Hacker News Reader

Comment by bjackman | Hacker News Reader

> The government has recommended removing the Buddhist manji symbol from maps aimed at foreigners, for example, for fear of unintended associations with the Nazi swastika.

Does anyone else think this is a shame? When I've been to Asia and seen "swastikas" everywhere I've found it in a way joyful. The hate symbol has no power here, I thought; it's a positive thing. Why should one culture change their own iconography just because it was perverted in a different culture? It seems like a mild example of self-inflicted cultural imperialism.

Maybe I'm just being very philosophically naïve.

View on HN

I agree with you. One culture's horrifying misuse of a symbol should not censor it for all and forever.

My roommate for the first two years of college was raised as a Jain[1], and a swastika with four dots is an important symbol for them. He liked to sketch, anything and everything, but also this swastika.

As his art was all over our walls, the expressions people had when they entered our dorm room for the first time were priceless. Sometimes it took some real explaining to convince them that I'm not a Nazi, and it was my Indian roommate who was drawing them and not me. ;-)

Beautiful artwork though.

---Alex

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism

It's not just Jains (it's almost all Hindus as well), and the original Swastika [1] really doesn't have anything other than a positive connotation. It's considered to be an auspicious symbol, something which brings luck, prosperity etc. Even now if we buy something big (like house/vehicle etc.), the first thing religious Hindus do is get the ceremony done for making it 'auspicious' (by a Hindu priest), and drawing Swastika on that property is an important part of it. The people in US, if you visit any famous Hindu temple there, you might observe a priest doing the same ceremony with someone's new flashy car.

The symbol is also used in almost any important life event in Hindu culture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika

You'd be surprised at how many times I have had to explain that it was for good luck and not some kind of evil logo

Even if they think Nazis' symbol is bad, ideally they should easily be able to see the difference between that and the Indian symbol which is almost always red, vertically upright, and with four dots.

Aww the Jainism tenets looked great until they got to chastity. Why do so many religions and movements associate sex with sin? It is a beautiful, wonderful thing.

It's not exactly with sin, but sexual activity is correlated with the power of creation. So "misusing" a "big bang" is often painted as something "bad", be it a sin or simply considered an act of layman's ignorance.

You may like Tantrik Hinduism. ;)

Does it have the caste system?

To be honest I'm happy just figuring out my own beliefs.

Brahmachary is often translated as chastity, but an alternate translation widely accepted in other spiritual traditions, like Bhakti, is fidelity within a committed relationship and conservation of sexual energy. So that might mean not masturbating every day, but conserving that sexual energy to bond with your partner (sexually or otherwise).

Islam, actually, does not. Sex between a husband and wife is considered worship.

> Islam, actually, does not. Sex between a husband and wife...

So far true for Christianity as well according to my reading and what I have been told. The worship part however I can't relate to.

Really? I thought several denominations of Christianity frowned on non-procreational sex.

They see sex as equally procreative and unitive -- so if you explicitly block either aspect, you're misusing it. (Catholic perspective, anyway, and probably significantly over-simplified).

The US council of bishops has a document giving more details: http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/marriage-and-family/n...

Saying "Christianity believes X" is likely to be not true for some denominations for any X other than "Jesus is the son of God"

Even if you restrict yourself to Protestantism in the US, you will have trouble generalizing too much; the doctrine of Sola Scriptura[1] is probably the only other universal there.

With regards to sexuality, there is very broad agreement that extramarital sex is sinful, but not much more agreement beyond that. Most protestants are accepting of contraception within marriage; Roman Catholic doctrine is opposed to any use of contraception (to the point of the official stance being that HIV positive married persons should never have sex rather than use a condom), however somewhere between "more than half" and 90% of western Catholics disagree with this.

James Dobson (A well known Evangelical Protestant psychologist) gets plenty of angry letters any time his stance that masturbation is a normal and healthy part of developing sexuality comes up.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_scriptura

Not sure why child post from aidenn0 is flagged dead, the way I read it it was correct and unoffensive but for what I know it might have been changed after flagging or I might have misread it.

And sex between a husband and wives is considered greater worship, but sex between wife and husbands is a sin.

You sound like you're mocking it, and I almost didn't respond, but here goes (hoping you'll take this in good faith): people in the west like to nitpick on this, but you have to understand that Islam was born in an incredibly sexist environment where when your dad died, you could inherit your stepmothers as wives. Women weren't allowed to own property or inherit. So compared to that, Islam was incredibly progressive (women allowed to own businesses, inherit, entitled to all sorts of benefits in case of marriage, divorce, etc that simply did not exist before). So strictly speaking polygamy is allowed in Islam (man->women, not women->man) but that is not an obligation by any means. As times have changed, culture has changed, people have just stopped doing that as much.

