How Japanese is the Combine? Their Relations with the Other Ethnic Groups

[GespenstM]

I don't have much to directly contribute, but just wanted to say this thread is interesting as hell. I never really thought about population distribution in the Inner Sphere quite like this.

[Archangel]

I'd say more like this:


Davion: Anglo-French, with some small amounts of Jewish, Latin, and Indian minority influences
Steiner: Germanic, with a vocal Celtic minority
Marik: Eastern European, with a notable Indian minority
Liao: Chinese, with an important Russian minority
Kurita: Japanese, with an oppressed Nordic minority

Plus an Arkab minority that are tentative allies of the Dragon and supposedly enjoy special status.

[FirstStarLord]

When I was younger I saw it as:

Davion: Western Europe, what was left of the North American space colonies, and a smattering of other groups.
Steiner: Pan-European, with small numbers of other groups.
Marik: All groups, including the ones you never thought of.
Liao: China, Russia, Southern Asia, and the British Isles minus England.
Kurita: Japan, Russia, Scandinavia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

These days I see it more as: Everybody has every group, but the proportion changes from state to state. You can find Swedes in the FWL, but most of them will be found in Rasalhague. Africans live in the Commonwealth, but more of them live in the Combine, and so on.

I think part of it comes from the continuing evolution of the game's backstory, and the Combine is especially targeted by this. I'll argue no state, even the Capellans or the Taurians has undergone more changes in the overall tone or depiction of their society in the past 30 years than the DC.

Mechwarrior 1st ed./Sorenson's Sabers: The Combine is a dictatorship. The family that rules it is of Japanese heritage, some of the people associated with it have Japanese names. Other than this, very little of the state has any Japanese flavoring in its institutions. To the point that the word samurai is almost never mentioned, and one duel is described as being fought with epees instead of Japanese swords. In many ways this version of the Combine has more in common with the Empire from Star Wars than it does with later depictions from just a few years later.

House Kurita SB/Gray Death Trilogy: The books that formed the basis of the Combine as most of us view it. Japanese people form a minority, but an influential one both politically and culturally. "Orientals" (the term used throughout these books) form a very large part of the population, maybe a slim majority.

The Combine is a dystopian mix of Stalin's Soviet Union, Imperial Japan in the 30's and 40's, and any number of family-run dictatorships common in the mid to late 20th century. Non-Oriental people are oppressed, but the degree to which they are oppressed run a gamut of complex social factors and stellar geography (general rule, the more peripheral you are to House Kurita's rule, the less flak you take in your personal habits unless you get ratted out to the ISF). Guys with last names like Clay, Hamid, and Samsonov can become powerful noblemen and generals, but they need to follow the Combine's version of bushido and political orthodoxy to do so. Rasalhague does not fall into line with this, so they get pushed around even harder than the other peons, but House Kurita will make small compromises with non-Japanese groups in order to keep greater stability in their empire.

Robert Charrette's Combine can be considered an evolution of this above Combine, with some of the more over-the-top brutality and cartoon villainy removed. Charrette showed that the average Combine citizen has some good in his heart, and there are some truly outstanding people who live and die under the banner of the Dragon, even if they pay a high price for it. Overall however it is still a pretty grim place to live, Theodore's reforms offering a ray of hope that things might get better.

Stackpole's novels: Where do I begin? Stackpole does a decent job of expanding much of the Japanese warrior ethos from earlier books, but he distorts it as well for dramatic purposes. He also depicts the Japanese as being a much larger share of the population than many of the earlier books, which is either good or bad depending on your personal tastes. There are few shades of grey to be found here, either the Combine is the worst thing ever or another one of the white hats, depending on the needs of the greater story. Generally he depicts it as softening under Theodore to the point where it seems not much worse than its neighbors, and much better than the Clans it opposes.

Milan's novels: A mix of the above versions with some original concepts thrown in. Milan's Combine plays up the blending of various cultures; there are different and distinct ethnic blocks, but at the edges they have merged with other groups from centuries of autocratic rule under House Kurita. Jeffery Kusonoki is the poster boy for this: He is blond, blue-eyed, two-meters tall, has some degree of Asian ancestry but above all considers himself a samurai dedicated to seeing House Kurita conquer the universe and crush all inferior cultures.

Eastern and Western concepts have been mixed together into a syncretic mix that is recognizable to the reader, but gives Combine culture a distinct bent from "Japan as seen by America" that existed in earlier works. The activities of the social classes outside of the military get more focus. The Combine is a police state, but one where the business of everyday living needs to be done as well.

Personally, this is one of my favorite depiction of the realm, and really makes it come alive.

