Pico Iyer, a British-born journalist of Indian origin who lives in Kyoto, has impressive credentials throughout Asia, including a decades-long friendship with the Dalai Lama. Iyer knows whereof he speaks, therefore, when he says, “the Japanese speak the language of the world, literally and metaphorically, less well than any of their Asian neighbors, with the exception of the North Koreans.” There is plenty of support, both anecdotal and data-driven, for Iyer's observation. In global comparative data on language proficiency compiled by IMD's World Competitiveness Center, Japan's performance is strikingly poor. Japan's mean English proficiency has already fallen below China's: the latter's position has increased by leaps and bounds in the last few years as it has prepared for the Beijing Olympics. In fact Japan's English proficiency, as measured by Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) scores, has it ranking not only last among Asia-Pacific countries and last among countries with GDP per capita greater than $10,000 (thirty-second out of 32), but in fact last overall among countries surveyed – fifty-second out of 52. There are also cognitive barriers, like shyness. In an international comparative study some years ago, famed Stanford psychologist Phillip Zimbardo found that, “more than any other nationality, the Japanese report feeling shy in virtually all social situations.” As Zimbardo concluded from various cultural observations “Japanese society is the model of a shyness-generating society.”

As Japan rose from the ashes of World War II, liberal intellectuals such as TSURU Shigeto, MARUYAMA Masao and ENDO Shusaku hoped that with its new constitution, Japan would come to represent a new international force for pacifist socialism. However, with the outbreak of the Cold War, the Chinese revolution and the Korean War, the United States had to engage Japan in rapid nation-building. As a result, the initial liberal reforms the American Occupation had instituted were greatly attenuated, and the United States very quickly transformed Japan from its bitterest enemy to its most pampered protégé. As a consequence of shifting its focus to rebuilding the Japanese economy, and its concern for avoiding strong leftist forces in Japan, the United States allowed the postwar Japanese establishment to remain in power and escape fundamental questioning or serious political change. As exemplified by the emperor transitioning from head of state to symbol of the state in the 1946 constitution, postwar Japan developed in a state of amnesia and political quietism. In addition to the emperor never going to trial (Emperor HIROHITO was almost certainly a war criminal), the CIA funneled secret funds to the “Liberal Democratic Party” (LDP, the dominant political party of postwar Japan) to help it defeat more progressive and socialistic political forces.

In the Japan of the second half of the twentieth century, the military battalions were replaced by the kaisha, the corporations. The mission statements of virtually all major Japanese companies included a strong patriotic component. As the late James Abegglen and other specialists have argued, whereas the typical American company would have shareholders as first priority, stakeholders second and the country in third place, in Japan the order was generally reckoned to be country, stakeholders and shareholders.

Since the crisis of the early 1990s, the government–industry nexus has somewhat fractured, Japanese companies have moved a lot of production offshore and the proportion of permanent employees to temporary employees has been significantly reduced. But while there has been an evolution, there has been no revolution. The big Japanese kaisha are emphatically not state-owned enterprises and Japanese capitalism cannot be labeled state capitalism. However, nationalist capitalism would still remain an accurate description. Senior management of the big kaisha still tend to be, pretty overwhelmingly, lifetime employees, and they still tend to introduce themselves by giving the name of their corporation first (e.g., “I am Hitachi's WATANABE”). Just as Japan would benefit from more international trade, imports, higher interest rates and letting the yen find its level, these macro changes ought to be complemented by openings at the firm level: new ways of conceiving of and undertaking work, both for businesspeople at the kaisha, and entrepreneurs outside the kaisha.

Contemporary Japan is a fascinating mix of cultural influences. Japanese language, art, architecture, religion and government are all inconceivable without the influence of Chinese and Korean culture. Japan is the land of the rising sun only because it was so described from the perspective of China to its West; in this sense, an intercultural identity is infused into the very heart of Japanese consciousness. Immigrants from what is now Korea taught Japan's indigenous ancestors how to farm rice. Modern Japanese economic, legal and corporate models have Prussian, American, French and British influences. The Portuguese gave the Japanese bread, or pan. The wildly popular “Japanese” game, sudoku, was first developed by an architect from Indianapolis, Howard Garns, and first popularized by a New Zealander, Wayne Gould. Even the Japanese tea ceremony, so emblematic of Japanese culture, is animated by Zen Buddhism, which originated in India.

As these and countless other examples show, there is no monolithic culture in Japan; it is a richly multicultural society. But we will go a step further, and argue that even the idea of the uniqueness of the Japanese race is pure myth, because the Japanese “race” is largely the result of waves of immigration from Asia. There is much that is potentially liberating for Japan and its neighbors in acknowledging these multicultural and immigration-based features of Japan. But we are getting ahead of ourselves, because the nineteenth century construct of Japan as a unified nation-state, a monoculture and a homogenous race retains deep roots in the Japanese imagination, and serve as anchoring principles for Japanese nationalists to this day.

