12 We Japanese...

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“With my friends, or in a class discussion, sometimes there were times when I said something about ‘Japanese people,’ you know? The thing is that I called myself Japanese (nihonjin), and although in fairness, I shouldn’t say so. I would say ‘We Japanese [warera nihonjin ha] such and such’...Of course my best friends knew [what was going on], but still I really felt the burden of deceiving everybody by not really being Japanese.”
Higashi-kujo resident and Madang organizer

The “official version” of why “We Japanese” are like they are is provided in capsule form in this video produced by the Jinjahoncho.
Expousing an unbroken heritage from prehistoric society, informed by a “spontaneously” generated native religion (Shinto) and reflecting the unique (in the facile sense that all geographic locations are unique) influences of climate and agriculture—modern Japan is simply, and without an accommodation for modernity, the result of social, cultural, and racial evolution on the Japanese Archipelago from “time immemorial.”

For the last two decades it is Japan’s singular economic triumph on the world stage that has bolstered internal arguments about the benefits of belonging to “Japan, Inc.,” i.e., to “We Japanese.” But still, there is a need to secure the message of this triumph as a national achievement, to implicate (if not reward—most life-style markers in Japan are far lower than the per-capita GNP would predict) the national population as the source and the means to continual success.

“To ask that Japan be portrayed as a multiracial, multicultural society is only to ask that the artist, journalist, and scholar be objective and humanistic. For Japan has never been a country for which the description “homogeneous” or “mono-ethnic” would be appropriate except as a reductionist, holistic caricature. During the one-and-a-half millennia for which we have reasonably accurate historical accounts of Japanese society and its population, it is clear that Japan has never been without ethnic minorities and ethnic conflict.
(Wetherall 1981, 203).”

For decades various messages given by the state—from those during the pre-War days that linked the citizenry to its sovereign Emperor, a link that was legitimized by blood ties and informed by “nature” (the monsoon climate of Japan); to the more recent refrains about Japan’s total lack of minority groups (eliding entirely groups such as the Ainu, Okinawans, resident Koreans and Chinese, the distinctions used against those who live in buraku areas, and the growing number of foreign workers in Japan)—have had one central theme: the Japanese population is one homogeneous group.

“...Similarly, the cultural homogeneity of Japan is an important asset to authorities in carrying out their mandate. In a society where elites are not expected to be directly responsive to the public and where the direct articulation of grievances by social subordinates is discouraged, this homogeneity enables elites to understand and anticipate the needs of those subject to their authority.
(Pharr 1990, 222).”

From the far north to the sub-tropical south, and from seacoast villages to mountain pass hamlets, from the great cities to the small towns: at all places and levels, what is presumed to hold in common is so much greater than what could be used to divide, that all persons (of Japanese descent) are equally (and unavoidably) members of the national “We Japanese” cohort. And so, when a politician starts his speech, “We Japanese...[warera nihonjin ha...]” everyone knows precisely for—and to whom—he is talking.

“Consider ‘paternal constructions,’ the rather large class of deceits and fabrications that is performed in what is felt to be the dupe's best interests, but which he might reject, at least at the beginning, were he to discover what was really happening. The falsity is calculated to give him comfort and render him tractable and is constructed for those reasons
(Goffman 1974, 99).”

What is most suspicious about this discourse of underlying homogeneity, which has also been acquired by many social scientists looking at modern Japan¹, is that this seems so blatantly to be used in the service of inequality. What the Japanese public holds most in common, it seems, is that it is collectively obligated to all of those elevated (erai) individuals (the new paternalist nobility, including one’s parents and teachers) who are said to be in a position to know, and have the facilities to understand, and [one can only hope] the integrity to act on behalf of the Japanese public.

“...Where organisational and decision-making structures remain centralised, the consequence of socialisation is only a shift from the private control of knowledge by the corporation to the monopolisation of knowledge by the state. The position of the majority of the population continues to be one of ‘subalternity’, a situation (similar to that criticised by Hidaka in contemporary Japan) in which individuals regard themselves as ‘little people’, lacking all power to influence the wider society, and therefore devoid of all responsibility for the outcome of social change
(Morris-Suzuki 1988, 206).”

In the same way that deference to one’s “betters,” i.e., to elders, to men (if you are a woman), and to anyone with a higher position in an organization, or with any job in an organization with higher status, is taught as “manners,” in Kyoto, an entrenched lack of equality² is passed off as “homogeneity.” What is shared here is a common, limited ken, a mutual lack of perspective on a situation. This lack is both an outcome and input to the delegation of authority and the relinquishing of opinion that so marks the public sphere in Japan, and which is central to a governmentality often termed “paternalistic³,” although this term does not adequately reveal the dynamics of the situation.

¹ Susan Pharr’s (1990) work on conflict management in Japan is a very good case in point. Her arguments are most convincing when they point to specific programs and instances of status conflict and state responses to this, and much less credible when she credits blanket cultural bases for these actions.

²One of the primary referents to democracy in Kyoto is “equality” as exemplified by a commonly held notion that the range of affluence between the rich and the poor in Japan has narrowed appreciably since the 19th century.

³Paternal “games”, as Goffman (1974, 99) noted, requires the management of the subject’s ken in a way that hides the mechanics of this management. The “dupe” is told what the pater believes is good for him to know, and is shown what the pater believes is good for him to see. But at a more subtle level, paternalism is also a delegation of expression. The pater speaks for the family: for that socius over which his authority has been granted.