Modern books (From 2005 to now): A mix of the old sourcebook, Stackpole, and Milan thrown together. Generally even darker and more cynical in its depiction of the Combine than earlier sources, as part of a general trend in the material produced for the entire game universe.

[Nodachi]

  First, my take on the ethnicity of the various Houses is window dressing. A shallow veneer of cloth and foreign words so the players could tell one from the others
  Neo-Japanese culture is a shallow veneer of Terra's Japan; a scoop of vanilla with sweet black bean topping. 
  As with the other factions, there are sub-ethnic groups that drift below the layer of dominant culture. -
  Historically, the Combine goes through cycles of virulent cultural intolerance, such as under Urizen Kurita and it would wane under others.
  As far as how Japanese the Combine is portrayed, I base it on my own experience: I was born and grew up in Hawaii, where about 25% of the population is Japanese but most of the political, public bureaucrat and school teacher positions are held by Japanese descendants of the immigrant laborers that arrived about a century ago. They established Japanese-language schools, which, when i was growing up, still displayed pictures  of Emperor Hirohito. I also worked at a Japanese-language publishing house, where every New Year each employee was awarded with a 20kg bag of rice and we greeted the Japanese owners with shouts of "Banzai!"
  I grew up eating sushi and learned to use chopsticks (hashi) by age five, as did just  about everybody else I attended school with. Rice was a daily staple as was SPAM, which was the only kind of meat available to the plantation workers during the Second World War; so we make sushi, musubi, ramen, omelets and sandwiches using that canned meat.
  My Japanese neighbors celebrated American holidays like any other Americans but also celebrated Girl's Day, Boy's Day, the Obon festival and Tanibata as they still do in Japan, although the subsequent generations are less and less traditional, unless they keep ties with relatives in Japan.
  In a relative cultural note: My cousin had a Nisei (second generation Japanese) Nanny (Mamasan) named Beatrice. When Beatrice first entered school, she still used her Japanese given name and she was handed a book with a list of "Western" names and told to pick one, which would be the name she would use in school and eventually it became her legal name. That was in the 1920s and a standard practice in Hawaii schools, even when I attended school in the 1960s. I suppose Kurita worlds would be similar in order to force assimilation, or non-Japanese citizens would feel the social pressure to conform and adopt Japanese names and practices. I grew up attending school wondering why we decorated our classrooms with Pilgrims, Indians, Turkeys and snowmen as it never snowed in my part of Hawaii...and turkeys only appeared cooked once a year.

Part of the reason I enjoy your writing is that perspective that you added. And I tend to see the biggest sin in the Combine is not Kuritaizing your culture to the rest of the Combine, hence why we got the FRR and the Ronin Wars. As I mentioned before, the Azami are one of the few exceptions, though some DC influence did creep in.

[MoneyLovinOgre4Hire]

Don't remember who said it, but the best description I heard of the DC was that it was theme-park Japanese.

Also, can't bring up this topic without pointing out that in the Warrior Trilogy, Romano Liao was described as having red hair and green eyes while every single depiction of her ever since has depicted her as having hair and eye colors much more typical for someone of Chinese ethnicity.

[Liam's Ghost]

Easy to change. Especially if she's going for a specific cultural image.

[FirstStarLord]

Plenty of Liao family members have had blond or red hair and green or blue eyes. The House's founding member Elias Jung Liao was described as being of mixed Nepalese-English descent (despite Liao being a Chinese family name), and they apparently married into a number of Scottish families as well. You can't really compare them to House Kurita however, since Liao never made the promotion of Chinese values or aesthetics a serious program until Xin Sheng, it never reached the level of Kokugaku in overwriting the other cultures present in the Confederation. No Chancellor ever had an issue with Tikonov being a bastion of Russian culture, or St. Ives being a fusion of British and Cantonese culture. If anything they seem to revel in the diversity of their realm.

Strangely enough, the Confederation's population as a whole seems be far more Chinese than the Combine's population is Japanese*, and yet they never felt the same impulse to force the other groups to conform to their culture. I guess since they form a clear majority in so many regions, the Chinese never felt quite as threatened that the other groups would be able to assail their position in Capellan society, or it just did not mean as much to them.

*Or not, the Chinese might well have sent more people out into space than any of the Terran nations, and most of those colonists went to the Capellan zone.

[False Son]

Don't remember who said it, but the best description I heard of the DC was that it was theme-park Japanese.

Not the worst way of explaining it.  I now imagine the situation to be how Disney World operates.  You may have a name, a family and personal interests behind closed doors.  But, in public, you keep the Mickey head on at all time.  NO BREAKING CHARACTER!

[massey]

Maybe there were originally a lot of Japanese people within the Combine's borders, but there were other nationalities too.  I think now it looks more like a Japanese cartoon (where, as I understand it, they draw the average person as "white" because then it's easier to distinguish characters) than actual Japan. 



