Kazakhs and Japanese. Fortitude and perfection

The cheapest pride is national pride. It discovers in the subject infected by her a lack of individual qualities that he could be proud of; otherwise, he would not have turned to what is shared by many millions of people besides him. Whoever possesses great personal virtues, constantly observing his nation, will, first of all, notice its shortcomings. But a poor man, who has nothing to be proud of, grabs the only thing possible and is proud of the nation to which he belongs; he is ready to defend all its shortcomings and stupidities with a feeling of tenderness

© Almaz Braev, 2024

ISBN 978-5-0059-7060-2

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

– Arthur Schopenhauer

Chapter 1

Kazakhs and Japanese

What can unite such different and, to the same extent, very similar folks?

There is a gap of distance between us (eight thousand kilometers). The Japanese live on islands. Modern Kazakhs live in cities. The ancestors of the Kazakhs traveled thousands of kilometers because they were nomads. The Japanese have never in their history been able to have such luxury, and they did not have such unbridled space. After all, islanders live differently than on the mainland. This greatly affects behavior.

Despite such a remote residence, Kazakhs and Japanese are somewhat similar (in what? – an explanation will be given in the course of the book). Even outwardly, Kazakhs and Japanese are more similar than Kazakhs and Chinese, for example. Our common ancestor lived a very long time ago, ten thousand years, in caves near Beijing. Then, our paths diverged altogether.

Japan was settled three times. The first settlement occurred 23,000 years ago during the Ice Age. But these “Buryats” were not modern Buryats at all, although their remains were found at the sites of ancient hunters in Buryatia. The common ancestor of the Japanese and Kazakhs settled on the islands ten thousand years ago, and he came from China. It is because of this ancestor that we are so similar in appearance. Then the Japanese accepted Buddhism and stopped eating meat, and we Kazakhs ate meat non-stop – which Kazakh does not eat meat? (Only Kazakh from the community of Krishna, probably. This is his personal business). That’s why the Japanese stopped eating meat and switched to rice, and they became so miniature. But still, you can notice something Kazakh in this miniature … (There will be even more of this Kazakh if you read to the end). But in general, there are a lot of differences between Kazakhs and Japanese. It is not necessary to look for something in common in one Shintoism. Shintoism influenced Japanese spontaneity. And so the Japanese are very disciplined and hidden. Kazakhs in this sense are always clumsy gaper and “ashik auzdar”.

So.

Everyone who visited Japan at different times noticed that there seemed to be no place on the islands where the hands of the Japanese would not reach. This does not mean that the Japanese have dug down all the mountains and fenced off with buried stones from the continuous Pacific typhoons. No, the Japanese did not touch the mountains. (As, however, the Kazakhs did not touch their steppes). All foreigners note the Japanese participation in all inhabited places; they say that every pebble, every meter of land, every bush, and even every leaf from the bush was processed by a Japanese for contemplation so that it was harmonious and then practical.

On the contrary, Kazakhs did not touch anything along the way of nomads. Unless cattle eat grass – this is a natural “creativity”, but it is not the fruit of aesthetic Kazakh desires. Kazakhs did not touch the natural landscape. They hid in tents and yurts from rain, wind, blizzard, cold, and snow. Somehow, it would be absurd to interfere with the misfortunes of continental nature. Thus, we discover the first factor – landscape- which determines the type of economy and the character of the locals living in such a climate. (The influence of landscape on the character of people has been known for a long time, but we should be interested not only in the influence of nature and the influence of a person on himself and on his people. The workaholism of the Japanese, as everyone understands, was forced. To survive, the Japanese had to work hard. Every year, they had to wait for typhoons and prepare a sowing campaign).

In this respect, the Kazakhs trusted nature more and again and did nothing… The climate in the Kazakh steppe is not a typhoon, which is even worse. These are more powerful forces. Therefore, the Kazakhs looked philosophically at all such events outside the yurt. Well, a blizzard will blow, it will blow, and it will pass by itself. Is it snowing? So what? The same thing – will pass. And the cold will pass. For almost eight months a year, Kazakhs had to sit in a yurt, drink mare’s milk (tea), and listen to each other under the motto “Everything is past, and this too pass.” Therefore, Kazakhs are great masters of oral creativity and dreamers. Every Kazakh wants to surprise first with an outfit, then with conversations.

