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10 fear of the foreign
The U.S. continues to provide a good share of the international popular cultural imagination in Kyoto. Films, fashions, television, music— sometimes the presence is comically ironic, as when a supermarket plays the latest “gangsta rap” as muzak, or when a pre-teen girl wanders down the street with a T-shirt that reads “The Devil sucked me off.” But more often the marketplace has made conscious efforts to manage and promote images and products licensed from the U.S. The marketplace increasingly works at odds to the governmental interest in domesticating these products, as it sells them as original and thus “raw.” This conflict of interests seems to be tilting in favor of the market. The government may even play into this when it fronts the dangerous differences between the US and Japan.
The dangers of the American lifestyle are a daily fare on NHK (the government-run TV/radio channel), particularly violent crimes and the lack of gun control. Japanese school groups that plan to travel abroad have been encouraged to go to Canada or Australia.
As a reverse example (i.e., making dangerous a foreign import), the government managed to enhance the dangerous and inferior qualities of foreign rice. When foreign rice imports were necessitated due to a terrible harvest in 1993, the Japanese government bought a cheaper quality of the long-grain Thai rice (which is, in any case, not suitable for making sushi) and then distributed1 it with information on how to cook it in order to get rid of its bad odor. They also insisted on mixing this rice with the Japanese-style rice they imported from elsewhere, so that the consumer never had the opportunity to taste Japanese-style rice from only one source outside of Japan. Reports of the pebbles and other matter that people discovered in their rice made regular news features.
A last example. When Japanese companies predicted a need for additional labor in the late 1980s the Japanese government began a program of recruiting foreign workers who could prove their “pure” Japanese ancestry. Most of these were from communities of agriculturalists who had expatriated to Brazil or Peru earlier in the century. The idea was to re-socialize persons who were already biologically similar to the local population so that their continuing residence, and their resulting lack of “foreignness” would not be so disturbing.
The realities turned out to be much more what one could predict: the Brazilians were often less than enthusiastic over the lack of lifestyle amenities and the rigid constraints of the Japanese workplace. And the locals were even more frightened by the rumors that there were groups of people who looked Japanese but who might be more prone to acts of violence or crimes. At least with Europeans one could see them coming.
The Koreans and also buraku Japanese face a similar prejudice, a generalized terror about their potential for being different (in anti-social ways) that their ability to pass as mainstream Japanese only increases. A Japanese friend of mine was certain that it was Koreans who bullied her in her primary school days. After the great Kanto earthquake in the Tokyo region seventy years ago, vigilante groups massacred thousands of Koreans when rumors circulated that they were setting fires and poisoning wells. Even after the 1995 Kobe quake, which destroyed much of the Korean/buraku area of Nagataku in Kobe, there were rumors circulated as far as the National Diet, that the Koreans had set some of the fires.
Various polls in Japan periodically rank peoples of foreign nations in terms of their “trustworthiness,” polls in which the Koreans invariably rank last, close behind “Africans.” But even without attaching national groups to such a list, there is the more general idea that foreigners may not be trustworthy. It is such an attitude of mistrust that forms the ground for the racism that most affects “foreigners” residing in Kyoto.
1The Japanese government food agency made a reported profit of more than US$4 billion on the sale of foreign rice at greatly inflated prices. They succeeded in reducing the demand for Thai rice to the point where they had too much on hand when the next harvest proved bountiful, so they exported this rice as a part of their ODA to African nations.
