“When spatial imaginaries and ideas about how to transform public plazas disregard the context, wants, and needs of residents themselves, these spaces become sites of exclusion rather than vital spaces for city culture to thrive.”
In our concern for an equitable distribution of benefits and resources, we tend to overlook two other critical dimensions of justice: participation and recognition.
How many of us are familiar with the stories of the Ifugao, the Tausug, the Talaandig, the Mangyan; of the history of Pampanga, Iloilo, Cotabato; of agriculture in the country and the rituals observed with fishing, or with the planting and harvest seasons? There are many provinces in the Philippines; there are many ways of life; indigenous peoples are Filipino and part of the nation-state. But apart from an awareness of some of these places as tourist sites; apart from remembering indigenous peoples through street names and even class sections in elementary or high school, we know little about them.
Modernity is ultimately about human agency and reason. Such allowed people to accomplish and to fight for so many things. The values and practices that we espouse now – freedom of expression, human rights, free markets, mobility, innovation – are legacies of changes that took place in Europe from the 1600s onwards. They are contemporary expressions of modernity.
Atsumi is twenty-three years old. She has been living in an Internet-Café for two months. She works as a waitress at a coffeehouse, but she may lose the job if the owner finds that she has become homeless. When she was in high school, her father died of cancer, her mother left her, and she withdrew from school. A loan shark has been chasing her after the first loan. She has scarcely been surviving alone (Suzuki 2014: 16-36). Introduction It was in 2015 that the “hinkon joshi,”or women in poverty, which include the likes of Atsumi, suddenly gained public attention in Japan. A documentary by NHK discussed the shocking fact that a third of working women in Japan were poor. Even if they marry, becoming a “wife” would not give them any advantage in contemporary Japanese society; matrimony has not become a realistic measure for women to escape from poverty (NHK Research Group 2014: 64-65). This feminization of poverty is worrying for a country suffering from a declining birth rate. In this essay, I will …
While historical causes, political conditions, and entrenched patron-client relationships cannot be discounted in the examination of rural poverty, a rethinking of spatial organization may be in order to avoid the pitfalls of locational biases.
When I was a student in Japan from 2011 to 2015, the incidence of hikikomori was a much-talked-about issue. The Oxford dictionary defines hikikomori as “(In Japan) the abnormal avoidance of social contact, typically by adolescent males.” It was an unprecedented social phenomenon; no one knew what it was and how to deal with it. It is easy to conclude that the hikikomori are outcasts of a fast growing society and that their emergence is a natural outcome of social change. However, such a notion raises too many questions: why did they emerge in this particular point in time? What have influenced young people to be hikikomori? What do they imply about the current society?
One might think that this country is barely a generation away from the trauma of dictatorship to believe itself ready to embrace yet another strongman’s rule. But such is the unraveling of the times. History is governed by a relationship between action and reaction, often between or amongst opposites.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nation’s (ASEAN) seeming inaction on the Rohingya crisis came as a shock to many. However, for those who have been observing ASEAN development, its failure to enact a coherent policy towards the Rohingya crisis only adds to the long list of matters it failed to address such as the “Cambodian Problem,” the South China Sea Dispute, and many others.
Our economy is growing dramatically but poverty rates are not dropping substantially. Where have we gone wrong? To begin with, faulty paradigms about the poor.
VERSTEHEN 