The Japanese are great conservatives in this sense. When they eat, it’s indecent to talk. Drinking tea with them is a whole exercise; this is a world-famous tea ceremony. Only in the third phase, when sake is served – Japanese vodka (or beer- whoever likes it, because sake has a weak strength), when the host makes a welcoming speech (that is, at the third hour of gatherings!) and serves the guest to drink sake first, mutual relaxation begins. This is, of course, if the guest is a stranger the first time he comes to the house. And how can there be strangers among Kazakhs? Who wants to wander around in such a cold winter, for example? Only relatives live everywhere. Therefore, everything was happening faster. When a “stranger” from distant relatives appeared, it was a great joy – he could tell a fresh story. And so it’s everything that happens sedately. During the absorption of meat, you can talk about anything. (This is what Kazakh journalists like to do today. Corrupt officials eat a lot of meat, as if they hadn’t eaten for a long time, and got lost in the steppe for years …)

Yes, under the influence of climate, the behavior of Kazakhs and Japanese is sometimes diametrically opposed. However, this bad weather has affected the powerful forces of nature; therefore, the Japanese are Shintoists. Shinto is one of the main religions of Japan. There are Kazakhs who see this as the prerequisite for the same success. If the Japanese could, why can’t we? We can! This gives hope for some kinship. In fact, there are moments when the Japanese and Kazakhs are very similar. And there is a lot that distinguishes us.

Chapter 2

Meeting at Stalin’s station

How did you see the meeting of Kazakh and Japanese through Soviet writers of the bestseller “Golden Calf” of the 20s of the 20th century – Ilf and Petrov.

Let’s start, perhaps, with the scene at the train station.

According to the novel, the scene of the Kazakh and Japanese meeting took place during the construction of the TURKSIB in the 30s of the last century.

“A wide field of activity opened immediately outside Orenburg when passengers saw the first camel, the first yurt, and the first Kazakh in a pointed fur hat and with a whip in his hand, at the stop where the train was accidentally delayed, at least twenty cameras aimed at the camel’s muzzle.

The exoticism began with the ships of the desert, the camels and the riders, the freedom-loving sons of the steppes, and other romantic burdens.

The Japanese diplomat was standing two steps away from the Kazakh. Both looked at each other in silence. They had exactly the same slightly flattened faces, stiff mustaches, yellow patent leather, and eyes that were swollen and narrow. They would have passed for twins if the Kazakh had not been in a sheepskin coat belted with a calico sash, and the Japanese in a gray London suit, and if the Kazakh had not started reading only last year, and the Japanese had not graduated from two universities twenty years ago – in Tokyo and Paris. The diplomat stepped back, bent his head to the mirror, and clicked the shutter. The Kazakh laughed, sat on his rough horse, and moved into the steppe.”

The authors of The Golden Calf knew for sure that the Japanese graduated from two universities, and the Kazakh himself probably said that he learned to read last year. The cultural revolution came to the steppe with Stalin’s railway construction. The Bolsheviks needed literate Kazakhs. I don’t know why the shepherds need a letter in the bare steppe, probably so that they understand what is happening. But the Bolsheviks are the Bolsheviks. They said they had come to enlighten the people, so they began building schools and teaching everyone to read and write.

However, if you put a Kazakh in front of a Japanese again, after fifty years, everyone would indicate who is who, even in the 80s of the last century. First of all, by the Panasonic camera and other things and clothes. And an experienced person would hardly be mistaken who eats who even now. The Japanese are more experienced in urbanization. When the Kazakhs began to receive only with the collapse of the USSR, it was just that everyone received this highest education. And besides, the Japanese are more petite in terms of figures. It is unlikely that the Japanese would have so many sumo wrestlers. After all, these wrestlers were specially fattened in the Middle Ages to entertain samurai. The urban environment strongly influences people’s inner world. It makes them tolerant and democratic. But it can not get rid of the “ghosts of the past,” in the apt expression of Karl Marx.

