14 Discourse or dissent?

---

“Because of the potential political consequences linked to survey results, faithfully confessing to some unknown pollster on the telephone may seem like a public duty.
Quite the contrary, the act of consciously misleading a pollster may actually do more public good in the long run. As an act of civil disobedience, this is a fully legitimate counter-population practice: it announces that the individual refuses to be interrogated for some institution's convenience. And it is not even illegal, not even in Japan.”
(Caron 1996, 124)

While Pharr’s (1990) arguments about “conflict management” in Japan contain some assumptions that are difficult to accept (such as the “fact” of homogeneity, which she does not sufficiently critique), her work, read with attention to constraints on expressions in public, reveal practices that defer (and so defeat) discursive access by the majority of the public to the public sphere in Japanese cities such as Kyoto.

By looking at the (mostly pre-War) history of protest by women and buraku dwelling Japanese, she reveals a pattern of institutionalized delegitimation of protest. She describes how the steep requirements for legitimating public protest and the institutional practice of settling disputes without legitimating the right to dispute either the original situation or the settlement constrain public protest, and public discourse in general.

Japan: a lawless state

“...Acts of civil disobedience are examples of self-limiting radicalism par excellence. On the one hand, civil disobedients extend the range of legitimate, even if initially extralegal, citizen activity that is accepted by a given political culture. Few would be shocked today by a workers' strike, a sit-in, a boycott, or a mass demonstration. These forms of collective action have come to be considered normal, yet all of them were once illegal or extralegal and could again become illegal under some conditions. Thus, civil disobedience initiates a learning process that expands the range and forms of participation open to private citizens within a mature political culture. Moreover, it is well known that, historically, civil disobedience has been the motor to the creation and expansion of both rights and democratization. On the other hand, civil disobedience defines the outer limits of radical politics within the overall framework of civil societies”
(Cohen and Arato 1992, 567).

Because it is not used as a popular forum for counter discussions (which might lead to protests), the public sphere in Kyoto may be said to not exist as such, at least as this term is currently¹ being used to necessarily include counter-public protests. Of course, a similar argument has been leveled against the bourgeois public sphere in other nations: i.e., the lack of serious counter discourse brings into question the viability of the public sphere as an arena for social change.

However, in many states (mainly in nation-states, rather than in state-nations—Tienanmen is a counter example) there are signs of life within the public sphere: feminists challenging the masculine domination of this, and environmentalists challenging the market’s place in this. These challenges often appear in the form of mass protests. And so we can look for these events as a barometer for the viability of the public sphere.

Public protest is no more legal or illegal in Japan than it is in most parts of Europe and North America. And so why are there so conspicuously few protests on the streets in Japan? In part, we can suggest that this is due to a longer history of a lack of mass protest (combined with a lack of an acknowledged history of mass protest— state controlled history books do not reveal this history). Civil disobedience is a practice that requires, well, practice. And the space it opens on the margins of social action needs to be used regularly in order to be kept open.

The state in Japan used the threat of Communism in the 1950s to move against the industrial unions, and since 1960 it has tightened its control over universities and teacher unions to the point where student protest is virtually non existent. And so the memory of protest and civil disobedience has faded in Japan, allowing the state and industrial organizations to exert social, pre-legal forms of constraint against protest, in effect making these practically illegal without the use of the legal system.

Pharr describes another reason for the lack of protest: in Japan, a Private public sphere takes the place of the (public) public sphere. The (public) public sphere is evacuated, a space of silence, while discussions of national policy and social grievances are instead pushed into the private enclaves (the boardrooms and back offices) of those who have acquired the auspices to speak and to act on behalf of the general population.

One of the chief outcomes of a public sphere is the opening of a space between acts of active dissent and those of simple articulation of alternatives to official policy. Dissent is still possible within the public sphere (although this may take a more symbolic form, such as flag burning, to self-define it as dissent and not just another argument) but so too are discussions about and against official policy. Under State-nation modernity, where the public sphere is pre-occupied by the state, all public discussions of state policy acquire a potential interpretation as active dissent, and may result in sanctions by the state.

