Zwarte Piet meets Burapan: Blackface

Peter Breedveld

Japanese broadcasting company Fuji TV plans to air a show on March 7 featuring two bands performing in blackface. This is nothing new in Japan, where musicians have been painting their face black since jazz music was introduced there by, I guess, the American GI’s and there are no bigger jazz fanatics in the world than in Japan.

That is how fans of the two bands involved in Fuji TV’s blackface show, girl band Momoiro Clover Z and doo-wop band Rats & Star, try to sell it: painting your face black is in honor of black people, it is an ode to black music. This is not, however, how black people in Japan see it. Intention is irrelevant, they say. The act is a reminder of the old American minstrel shows which depicted black people as ‘dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious, and happy-go-lucky slaves.’ Just stop it, says Baye McNeil, a New York born, black writer who lives and works in Yokohama.

Modern-day minstrel show

McNeil started a petition to urge Fuji TV not to air the blackface act, which has been signed by more than 2000 people at the time of my writing. ‘Time to shut down this modern-day minstrel show’, he writes in the English-language paper The Japan Times. Having lived in Japan for many years now, McNeil has learned to shut up about racism in order to be seen as an ‘evenhanded, fair-minded guy’ instead of a trouble maker who sees a racist behind every tree.

McNeil experiences incomprehension whenever he tries to convince Japanese of the error of their blackface ways. He is backed by Hiroko Tabuchi though, a Japanese-born journalist living in New York and working for The New York Times. Not all Japanese tweeps appreciate her efforts. Some accuse her of Japan-bashing, many protest that Japanese painting their face black has nothing to do with blackface, since it’s all in good humor.

Racist tradition

This will strike a familiar chord with the Dutch reading this. Holland has its own cherished blackface tradition every December, when the country is visited by a Catholic bishop from Spain, Sinterklaas (he is the inspiration for the American Santa Claus) accompanied by his jolly black side-kick, Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). Zwarte Piet is a white guy with his face painted black, invented about a 150 years ago to scare children into submission, but nowadays he is a frolicking, happy-go-lucky, silly, old-fashioned caricature of a black man.

But saying to a Dutchman (or -woman) that Zwarte Piet is an obsolete, racist tradition will invoke his flaming fury, even if he is the most cultivated of men, the most learned professor, even if he has joined rallies against racism all his life. You cannot take from him his cherished Zwarte Piet. Three years ago a black Dutch guy named Quinsy Gario decided not to put up with this shit any longer. He donned a T-shirt saying ‘Zwarte Piet is racism’, went to a Sinterklaas procession and was brutally and violently arrested by the police, just for wearing that T-shirt.

Ode to black people

The genie was out of the bottle though and Holland has been (and you will now think I am exaggerating but I am not) on the verge of a civil war since. Quinsy Gario is the most hated man in Holland (last year he was elected ‘Asshole of the year’ by a national broadcasting company). The same arguments in the blackface controversy in Japan are used here: that Zwarte Piet is not intended to be racist, that Zwarte Piet is an ode to black people they should be flattered by, that outsiders shouldn’t meddle in Dutch traditions they don’t understand, and so on.

The Dutch being Dutch, they express their sentiments regarding white women voicing their objections against Zwarte Piet (’traitors’) a little harsher than the Japanese accusing Hiroko Tabuchi of ‘Japan-bashing’. A Dutch singer called Anouk, who dared to state publicly that Holland should do away with Zwarte Piet, is threatened and harassed. On social media Dutch people, using their own names and carrying avatars with photos of themselves with their sweet children, write Anouk has ‘nigger-seed dripping from her ass’ and call for the burning and hanging of black people. Other white women, like top model Doutzen Kroes and journalist Sunny Bergman, who made a documentary about racism in Holland, get a similar treatment.

Rape and violence

This is not an exceptional thing to do in Holland, which clings to it’s racism like a mother to her baby and will defend it like the Alamo, taking no prisoners. Journalists from main-stream media join in on the fun, politicians of the Christian democratic party don’t have any qualms about it either, uttering racist slurs like they’re psalms or law proposals.

In many ways Japan and Holland are alike (both are very collectivist societies, for example) and in this particular case the resemblances are striking. For instance, a few weeks ago a former adviser of conservative Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, Ayako Sono, wrote a column in a conservative newspaper in which she made a case for South African Apartheid as a model for treating immigrants in Japan. The abolishment of Apartheid is openly regretted by representatives of the largest political party in Holland, the conservative PVV, and on Dutch national radio you can hear writers argue that people with dark skin color are more prone to rape and violence than white people. Highly respected professors will tell you on television, radio and in the papers that the majority of Muslims consists of potential terrorists with no respect for democratic values.

Black planet

I think what’s happening in Japan and Holland and elsewhere is a direct consequence of globalisation. For so many years – decades in the case of Japan, centuries in Holland – people have been able to disregard the feelings of people of color, who were always a minority in their relatively isolated communities. Now that the world has become a village, it’s the Westerners (including the Japanese) that are a small minority on a largely black planet.

High time, as I said before, for everyone to get their head out of their own ass.

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