Chapter 3

In what Kazakhs and Japanese are similar

This book will mainly show the differences between us. But this distinction will be shown for the learning so that we can see the shortcomings. Moreover, there are some shortcomings among the Japanese who are successful in everything today. It’s never a shame to make mistakes; the main thing is not to repeat someone else’s. And it’s even better to learn from others to be proud of yourself later.

Despite the many differences between peoples so far apart, even though many thousands of kilometers separate us, Kazakhs and Japanese have a lot in common.

We are very similar in some manners. We are so similar that even a subtle connoisseur of people can get confused. Only the Kazakh or the Japanese will immediately tell who is who by the face and facial expressions. An ethnographer of another nation will have difficulties.

So, the first similar feature of the Japanese and Kazakhs is the Asian art of diplomacy.

Japanese are taught from childhood not to lose face. Therefore, the Japanese always retain dignity.

What does it mean?

This means never committing such an act that will cause the condemnation of others. Therefore, the Japanese have followed this rule all their lives. They preserve their honor and care for someone else’s honor in every possible way. This does not apply to the fact that the Japanese do not shake hands with each other in a European manner. They try not to even touch each other because it’s an insult (for a samurai. Here, it is a legacy from the past. And samurai are not to be trifled with. In 1963, for example, a world-famous wrestler, Japanese celebrity Rikidozan, and Yakuza member Katsushi Murata quarreled with each other in a nightclub with a tragic outcome for the wrestler. Murata stepped on Rikidozan’s foot. It was a great insult).

A Japanese person will never tell you the word “no”. Although, even if a Japanese person says “yes” to you, it doesn’t mean anything either. If a Japanese person says “hai” to you, it looks like “yes”; in fact, it rather means “I understand”. If a Japanese person answered “hai” to an appeal, this does not mean at all that he will fulfill your request. To answer you no, the Japanese will turn the situation so that you will never be able to do what he asks you. You need to know this when you sign a contract with them. Thus, the Japanese do not say “no” to you. It saves your face. He protects your self-esteem. First, the Japanese think about you.

Although we live far from each other, Kazakhs speak in such patterns that sometimes a non-Kazakh will never understand what the Kazakh said to him. What can I say? Even a Kazakh must guess a crossword puzzle in his mind, which his interlocutor hinted at. It’s good that we have lived next to the Russians for so many centuries, so there are Kazakhs who speak directly and are not so colorful. In the yard, after all, market relations. Time is money. But tradition is tradition.

This is a tradition -ymdau. When a Kazakh speaks by hints, he first wants to find out who he is talking to and in what manner to communicate with the interlocutor further.

If a person does not understand the hints, then he is either not a Kazakh or a city Kazakh. Kazakhs have excellent, very accurate proverbs on this score. I sometimes wonder who came up with such proverbs. If we could implement these proverbs and follow them to life, then we would overtake even the Japanese. The Kazakh tradition of ymdau resembles the Kazakh game of cat and mouse, which is more cunning and has a rich imagination. No one will lose face here, but everyone will remain with their conclusions.

(The way of allegory also arose for a reason. To inform Genghis Khan about the death of his son, the great akyn Ketbuga took a dombra and played the kui “Aksak Kulan” (Lame Kulan), and Genghis Khan began to cry).

The second similar feature between Kazakhs and Japanese.

Today’s Japanese cities are beautiful: they glow with neon advertising, which takes millions of dollars. The streets are clean, all the sidewalks are clean, and well-groomed green spaces grow all around – it’s nice to the eyes. But not everywhere and not always. You can make up legends about Japanese home cleanliness. Even for the toilet, they keep a separate pair of slippers, not to mention slippers for the house.

The whole problem

The Japanese can’t keep everything clean everywhere. They can’t walk in subway slippers, either. It comes out of their understanding of the world. In the subway, Japanese people walk in large shoes and white socks to quickly remove their shoes and put on their slippers again at home. Hence, the phenomenon of alienation: if it’s not his house, he can throw a beer can everywhere.

