Talk:Simon Kaspé

A few issues on categories

1. Since Manchukuo was under Japanese occupation at the time, should the Murder victims by country category by "People murdered in China", "in Japan", or some new and all but unpopulated "in Manchukuo" category?
2. Since Kaspé was of Russian descent and raised in Harbin, despite attending school in Paris and holding French citizenship, does he really belong in categories like "French Jews" and "French people murdered abroad"? Is it correct to identify him as a "Chinese Jew"? Most people in that category were not ethnically Chinese, and many might not have held Chinese citizenship, but were simply (European or American) Jews historically significant for their activities in China.

• Thoughts? LordAmeth (talk) 17:12, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

Skewed facts

I have reverted edits by an anonymous IP editor who seems insistent that the only people active in Manchuria at the time were crimelords, and that the only people who attended Kaspe's funeral were Chinese and Europeans.

1) It says explicitly in "The Fugu Plan", p54, that "tens of thousands, including Chinese as well as Europeans, attended the funeral." This is not the same statement as the IP editor's "thousands of Chinese, Jews, and Gentile Europeans". It is important to note that it was not solely Chinese and Europeans who attended the funeral, and that the protests, the political attitudes at the time did not run 100% down racial/ethnic/national origin lines.

2) It is an absurdity to think that in any colonial situation, in any place, the only people to come over from the mother country to settle and engage in business are "crimelords". Businessmen, entrepreneurs, however corrupt, are not necessarily "crimelords", and to call them such is to express a biased (i.e. anti-colonial, anti-Japanese) point of view. Tokayer writes "the civilians who followed on the heels of the army wanted only to get rich and get out, back again to 'civilized' Japan. Businesses were taken over and houses and commercial buildings appropriated." Nowhere do words like mob, mafia, yakuza, appear, nor does even the word "criminal." We know from the general context of the history of that period that the Japanese businessmen, entrepreneurs, etc in Manchuria were corrupt, and engaged in many unsavory practices, including, according to Tokayer, in kidnappings and ransom... but that doesn't make them no longer businessmen and entrepreneurs. A corrupt coal or iron magnate does not stop being a businessmen, albeit a corrupt one, because he's engaging in these practices; the yakuza, mafia, whatever, the kind of organization that has "crimelords", is a separate entity.

I spoke to this editor briefly on my own talk page, advising him to use his sources to expand upon the article, to improve it beyond what I was capable of doing with the Tokayer book, but without skewing the facts. He has insisted on painting with a very broad brush all entrepreneurs and other Japanese civilians in Manchuria as crimelords, and has divided the attendance of Kaspe's funeral (and the associated political attitudes, protests, uprisings) strictly along racial/national lines, as if *only* Chinese and Europeans attended. I don't have an agenda here; I'm just trying to have the facts, as represented in the only source I have available to me, represented factually.

LordAmeth (talk) 10:57, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Slight problems with Marvin Tokayer "The Fugu Plan"

Putting aside the deliberate misrepresentation above for a minute, I just want to note a problem in using Marvin's Tokayer, "The Fugu Plan" as a reliable source without further qualification.

Not my opinion, but that of that of Prof Ben-Ami Shillony from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the problem with both the language and content of "The Fugu Plan" is that it is a popular book, partly fictionalized (there can be no possible argument against this), and it was written in the type of language specifically intended to raise the same sentiments evoked by many other popular works on Holocaust survivors. Quote-unquote, "describing experiences of make-believe characters".

Ben-Ami Shillony CV is here; http://pluto.huji.ac.il/~shillony/).

The question is, where do facts stop and the embelishments start?

Consequently, until other more academic sources are forthcoming, I think it is best to tone down the more emotional language which is what I have done.

"Business people" do not carry out kidnaps and murder to make money, criminals do. And that is what I clarified. --118.18.196.230 (talk) 14:57, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

I know who Shillony is; I've read his book on the Jews & the Japanese. And I do not deny that Tokayer's book, being heavily fictionalized, is an unreliable source. However, if one reads with a critical eye, it is very easy to see which parts are fictionalized - those relating to the characters of his narrative - and which are not - those parts which are represented as more general historical facts about conditions and events.

I will look through my other (non-Judaism-related) sources on Imperial Japan in Manchukuo to see what I can come up with to back up the fact that not every Japanese civilian in Manchukuo was involved in criminal activity. It's an absurdity to suggest they were, but I suppose you want to see cited evidence, so I'll see what I can come up with.

Keep in mind as well, that while it is true that anyone who commits murder and kidnapping is, under the law, a "criminal", describing people as criminals as their primary description, their primary identity, implies a particular image, of these people being yakuza, being mafia, being criminals by profession, rather than being corrupt, violent businessmen, i.e. people whose primary profession, chief identity is something other than "criminal", but who engage in criminal acts. I don't know why this is so hard to understand. Look around Wikipedia; there are hundreds of examples of people described as "politicians" and "businessmen" who committed criminal acts. You make it sound like Manchukuo was settled, in an organized manner, solely or primarily by the yakuza, in an organized, intentional, directed scheme to expand criminal activity to the mainland, which simply was not the case. LordAmeth (talk) 19:46, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Here we are:

The typical Japanese migrant was not a farmer-settler but a member of the lower middle-class. What drew Japanese to the continent was the lure of easy economic success. The colonial regimes in Taiwan, Korea, and the Kwantung territories [i.e. Manchuria] created jobs for policemen, mailmen, technicians, clerks, and other petty functionaries, and the growth of colonial trade opened up opportunities for shop keepers, small traders, company employees, restaurant owners, and others engaged in small-scale commerce. ... As one aggressive young Japanese businessman noted in 1900, "China is a broad and boundless country, whose demand increases day by day, month by month, year by year ... practically without limit." (Duus, Peter. Modern Japan. Second Edition. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998. pp201-2.)

Do you see anything about crimelords in there? I don't... The Japanese businessmen who dominated economic activity in Harbin were terribly colonialist, racist, nationalist, and broke the law, engaged in horrible activities, kidnapped, murdered, and robbed. They were not good people by any stretch of the imagination. But they were still businessmen, not "crimelords". As for the Russians, I don't know. LordAmeth (talk) 23:23, 5 May 2009 (UTC)