Word: kembei
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Last fall some Tokyo-based foreign journalists discovered and wrote about kembei, which means "resentment of America." Their stories unleashed fears that a new strain of anti-Americanism was emerging. But the word was never in widespread use and has since virtually disappeared. Writer Yoshimi Ishikawa, who claims credit for coining the word, asserts that it was misunderstood from the beginning. Kembei, says Ishikawa, was meant to describe Japan's sense of impotence when faced with America's demands for assistance during the gulf war. Ishikawa points out that U.S.-bashing demonstrations, a regular and often violent feature of student...
Readers of U.S. newspapers and magazines have noted a new word: kembei, a telescoped term roughly translated as "resentment of America." They have seen reports of querulous Japanese best sellers like The Japan That Can Say No, journalist Shintaro Ishihara's provocative manifesto of his country's superiority in all ways over the U.S. They have seen a screenwriter, Toshiro Ishido, quoted as exclaiming, "I have nothing but contempt for America!" and an unnamed Japanese professor predicting that the U.S. will become "a premier agrarian power, a giant version of Denmark...
...more than U.S. multinationals have done for decades. Japan's economic output may top America's GNP in 10 years if current growth rates persist, but large numbers of Japanese who struggle with skimpy retirement benefits and cramped homes still look up to the American way of life. Kembei books amount to little more than curiosities. The very term kembei is so new as to be virtually unknown...
...women and ethnic minorities has antagonized some U.S. communities where Japanese companies have set up shop. Yet a growing number of Japanese, especially younger ones, are more aware of that shortcoming. The Social Democratic Party is set to begin a series of symposiums examining Japan's wartime exploits. Kembei is not a word used in these circles, which are peering through the smoke of war memories and postwar trade frictions to find a durable basis for relations with their trans-Pacific partner in destiny. They only hope that Americans see fit to join them...
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