“In the cinema, in the car, in the office, people calmly throw cigarette butts, empty bottles, banana peels, candy wrappers, and other garbage on the floor. Regarding neatness inherent in Japanese housing, the Japanese office looks so sloppy.”

Now let’s talk about our problems

There is one central street in the city of Aktobe. Probably, there are such “central” streets all over Kazakhstan. But I remember this street especially. Not the whole street, but its edge, which is adjacent to Sankibaya Avenue. Three hundred meters from the intersection, this part of the street was always flooded with water. In autumn and especially in spring, there was a whole lake. Cars overcame this section at first speed, and the spectacle was literally like crossing a river into a Ford. In the spring, when snow was just melting, thawed pits appeared, actually from pits and snow edges – a real obstacle course turned out.

So what? – the reader will say. There are always such roads in the spring.

The fact is that private owners built mansions on the edges of this plot. Private traders had been driving out of their own gates directly onto the obstacle course and into the swamp for more than ten years. I am 100% sure that everything is dry, clean, and beautiful in their yard.

This psychology of “my hut on the edge” applies to society and the whole state. Everything is fine at home, but the state has a puddle.

Chapter 4

Japanese nationalism

Nomadism and nomadism are the worst conditions that market relations would have to face. Although the former nomads have already met with Western civilization and its mission, today, the market trend throughout history has been through an intermediary, Russia.

If we were looking for the reason for Asia’s lag. However, Asian civilization had cradles of civilizations such as Egypt and Mesopotamia. Although nomads did not create these civilizations, they are not nomads in the sense that we understand today. The long stay of the people in one place creates a deep root of the traditional elite. European civilization also seems to have been created exclusively by migrants. Although migrants are also a kind of nomads, we are not interested in such “nomads”. Such massive independence of character, directed at any small property of migrants and “travelers,” – contributed to modern Western civilization. All migrants, even the ancients (Darians, Latins, migrants from the Old World to America), had new laws in use. These laws rejected the “tails” of the old privileged clans, peoples, and families. Slowly, informal laws were replaced by formal laws, which were recorded and observed by everyone.

In Asia, the opposite is true. No one migrates, and everyone has been fine for centuries. That’s why a kind of eternal Asian conservatism has turned out. Whatever country you take, dictators rule everywhere. Because tradition is based on the root. Of course, you understand that. Why didn’t people fly into space from Egypt and Mesopotamia? Because huge pyramids caught on the tail of ancient civilizations and were not allowed into space.

It is better to be a migrant in this picture of a market-democratic future because all migrants are rootless. Nothing was pressing on them, and nothing was pressing on them. They found it difficult to show their arrogance. Who are you? – they could have told every upstart.

It’s better to be a migrant but not a nomad.

Nomads made annual raids along the old routes, essentially repeating the farmers’ sitting in one place; only some moved and returned to their original place. A nomad needs to go as far as possible along the route to take up more space to designate your land. This designation is repeated in time. On the contrary, the farmer “likes” to sit in one place. This community and the state of farmers are expanding, and the farmer dreams of acquiring a new plot. This perpetual movement with a small “rest” predetermined the technical lag of the nomads from the farmers. It’s not even about the late development of technology and, consequently, modernization in a cruel way (from anyone, but we are only interested in the Bolsheviks and why it happened. Without Stalin’s brutal modernization, it would have been even more difficult for the modern descendants of nomads to get used to Western civilization; even more, perhaps, they would have been threatened with complete disappearance. Even today, after the Soviet experience of modernization, Kazakhs remain imitators and consumers. Actually, who doesn’t imitate and consume in this world today? The only thing that remains as hope is a centralized state. This is very important for any nation. Without a central authority, every person is a miserable loner, a small boat in a market ocean. We must protect our state. But first, you have to come to him so that you can appreciate him later. Meanwhile, the nomads never loved the state, and they loved freedom. Because they loved freedom, they called themselves Cossacks.

