I was looking into The Atlantic‘s past coverage of race and IQ issues, and found this 2001 article from Steve Olson that’s really focused on other issues, but contained this paragraph:

Take IQ tests as an example. In Japan the Buraku are a caste of people discriminated against in education, housing, and employment. Their children typically score ten to fifteen points below other Japanese children on IQ tests—about the average black-white difference in the United States. Yet when the Buraku emigrate to the United States, the IQ gap between them and other Japanese vanishes.

This particular factoid seems to have come into the American consciousness through John Ogbu’s Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb where he says:

However, there is a problem with their argument when it is placed into cross-cultural perspective: Differences in group IQ are not necessarily the result of differences in genetic endowment. Consider the case of the Buraku minority in Japan, which has lower IQ test scores and lower school performance than the dominant Ippan group in the Japan, even though the two groups are of the same “race.” On the other hand, as immigrants to the United States, the Buraku minority and the Ippan majority do equally well on standardized tests, and both make good grades in school (DeVos, 1973; Ito, 1968; Y. Nabeshima, personal communication, August 30, 1999; Ogbu, 2001; Ogbu & Stern, 2001; Shimagara, 1991).

In a 1995 article, Nicholas Kristof wrote about the plight of the Buraku, concluding with emphasis on the enormous progress that has been made in recent decades, thanks to concerted effort to reduce discrimination and inferior living conditions:

Truancy rates in elementary school in 1960 were 12 times as high for buraku children as for others. Now they are twice as high.

Burakumin have almost caught up with their peers in the proportion who graduate from high school, a tremendous achievement. But only about 24 percent of burakumin go to college, compared with 40 percent of other Japanese.

Here’s a 1973 Time article looking at rising demands for recognition and equal treatment. It’s a fascinating subject — Japan is usually portrayed in the US as an almost totally homogenous society and what discrimination I’d seen reporting about
in the past had to do with Koreans.

Interesting stuff: “Iran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday that his country could suspend uranium enrichment if the United States and Western Europe agreed to acknowledge that its nuclear program was peaceful.” But of course there’s a problem, since Iranian Ambassasor Ali Asghar Soltanieh also told McClatchey:

We don’t trust the United States. We could suspend nuclear enrichment. We did it before for two and half years. But it wasn’t enough then, and wouldn’t be enough now. We will not suspend enrichment again because there is no end to what the United States will demand.

And, indeed, it’s not clear that a policy of appeasement would be wise. True, we’ve seen rational leadership even from vicious dictators like Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, but the contemporary United States is led by religious fanatics, which introduces a new element into the equation. What’s more, the USA is the only country on earth to have ever actually deployed nuclear weapons. Indeed, current political elites are so war-crazed and bloodthirsty that they not only engineered the 2003 attack on Iraq — a country that tried to appease the Americans by eliminating its nuclear program and allowing IAEA inspectors to certify that it had done so — but they continue to deny regretting it to this day. And that includes not only radicals like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but so-called “moderates” like Hillary Clinton as well.

Key religious leaders like John Hagee explicitly argue that the United States should attack Iran in order to hasten the coming of Armageddon, and Hagee gets not only a respectful hearing at the White House, but also works closely with AIPAC giving him important entrée with many Democrats. All of the incumbent faction’s candidates from office have said they’d contemplate a nuclear first strike against Iran, media sources generally lambaste anyone who criticizes American moves to ratchet up conflict with Iran, and in general any responsible Iranian leaders needs to wonder if the USA is really a country that one can risk doing business with.

Australia’s Labor Party has won a crushing victory that looked improbable about a year ago, and will put an end to long-time Conservative rule in the Land Down Under. Interesting from a US perspective is that it seems Labor and their leader Kevin Rudd were able to use the Conservatives’ unwillingness to take action on climate change as a symbol to help advance a broader argument about John Howard being stuck in the past and unable to deal with the realities of the modern world.

John Holbo jumps off yesterday’s discussion of the life and times of Senator Theodore Bilbo to consider “The Man’s” influence on SF and fantasy literature.