Obviously Japanese... right?

So most people wouldn't look like what we recognize as Japanese today.  They'd have red hair, blond hair, blue eyes, all kinds of decidedly non-asian traits.  However, to separate them from Davion or Steiner populations, they probably have a few features that stand out.  Maybe a lot of the people there have some degree of epicanthic folds around the eyes or something.  Whatever it is, after like 700 years, there's probably a distinct "Kuritan" ethnic group with a distinct look.  It doesn't matter that it's not really modern asian, it's a future ethnicity.

As far as society goes, whats-his-name Kurita must have watched some old samurai movies and just thought that was the coolest thing ever.  He was a huge fanboy, and wanted society to look like that.  When you're dictator-for-life, you can do that kind of thing.  For a while, the "theme park Japan" nature of society would have been kind of forced.  But after a few generations, it kind of became legitimate.  You've now got a longer history of bushido and that kind of thing in the Combine than you ever did in actual Japan.

[Kidd]

As far as society goes, whats-his-name Kurita must have watched some old samurai movies and just thought that was the coolest thing ever.  He was a huge fanboy, and wanted society to look like that.  When you're dictator-for-life, you can do that kind of thing.  For a while, the "theme park Japan" nature of society would have been kind of forced.  But after a few generations, it kind of became legitimate.  You've now got a longer history of bushido and that kind of thing in the Combine than you ever did in actual Japan.

Indeed. Though there are many historical examples, the Sun King, Louis XIV of France springs first to mind. He invented a whole new culture of royal pomp and ceremony unlike anything anyone had seen before, or since.

[False Son]

The whole Combine=Japanese thing is also, perhaps incorrectly and certainly unfairly attributed by the Federated Suns.  The Purge saw Asian descended citizens murdered and targeted for violence by a fearful Federated Suns population that saw them as Combine on the basis of physical appearance.  As much as I hate to call on that shameful episode in Battletech history to "prove" the Combine has Japanese overtones, it proves that at least the in universe perception of the Combine is first and foremost Japanese, Orientalist or whatever biggoted shorthand you wish to use.

In other words, it isn't entirely in our heads that the Japanese image of the Dragon exists.  Yeah, plenty of non-Japanese East Asian people might be wrongly identified as Japanese along the way.

I think now it looks more like a Japanese cartoon (where, as I understand it, they draw the average person as "white" because then it's easier to distinguish characters) than actual Japan. 

There are a variety of reasons for this practice, some of which are really, really not safe for this board.  Japan is not immune to colorism just because it is a non Western society.

[Arkansas Warrior]

The whole Combine=Japanese thing is also, perhaps incorrectly and certainly unfairly attributed by the Federated Suns.  The Purge saw Asian descended citizens murdered and targeted for violence by a fearful Federated Suns population that saw them as Combine on the basis of physical appearance.  As much as I hate to call on that shameful episode in Battletech history to "prove" the Combine has Japanese overtones, it proves that at least the in universe perception of the Combine is first and foremost Japanese, Orientalist or whatever biggoted shorthand you wish to use.

In other words, it isn't entirely in our heads that the Japanese image of the Dragon exists.  Yeah, plenty of non-Japanese East Asian people might be wrongly identified as Japanese along the way.

There are a variety of reasons for this practice, some of which are really, really not safe for this board.  Japan is not immune to colorism just because it is a non Western society.

I'm pretty sure the Combine/Japan connection predates the First Succession War by centuries.

[False Son]

I'm pretty sure the Combine/Japan connection predates the First Succession War by centuries.

It does.  I'm saying that outside the Combine the perception exists that the Combine is Japanese, or that Japanese (in this case East Asian regardless of nationality) is Combine.

[Kitsune413]

http://bg.battletech.com/download/MWDA_Uniques.pdf?bab45d

Stephan Dirk.

[FirstStarLord]

http://bg.battletech.com/download/MWDA_Uniques.pdf?bab45d

Stephan Dirk.

And Minobu Tetsuhara, Albert Benton, Michael Ryan*, and countless other examples. But that just confirms something we have known about the Combine from the start.

*Said in the Twilight of the Clans Scenario book to be one of the few DEST team commanders of non-Japanese descent.

I've compiled a number of statements on ethnicity from the old SB. Some of it overlaps with newer material but much of it has not been cited since the 80's.

On the districts:

"...The five prefects of Rasalhague
reflect the separate, mostly
Scandinavian origins of the district."

"...Rubigen appears at times to desire separation from
both Kurita and Rasalhague. Unlike the other Rasalhague
prefectures, Rubigen has a large non-Scandinavian, non-
Japanese population. As it is almost impossible to unite
the descendants of Black Africans, Arabs, and Eastern
Europeans to carry off a rebellion, Prefect Tony Armandu
can stave off the strictest Kurita intervention in local affairs..."