I grew up in a conservative, Muslim-majority country and in my 18 years there, I did not meet a single person with multiple wives. I heard of one person though - a man from a village who worked in the city had one wife in each location. I never met this man, but a distant relative knew of him. That's it. Every other person I met was monogamous. I'm not trying to justify something you think is wrong, just giving you a bit of perspective that I hope you'll consider.

Civil (and informative) comments like yours are why I come to HN.

Your phrasing is curious. You're "not trying to justify something that [I] think is wrong." I would have removed the italicized section entirely. Do you not also think it is wrong that you have heard of a man with multiple wives but not vice-versa?

Shame about the rest of the attitudes towards women.

Eh, I think there's a lot of room for progressivism out there. Problem is that a lot of Muslim-majority countries out there are very much in the dark ages, where the orthodox religious institutions have a chokehold on society, and that is what the world sees. If you actually go and observe Western muslim society (beyond newsmedia fearmongering), women are much much more so on equal footing here, and society thrives for it. I, for one, am very excited to see what direction this new generation of Muslim millenials in the West take the cultural development of Islam.

(based on my experience in the US; may not be true of Europe)

For Europe, at least where I am, it goes both way, in some parts the women are on equal footing to men, but in other parts it's the opposite, with women seen as inferior to men.

Before good birth control, extramarital sex meant single mothers. And if it's hard to be a single mom today, imagine being a single mom in a world where there were a fraction of the job opportunities outside the home for a woman.

Surely we need to fork the religion.

Geospatial Information Authority of Japan heard public comments and have finally decided NOT to change the symbol for temples. Their official statement is at http://www.gsi.go.jp/common/000138869.pdf. (It's written in Japanese. I couldn't find out English one.)

I'm part Jewish but I also live in Asia and I see the "swastikas" here all the time. Completely different meaning, no negative connotation. It's not the symbol that matters, but what people are trying to represent with it.

It's just like the word "hacker" that meant scary things in the 1990s and "cool and hip" in the last 5-10 years.

Also see: Pepe the Frog. Some people tried to brand it as a hate symbol because a very small group of bad people were using it, but it's just a cartoon frog.

Poor pepe...

https://thenib.com/pepe-behind-the-meme

I absolutely agree. I find the manji symbol highly aesthetically pleasing and would love for it to be 'reclaimed' from its evil connotations globally/ in the Western World.

Please do not self-censor, Japan!

In fact, one could even argue that the symbol on the maps might have an interesting secondary effect on many unaware foreigners, shocking them when seeing it the first time (What are all these Nazi symbols doing here? Ah, it must be because they were Axis allies?). Only for them then to realise that in fact, a symbol at its core, is just that: lines in a certain constellation. Meaning is ascribed by the observer.

What can stand for pure evil one place, might be synonymous with sacred temples of peace in another.

Perhaps... If Japan hadn't had been the military ally of the people who perverted the symbol, I'd probably agree.

Yes, because the symbol hasn't been used for tens of thousands of years before the Nazis adopted it.

India should be able to use it as much as they want. I would imagine it would be harder to make that case for a former Axis power.

Why? It's a religious symbol. Their use is completely (as in, totally, 100%) unrelated to WW2, and it was in use far before the war.

So, with all that said why should their status in that war affect it at all?

Japan is not a person. No people should be held responsible in its entirety for a mistake of the political organisation governing them. Even in most democracies, minorities get to decide on cases concerning the people in its entirety, and during the WWII, an absolute monarchy with religious powers was in effect in Japan.

My parents were not yet born and my grandparents were grade school children when the US interned Japanese-Americans but their tax money was still used to compensate those people for the injustice done to them.

You inherit everything, good and bad, from those who came before you. It's your choice of what to keep and what to drop.

Given the symbol is not inherited from Nazis, there is no heir and no heritage here. It's just a similarity here.

This line of thinking is just basic collectivism.

>Maybe I'm just being very philosophically naïve.

Possibly, more culturally naive than philosophically so.

World War 2 and the Holocaust had a profound impact on Western culture, and Westerners have identified that symbol with the Nazis for almost a century. The impact of Buddhist or Hindu symbology in the West, in comparison and response, has been practically nil.

For Westerners, who may never have been to an Asian country prior to Japan's Olympics, to see a manji and mistake it for a Nazi symbol is perfectly reasonable, if that is the only context in which the symbol exists for them.

The change in icons makes sense, if you (you being some hypothetical Japan) want to communicate specifically to those tourists and encourage their engagement with local businesses and culture. Why use a symbol on maps specifically for foreigners to use which would probably confuse them?

