nationalism

I got fever after the food festival. I am tired....

Is there anyone who realized that we did not have national flag in our stall? Other countries displayed their national flag but we did not.

The reason is simple. The national flag and national anthem of Japan are controversial in East Asia and Southeast Asia (in Japan, too) due to Japanese imperialism in the past. The flag was and still is a symbol of Japanese nationalism and imperialism for lots of people. Imagine that Germany is still using the Nazis flag as a national flag. We did not use the flag to avoid evoking anti-Japanese feeling from other international students. (Koreans and Chinese, mainly...)

I consider myself as one of anti-nationalists (in theory). My family never had the national flag. Never sang national anthem. I still remeber my parents were sitting and protesting against forcing students to sing national anthem at my graduation ceremony of elementary school. I did protest by sitting at high school. And 90% of students protested to sing national anthem at graduation ceremony.

It may sound like strange to most of people. But those who oppose the national flag and the anthem are not opposing to have a national flag or song. We are opposing to use the flag and song which were used as a symbol of Japanese imperialism.

I sometimes feel jealous of those who are proud of where they are from. But at the same time, I like being myself not nationalistic. People may think that we lack of sense of national identity. Yeah....true. However, the situation of lacking national identity or doubting national identity actually made me easily to be familiar with and accept ideas of post-modernism.

The thing is....I guess most of Korean and Chinese students did not realized the absence of the Rising sun-flag.....