In Disneyland near Paris one summer, I felt saturated with someone else's fantasies, someone else's objects. Some of the fantasies were also my own, but I recognised images from childhood only as if they had been refracted through a distorting lens that another person operated. Some were those of my sons, then aged twelve and sixteen, who were able to play in a cynical distance from the images, to both enjoy and parody what lay around them. Many of the fantasy objects, however, belonged to the Disney Corporation who managed to maintain a no less cynical distance from its customers as it extracted large amounts of money for personalised souvenirs, memories made and retailed for us to retell. We survived inside Disney's world from eight in the morning, with extra earlier entry for hotel customers, to eleven at night, when we staggered back after the music and fireworks finale.

Fantasy enjoys a divided double existence inside and outside the modern mind. It is something that feels personal and idiosyncratic, and it also circulates around us in representations that are shared by many others. Perhaps it was always so, to an extent, with the internal and internalized private fantasies about death and survival for each medieval citizen, for example, being matched by collective public fantasies about mortality and heaven. But the degree to which fantasy is systematically gathered and marketed, researched and turned into systems of commodities, is qualitatively greater now.

Just before the conclusion of the agreement on the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury visited refugee camps in South Tripura and had an extensive interview with Mr Upendralal Chakma, president, Jumma Refugee Welfare Association. In this interview, Mr Chakma expresses his opinion on different issues related to the situation in the CHT, Bangladesh. Here is an excerpt of this exclusive interview.

Refugee Watch (RW): After 50 years of partition of the Indian subcontinent, how would you relate the CHT problem to that of partition? Do you think that the partition on the whole created the problem?

Upendralal Chakma (UC): In 1947, 97.5 per cent of the total population of the CHT were Jummas and the remaining 2.5 per cent were non-Jummas. Logically, the Jumma people expected that their region would be merged with India. The Jumma leaders were working hard in that order. They met different political leaders at that juncture. Our leaders placed their demands before the visiting sub-commission that the CHT should be made a part of the new nation of India. But, on 18 August, we heard on radio that the CHT has been included in Pakistan. Our leaders talked to the Indian leaders. While the new Prime Minister of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru did not take the matter seriously, Sardar Ballavbhai Patel showed keen interest in the entire issue at the point. Nevertheless, there was no attempt to resist the unjust treatment of the CHT and we were included in Pakistan.

INTRODUCTION

The development of principles on displacement as a discourse can be attributed to the development of ideas in the twentieth century. Ideas can change the nature of international public policy discourse while helping governments and other actors to redesign their policies, identities and interests. At the same time, ideas can contribute to formation of new coalitions, political or institutional forces. Once an idea is stated, especially within the diverse global world of the twentieth century, it takes a life course of its own. The development of internal displacement as a discourse derived out of displacement discourse was the result of this cyclical phenomenon. Internal displacement is becoming a crucial factor affecting the course of Sri Lanka in its approach towards development. The main thrust of this paper is to analyse the many facets of displacement existent hitherto within a framework of human rights and humanitarian laws while bringing to the fore selected international developments of internal displacement as a discourse that is relevant to Sri Lanka.

HUMAN RIGHTS AND HUMANITARIAN LAW: A DISCURSIVE ANALYSIS

At the outset, it becomes necessary to outline the discursive paradigms of human rights and humanitarian laws.

Introduction

Since the 1980s, the exhaustion of Brazil's postwar economic development model became manifest in severe macroeconomic disequilibriums and the inability to maintain earlier high, sustained rates of economic growth. The stagnation of investment and weak efforts at technical innovation translated into low levels of efficiency, productivity and technological modernization.

The 1990s saw a break with the statist postwar model in favor of reduced state economic intervention and a more comprehensive liberalization of both trade and capital flows. Among the economic policies adopted to this end, trade and financial liberalization and privatization of state-owned enterprises stand out. Proponents expected these policies to eliminate bottlenecks hindering the competitiveness of Brazilian industry and to hasten the convergence of Brazil's technology, managerial practices and levels of productivity to those of the “advanced” economies.

Some scholars and policymakers saw foreign corporations as the protagonists of this process. They believed that most domestic private companies would not be able to survive or expand in a liberalizing, non-inflationary context without the subsidies they had enjoyed under the earlier model. Given the privatization process and the declining importance of state-owned companies, these analysts argued, economic modernization would be accomplished by affiliates of transnational corporations (MNCs). Under a liberalizing regime, these affiliates, mainly in the most capital and technology-intensive sectors, would have stronger incentives to invest in cost reduction and technology modernization, and to become more specialized and less vertically integrated, increasing their efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness in world markets.