The lack of a public sphere is observable in all public discourses, from coffee-house conversations, to political speeches.

A public sphere opens up a space between simple expressions or discussions of alternative views and statements of active dissent from official policy. Verbal acts of protest are treated within this sphere as legitimate discursive practices. Within a public sphere, official policies (and those who manufacture these) are liable to a wide spectrum of comment, from serious critiques, to parodies and cynical dismissals. This broad discursive space allows for a variety of discussions to happen without these becoming illegal, or de-legitimate, and thus subject to social sanctions (silence) or state interventions.

The lack of a public sphere involves more than the lack of recognized public spaces and arenas for discussion, it actually precodes discourses in public as being anti-state, and by extension (as the state reserves for itself the voice of the public), anti-public.

the safety of silence

To speak out under these circumstances is to place oneself in a position of conflict with the state, even though this conflict may be perceived as minor. In the course of my research in Kyoto, Japan, I wanted to ask several of the people I was talking with about their opinions concerning how well the City represents their interests. In order to give them some time to reflect upon these issues, I made up a short list of topics that I handed out at the end of one of my conversations with them. I considered these topics to be fairly straightforward openings to the conversations I hoped to have about their circumstances of living in Kyoto. The following is the list of topics/questions that were translated and handed to interviewees to think about.

“ALL Interviewees: Questions for them to think about...

1Q-A. What differences do you see between Japanese and Korean cultures? How are these cultures similar?

2Q-A. What do you think of Japanese culture today? What kind of things are good examples of modern Japanese culture?

3Q-A. Japan and Kyoto have democratically elected governments. How well do these governments represent your interests? Are you satisfied with the condition of democractic government in Kyoto? IF NOT SATISFIED: how would you change Kyoto’s system of government to make this more democratic?

4Q-A. Kyoto society has many social divisions. Do people in all of the parts of Kyoto society participate equally in the city’s government and benefit equally from the city’s economy? [IF NO: describe the reason for these social and economic inequalities.]

5Q-A. Kyoto and Japan uses a family residence law that records where people live. Many other nations (for example, the United States) do not have such a law. Does Kyoto need this family residence law? What would happen if this law was not used?

6Q-A. The Higashi-kujo community is a large community with many groups. Describe in as much detail as you can the different groups in Higashi-Kujo (the name of the group, who is in the group, where do these people tend to live).

7Q-A. What are the most important changes that you have noticed in Kyoto in the last 10-20 years? How do you feel about these changes?

8Q-A. What will happen to Higashi-kujo in the next ten years? Do you think there will be any changes in the place or in the society? IF SO, what kind of changes do you predict?”

Before I began to distribute these questions, I gave them to an associate who responded, “This is a mistake. These people are not in a position to speak on these issues. If you give them these questions it will only make things difficult.”

“In many areas of Japanese life, such as the private business sector, public bureaucracy, and rural community, a hierarchically grounded ideology of social relations operates as the “real” ideology, even if the “official” ideology, as set forth in public pronouncements, is based on democracy and egalitarianism.”
(Pharr 1990, 26)

And she was quite right. I did go ahead and distribute this list, but none of the local residents would comment to me in any manner that would be linked to them (although some spoke “offu reco” [off the record]) about topics three through six. “It is not good to speak out about such matters,” I was told, and a few people refused to talk with me at all again.

This is not to suggest that there is no internal discussion about these issues that I, as an outsider simply did not have access to. I am certain that all such topics get talked about in private. In this instance I was more interested in the characteristics of what would be said in public. So I also took this refusal to be an important finding about the lack of casual openness concerning many of the issues that are of some local interest, and that are also made available for discussion at and through the Higashi-kujo Madang.

¹As (Hansen 1993, xi-xii) notes: “If these and similar questions are perceived today as part of the problematic of the public, it is itself a measure of major changes in the constitution of the public sphere, in the very fabric and parameters of experiential horizons.” A critique of the public sphere based on the opening this defends for practices of protest is itself a conscious re-visioning of the public sphere (in a practical utopian manner).