You could just keep it there and say "those ignorant foreigners just need to learn what it actually means" ... but that would show hostility towards to your guests, be bad for business and an impractical way to design a map.

Edit: Apparently they decided not to change the iconography for the maps. It will be interesting to find out what impact if any that appears to have on engagement during the Olympics.

Why travel if not to learn about new cultures? Maybe you add an explanation to the map rather than changing the symbol.

I think it's a matter of unnecessary friction. People traveling to Japan to see the Olympics might not bother to get out of their comfort zone, leave the hotel and see something interesting if the maps seem to discourage them from doing so.

>Maybe you add an explanation to the map rather than changing the symbol.

That's a fair compromise, but now you have to explain it in every possible language that a foreigner might use. Which is probably why you considered changing the symbol in the first place, because well designed icons theoretically speak to everyone.

> Why use a symbol on maps specifically for foreigners to use which would probably confuse them?

If everywhere is the same, why travel? Local color like this makes destinations more interesting, not less. Hiding culture and heritage makes the value proposition weaker.

/German living in Seoul

Additionally there is a significant link between Nazi Germany and Japan.

I think you're wrong here.

I'm all for acknowledging and sympathizing with people who mistakenly identify this symbol as a swastika. I'm certainly not in favor of looking down on them. By all means, gently explain to them the difference. Turn it into a positive thing.

But it seems thoroughly wrong to me to actually change the symbol based on these feelings. When I was studying Arabic I quickly came across the verb to be, which, when conjugated for the first person perfect is Kuntu (MSA pronunciation) and Kunt (colloquial pronunciation). This is quite close to one of the only words left in English that still carries taboo. Still, we got on with it. This is far from a perfect analogy, but the point is that these kinds of situations are quite common, and it's irrational to try to avoid them.

> For Westerners, who may never have been to an Asian country prior to Japan's Olympics, to see a manji and mistake it for a Nazi symbol is perfectly reasonable, if that is the only context in which the symbol exists for them.

Well then it seems like the obvious answer is to expose oneself to all the contexts in which the swastika has been used throughout history. We do have the world wide web after all. It's the duty of the ignorant to reduce their ignorance not that of others to cater to it.

> It will be interesting to find out what impact if any that appears to have on engagement during the Olympics.

You don't have to wonder, Japan has hosted the Olympics many times before this.

I agree with you. Serious question: I wonder how far you take that. For example, for me, the Confederate US flag represented a favorite TV show as a kid (Dukes of Hazzard), the south (which meant cool accents and hospitality). Until 5 or so years ago I didn't know anyone still associated it with slavery. When will it be cleared for use again?

In other words, what is the bounds where a tainted symbol can or can't be used? Geopolitical border?

I grew up with the Dukes of Hazzard on TV and I have pretty much always associated that flag with the racist elements of the American south. I have pretty much always had a negative visceral reaction whenever I see it. Most of the African Americans I know have the same feelings about that flag. What has changed is that recently, non-black people have been paying attention to how we feel.

The situation with the Confederate flag I think is much much more complicated than the situation with the swastika.

How so?

Southerners still cling to the notions of "states rights" and "war of northern aggression" and other bullshit.

it's a traitors flag. They committed treason to try to protect their institution of slavery.

> When will it be cleared for use again?

The south has been using it to celebrate their treason and slavery for a while. Only recently have people started to say "maybe don't use that".

It took the murder of nine innocent people to finally convince the SC General Assembly to remove the Confederate flag from the state house grounds.

The swastika has been used as religious symbol for millennia before the Nazis adopted it. The Confederate flag was created specifically to represent a secessionist movement aiming to maintain the practice of slavery. The two situations are not nearly the same.

Whenever I see the confederate battle flag it looks like the nazi swastika to me. Perhaps this is because I didn't grow up with it normalized.

Note that it's for maps aimed at foreigners, a lot of which are westerners. They're not removing or going to remove the symbol from temple themselves.

Also, to be truthful, a lot of foreigners wouldn't know what the svatiskas on maps point to.

> Also, to be truthful, a lot of foreigners wouldn't know what the svatiskas on maps point to.

Exactly. This is the main reason for the change. The changes were based on surveys where they asked foreigners "if you saw this symbol on a map, what do you think it would mean?". Not "is this offensive?" You can find a PDF of the survey results online, it also included stuff like hotel symbols which foreigners thought meant hospital or helipad.

Honestly, one of the things I liked about visiting Japan was that I had to adjust my preconceptions a little to accommodate a developed culture with a non-western foundation. Changing things to adapt to western preconceptions takes that away a little bit.