...New Bergen and Susquehanna
have become the centers of the
old Scandinavian culture, as
Rasalhague and Radstadt are
both too overrun with Kurita
operatives.

"...There are fewer people of
Japanese descent in Dieron than in any other District (even
Rasalhague, which was force-settled by Orientals around the
time of the Cultural Upheaval). This fact, combined with the age
of the first settlements of the planet, gives Dieron as much loyalty
to Terra as to the Draconis Combine. More than most Combine
citizens, the residents of Dieron would like to see the Succession
Wars ended and human space unified, as it was in the Star
League. Unlike most Draconians, the people in Dieron do not
much care who would rule this unified space, they would simply
like the fighting to stop."

"...The Principality of Rasalhague, a major
portion of House Kurita, and a primarily Christian region, did not
become part of the Combine until after the McAllister Rebellion
in 2510, 200 years after the death of Shiro Kurita.
Rasalhagian society originated in Terran Scandinavia. The
original settlers tended to be free-thinking individuals who wished
to avoid being dominated by the troubles of a larger neighbor.
The Rasalhague ethic was self-containment and independence
rather than conquest. Its religious underpinning was a gloomy
northern Christianity that nurtured the individuality of its believers
by fixating them on their personal relation to God..."

"Competition for these
lucrative “Gifts of Obligation” was soon monopolized by three
guilds of professional assassins, one predominantly Rasalhagian
Nordics, one predominantly Russian, the other predominantly
Irish. The noble Japanese would not stoop to such work. Members
of these three other populations were so spread throughout the
Combine that they could go anywhere without attracting notice."

"At 15, girls are considered
on the verge of marriage. (This birthday for girls is sometimes
referred to as the “Day of Nubility”; in some parts of the realm,
the girls are still referred to by the old Mexican term
“Quinceañeras”.)"

"Since then,
many people have continued to think of themselves as “Jewish,”
but not in a religious sense. These types can be found across
the Draconis Combine, though usually as individuals or as small
groups of friends, not as communities."

"Religious Jews who wanted to worship in Conservative or
Reform ways generally gravitated toward the more liberal Lyran
Commonwealth, but the Hasids set off in small groups across
the reaches of Kurita space."

"It was almost 350 years after the beginning of the Exodus
from Terra that Moslems began moving to other worlds. Those
who came into the Draconis Combine were mostly Touaregs,
Hausas, and Fulani, Black desert tribesmen from the northwest
African Sahara."

"Special conditions color the Rasalhague Regulars’ actions.
Rasalhague has always been a hotbed of political discontent. Its
large European population has long chafed under the Oriental
system of the Kuritas. As a result, political upheaval is a common
occurrence in this section of the Draconis Combine.
The loyalty of the Rasalhague Regulars is of vital concern
to the Kurita family, and subject to constant scrutiny. As much as
the Coordinator would like to man these units with dependably
loyal, hand-picked troops (namely, Orientals) that would be
dangerous, if not disastrous. Nothing would galvanize the anti-
Kurita sentiment of the Rasalhague public more quickly than to
make every MechWarrior in the Rasalhague Regulars an Oriental.
It would not take long for the Rasalhagians to believe that the
units were there to watch them instead of to protect them from
Lyran aggression.
Most MechWarriors of the Rasalhague Regulars are of
European descent, with Orientals forming a small minority."

"Examples of the first include
Philip Valenzuela’s translations of ancient Spanish authors
such as Marquez, Neruda, and Borges, and Marion
Tsevernasky’s popular renditions of Russian, Ukrainian, and
Latvian folk music... The
light-painting of Nevil Pastor is directly influenced by central
African textile and decorative arts..."

The next statements comes from the Personalities section of the SB:

"...Takashi knew that he must have a wife, for it
was his duty to sire a male child, and this young girl seemed to
him the perfect embodiment of traditional womanhood because
of her high birth, beauty, and almost pure Japanese features..."

"...Vasily Cherenkoff has the strong, fair-haired good looks of
his Slavic ancestors, with a hale and hearty air... Cherenkoff comes from a family that has produced a long
line of outstanding generals. This, along with his being a distant
relation of the Kurita clan, explains how a competent but not
particularly brilliant officer could rise to such heights."

"Warlord Sorenson is an abrupt man with little interest in other
people’s opinions. When in the company of Japanese-descended
officers, Sorenson does tone down his bluster, but still manages
to rile the other officers."

"Warlord Hsiun Chi has Chinese features and a stocky build... For a man of strict Chinese upbringing, Hsiun Chi is quite
talkative and gregarious."