —–2022-12-20 13:32:34+08:00:

The thing about the screencaps is that they are old, because the tweets in question have been deleted. The people who created and archived those screenshots, and who began deploying them publicly, were originally people in 4chan who had sussed out Mori Calliope’s past identity, and were aware of the prospect of reputational damage through releasing them. I will grant that by this stage, it was probably not exclusively 4channers sharing these screenshots, but it absolutely fits into an existing pattern, and one that absolutely helps their agenda by virtue of being able to mask their standard brand of behaviour behind people with more genuine reasons for indignation.

—– 985.6 —–2022-12-20 14:04:12+08:00:

Not to suddenly turn into an Agatha Christie character, but there is an underlying question of motive. There are, I will grant again, two possible sorts of people who might have sent these screenshots to umru: a) people who genuinely care about racism and sincerely believe that Mori Calliope, or more specifically the actor behind her, is problematic or even outright racist; and b) people who do not care about racism in itself but seek to be inflammatory and stir up trouble. Those in the former category may be unaware that she has walked those back, or not accept what action she has taken as sufficient; by contrast, it is in the interests of those in the latter category to avoid mentioning that there might be something construed as a retraction. But I would expect a good faith actor to be likely to say ‘she has issued non-apologies’ rather than simply present the information without that further context.

So, sure – I can’t say with certainty whether it was good faith actors or bad faith actors who shared the stuff with umru. But I can say that based on what umru was willing to publicise, he can only be known to have received the screencaps without the context of ‘she has walked this back’, and I would attribute that to bad faith action.

—– 985.7 —–2022-12-20 20:38:08+08:00:

Before getting into the rest of this, I ought to clarify that she has addressed the controversy, but not through explicit, direct reference, nor has she issued an apology as such, as opposed to stating that there were dumb statements she made as an edgy teen that she disavows and no longer stands by. For some, that is either as good as an apology or about as close as one can reasonably expect, for others that is insufficient. But one would imagine a good-faith critic to bring up the apparent non-apologies, which are very much publicly visible, because a bad-faith critic would not potentially compromise their case by divulging the existence of this sort of grey-zone statement that might be taken as sufficient by the person they’re trying to convince otherwise. Again, umru not revealing whether they are aware of these later statements is not evidence that they are definitely not aware, but I would argue it is a reasonable inference that they were being presented the older screencaps without the context of the later retractions.

Back to the 4chan point, a big part of this is a context thing: it can be hard to impress on someone not in the VTuber space just how much of an influence 4chan has on the wider VTuber fandom ecosystem. A not insubstantial portion of VTuber Twitter revolves around accounts that directly engage with content from 4chan; 4chan-originated VTuber memes suffuse the wider space. Even Reddit isn’t immune: shitposting subreddit okbuddyhololive (aka okbh) has served a similar function in acting as a mediating zone between 4chan’s /vt/ board and and more mainstream subreddits like VirtualYoutubers and even the official Hololive sub. In effect, there is a chunk of VTuber Twitter that functions as a facet of a space that revolves around shock content in all its guises.

There is, moreover, pretty clear evidence to suggest the existence of an antidom that is explicitly uninterested in any sort of artistic critique of the work in question when it comes to Calli’s creative output or that of her offstream persona. Take for example the QRTs of a recent ZUTOMAYO song she was featured on. A sizeable chunk of those are not substantive critiques, it’s a performative, almost ritualistic statements to the effect of ‘Calli is a bad artist and a bad person [and ZUTOMAYO made a mistake working with her].’ I just don’t know quite how much more I can labour the point that there is a large community of people who pull the same shit every time Calli releases anything, or if anyone releases something she contributed to.

So you’re right. All we have is evidence that there are people who have made it a habit to smear Calli at every opportunity, that the original impetus for it existed on 4chan, and that umru had access to the screencaps. We don’t have a smoking gun that proves that umru got those screencaps from the smearers or that the specific people, smearers or not, were 4chan based. But in an environment where the only evidence we can have is circumstantial unless umru publicises their DM chatlogs, this is as close to a causal chain as we get, and one that is consistent with broader patterns in VTuber community drama.

—– 985.8 —–2022-12-21 08:19:43+08:00:

The album hasn’t been retracted it just came out.

Sorry for the confusing language, but I meant the 2014 EP that might have been alluded to. Umru made no indication that it was any of the content on the 2022 album that led to their disassociation. On the other point, umru calling someone out for allegedly unaddressed racism online isn’t invalidated by their own post, but it does create a certain hypocrisy given that arguably she has done more to address her own tweets (i.e. deleting them and indirectly disavowing them) than he has.

—– 985.9 —–2022-12-25 09:50:58+08:00:

As someone whose Mandarin is very rusty but who speaks Cantonese natively, I feel like it works better for the latter than the former, and so I half-wonder if Nintendo HK’s particular localisation was intended for a narrowly local market.

Of course then you have Pokemon, which has historically locally been 寵物小精靈 cung mat siu zing ling (literally ‘little pet spirits’) but where the ‘official’ localisation used by Nintendo is the solely phonetic 寶可夢 bou ho mung (presumably it’s using the Mandarin pronunciation, bao ke meng). So IDK.

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