These seem like little UX things :) . It'd be tough to imagine changing their core cultural tenets in order to accommodate tourists.

But in this case, that little UX thing forces the understanding that a symbol that is taboo and has an offensive meaning in your home country is understood totally differently in Japan.

That means it's bad UX. "Make me think" is a totally different book.

God forbid we use this as a chance to educate people on the long history of this particular symbol.

This is similar to American cryptographic literature and libraries (and who knows, maybe some British ones too) using the word "nonce".

In the UK that word means ... well you can look it up.

FWIW, I've lived in the UK my whole life and I had no idea that had any meaning apart from the crypto one.

I think it's quite an old fashioned bit of slang... I think I've come across it more frequently in 1970s/80s police dramas than anywhere else.

Google has it pinned as being primarily a UK search term so there must still be people using it, unless this is just an echo caused by a special offer on boxed sets of The Sweeney.

Well, it is prison slang, but, I believe, in broad circulation. Maybe it is a bit dated.

Wikipedia says it's in the OED: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce_(slang)

Two way street here so since you used the general term "Asia", I feel obligated to point out that in large part of Asia, the symbol is known and when liked it's exactly for what it's seen as in the west.

Which parts? Anywhere with Buddhist or Hindu populations will use it like the Japanese.

I'm thinking of parts if south east asia, notably I've seen a lot of it in Cambodia and Vietnam (stores selling it openly, being wearing or doing nazi salutes, ...).

Then there is Thailand as how simple ignorance leads to the symbol being used as a representation of the nazi but without quite understanding what they are/were ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_imagery_in_Thailand ). It got so bad their government is now moving hard to push nazi/holocaust into their education programe to solve that, after a seemingly continuous serie of events like this:

> In 2011, during a sports day parade, students of a Catholic school in Thailand dressed and marched in SS uniforms. The school later apologized after international outrage."

I too found that enjoyable in Japan. The elimination of the Swastika from Western cultures as a response to the atrocities of the Nazi regime makes sense to me, eliminating it from Eastern cultures just seems to be giving the Nazi's an extra bit of power 80 years after the fact.

Agreed. They're even different symbols (manji for temples is left-facing "sauwastika", while Hakenkreuz is right-facing); although both have the same origin.

It's not just throughout Asia, it's visible in north and South American aboriginal ruins and culture. And in Ancient Greek art, though likely the same people who brought it to India brought it to Greece and Persia.

Agreed. This symbol existed before the swastika. Also, knowing that war crimes denial is still a thing in Japan, this decision doesn't seem the most appropriate to me...

It's a demonstration of how powerful a good propaganda campaign can be. 80 years later and still swastikas=bad.

A more recent example : Just Say No. All these 40-somethings who never did drugs, never will, just hate them and can't really explain why.

> It's a demonstration of how powerful a good propaganda campaign can be. 80 years later and still swastikas=bad.

Yes, 60 million dead is powerful propaganda.

Mao Zedong killed 65 million, Stalin killed 23 million and Hitler killed 17 million.

But it's Hitler that we remember. It's Hitler that gets cited by right-thinking fellows on the internet. It's Hitler's logo that gets banned from the tshirt stores. Why?

Hitler's crew had strong propaganda, that's why.

Propaganda is what rolls around in the media, and the public mind, for centuries. Not reality.

I guess "marketing" is the more common term.

Marketing can turn black into white and day into night. It is powerful.

Who has forgotten Stalin? Or Mao?

Think of it as as meme. The Hitler meme is big, the Stalin and Mao memes are not so big. You can look them all up on google but it's Hitler that gets cited in convo.

Ok but to be fair, Hitler is a 'western' meme. Stalin and Mao didn't kill westerners.

> Mao Zedong killed 65 million, Stalin killed 23 million

In their countries.

> and Hitler killed 17 million.

You have to include the WW2 deaths.

It's very common in Japan to pander to foreigners (read: "non-Asians") when they never asked to be pandered to in the first place.

It's unlikely anyone ever complained about the symbol but someone probably brought it up a meeting and the slightest chance that a foreigner would be offended was enough to push it through.

Special treatment for foreigners is not new. [1] Recently they rent-a-car agencies have started putting a "foreigner driving" sticker on cars rented by non-Japanese people. Interestingly the sticker says "Foreigner driving" in Japanese but "I love driving in Japan" or "Friendly driving" in English, with no mention of the 'foreigner' part.

[1] http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20160416/p2a/00m/0na/005...

> It's unlikely anyone ever complained about the symbol but someone probably brought it up a meeting and the slightest chance that a foreigner would be offended was enough to push it through.

The changes were based on surveys that showed that many tourists had no idea what the symbol represented.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com