The Japanese people, for example, have spent a lot of effort and time on centralization for almost 200 years. The samurai first took power from the aristocracy, then staged a civil war with each other. Tokugawa Shogun overcame the feudal fragmentation of the island. Of course, the island situation and the lack of large resources interesting to Europeans helped the Japanese. The Japanese managed and met with the Europeans – the future world colonizers – already in a centralized state. This was of paramount importance. The Japanese did not have to jump through formations like the Kazakhs immediately into socialism. After the shogunate, the imperial power helped to carry out rapid reforms. Already 36 years after the “Meiji Restoration” – the beginning of reforms – a victory was won over tsarist Russia and ten years before that over China. In 1904, Japan showed the imperial navy’s power and its admirals’ skill.

Moreover, a form of state nationalism or nationalism under the leadership of the emperor himself helped Japan. Japan has followed the path of all Europeans – and turned into a nation of militarists in a very short period. The German National Socialists, that is, the European analog of state Nazism, had a much larger time reserve – several centuries. However, Prussia and Bismarck formally united all Germans only in 1870.

Did the Japanese have an intelligentsia to educate chauvinists? It was not so powerful in scientific and intellectual, but it was (in the form of storytellers, myth-makers, and syncretisers, but Japan has its scientists and its own professors).

Japan needed resources.

Japan was poor in mineral resources, but all Japanese ministers were great-grandchildren of samurai. If Japan opened the doors to European technology and culture, then the inevitable happened: the imposition of modernization, economic growth, and population on the traditional Japanese craft – on the war. The Germans also had the Prussian military in reserve, and the Prussian military relied on the tradition of the Teutonic Order. There is nothing unexpected in this world!

There were no other ethnic groups in Japan except the Japanese. Where did the so-called Japanese nationalism come from?

There was no nationalism in the way the layman understood it in Japan. This is a state nationalism invented and controlled by imperial ideologists. The Japanese elite gathered and decided for the whole nation. Japanese nationalism is rather Japanese patriotism because the state completely governed it. Every Japanese before Emperor Meiji and the crossing of borders was inspired that the Japanese were the chosen race on earth. Watching East Asia die under the onslaught of European merchants and colonization, the Japanese could think that they were the best. And it affected the Japanese character.

If the Japanese seemed depressed after 1945 after the deposition of the emperor, this defeat resembled the soldiers’ failure and did not affect the Japanese character. So, a temporary setback. The main thing is that the bulk of modern Japanese is a reflection of the Remids, the Remids of the statesmen. This is because the modernization of Japan took place under the Japanese leadership. But most importantly, the aristocracy has been preserved in Japan. The aristocracy never steals. Never and nowhere.

The emperor’s power and the state had a paternal influence on Japanese society. Every government must care for its Remids, including every sovereign government (especially former historical nomads); otherwise, it will lose centralization. Centralization is the main value of all people. Without centralization, there will be a quick end, rapid disintegration under the influence of tribal or feudal culture. This is called a “fraternal massacre” (and the Kazakhs did not fully survive the zeref reflection). The market excites degradation, especially if the people have never had so-called citizens. Citizens appeared all over the world when people had private property. Then, these citizens fought for democracy. If the people have never known private property, and the nomads have never known it, then the people are always threatened with a “fraternal massacre”. It is the state that saves from the massacre.

The state may not be able to stand it, and the state is just a form of organization of people. Unless, of course, the government will continue “reforms” based on the traditional (primitive) personnel policy. The future of this state depends on which people are at the top. Either the state or death! This is the greatest danger if people still remember their kind, even symbolically and ritually. Each physical majority forms its leaders.

If market reflection penetrates into people who are not independent or complex but immediately militant and proud, these people will only accumulate material values to show their superiority. This is a primal quality. Therefore, the value of reflection is in the first place here.

What is nationalism? This is a massive desire to dominate yesterday’s artisans, townspeople, and peasants. They were humiliated by the traditional elite. Now they want to “humiliate”, and put any arrogant president in his place.

If feudal consciousness meets with market nationalism, then it turns out not a mass of free citizens as in Europe, but only a mass of feudal lords. And feudal lords always tear the state apart. The feudal lords of the state do not need anything. “It’s wet in the yard; start over”.