SHOW NOTES

I remain haunted by the ghost of a weeb, a shitlib superspy who, after cutting his chops as a naval intelligence officer in U.S.-occupied Hiroshima and Tokyo, wrote some of the first English-language scholarship of any depth on the Tale of Genji and the martial ballads, published geopolitical strategic analysis on how the Fourth Reich might best rule Japan, and was the preferred translator and lifelong friend of aesthetic GLADIO agent Mishima Yukio—all at the same damn time. On this outing we begin to deal with his parents: I promise you’ll never guess what they did for a living.

Part 1 preview here https://podbay.fm/p/the-kingless-generation/e/1676165665

SHOW NOTES

In this ongoing series, we savor the weebery of the greatest weebs of history, pondering the roles they play in various regimes of class struggle including whiteness, patriarchy, capital, and data counterinsurgency. This time, the President of the United States joins me from the Minyan to explore the life of Ivan Morris, a Swedish-Jewish man who grew up in rural France and New York City, attended the most elite of British boarding schools, joined American naval intelligence, and proceeded to act the proper British gentleman from his perch atop the crown jewel of American Japanology, the department at Columbia. He is most famous for his work on Heian court literature, as well as his promotion of anti-Communist liberals like Maruyama Masao, but in fact he was also the preferred translator and close companion of Japan Romantic aesthete and fascist paramilitary leader Mishima Yukio. In what became his final book, and a classic among the Japan Panic–era Anglo-American business class, Morris gave an interpretation of Mishima’s spectacular death by outlining a series of tragic heroes in Japanese history, from which he derives a Japanese national character that is chivalric and militant enough to achieve honorary whiteness but ultimately docile, clumsy, and non-threatening. Meanwhile, at the core of Morris’ most important chapter here lies an interpretation of medieval Japanese political economy that seems utterly alien to the subject at hand but which bears striking resemblances to the PR logic of GLADIO and the strategy of tension. Sadly no further explanation was forthcoming from Morris himself, as he was mysteriously found dead in a cheap hotel in Bologna shortly thereafter and only a few years before the Bologna train station bombing...