1 Here is JAPAN

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Here is Japan is a guidebook that was produced by the Asahi Broadcasting Company to “orient” foreign visitors to the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. Its editorial committee contained several of Japan’s most noted scholars and cultural analysts. The text is, of course, targeted not to the Japanese population, but rather with an aim of explaining this population to others. Again, within Japan, the most populous and durable “others” are the resident (zainichi) Koreans.

Here is JAPAN is a “native-ethnography” of Japan that was written from a desire to encapsulate the entire nation as a unique cultural place—a nation-state so unified by blood, history, and climate that its peoples live and think as one. It is filled with statistics and stories that seek to capture the essence of a Japanese mood of modernity. Thirty-two years later, these stories (in updated versions) still inform the Japanese school curriculum, and also governmental programs aimed at directing the self-projects of Japanese citizens.

One story speaks of the harmonious transformation of the nation from ancient farming to modern industry:

“We sow new seeds in ancient soil.

For the secret is hidden in nature's seasonal change of foliage.

Wooden temples yield to baseball grounds;

Castles bow to glass and concrete;

Rice-fields embrace busy factories;

And Noh masks peer into television sets.

Forest creepers envy electric wires carrying power across the land,

While huge trees are in awe at the soaring steel towers.

Aged Buddhist statues still smile benignly

At the age of movie stars.

All are Japan, the one no more an illusion than the other.

We grew with nature, we Japanese, as pliant as the cheerful trees.

Now we look upon what time has wrought—the fourth greatest industrial nation on earth.” (n.p.)

The natural “flowering” of industrial modernization, through the careful husbandry of the Japanese state is seen here as bridging the contradictions that would otherwise attend this process: the trees are in awe of the steel towers, and the Buddha smiles (perhaps through a Noh mask) into the Trinitron TV tube.

Its prose and poetry offer up the Japanese islands as a nation-village-family-individual: a fractal Japan, uniform and unique at all levels, bound by a single spirit and philosophy:

“The Japanese philosophy is deeply embedded in our individual consciousness, and it is a way of life we preserve through all the revolutionary changes of time... In a big family—whether of the nation or the individual—one’s own share necessarily is small.... Virtue is expressed in mutual concessions.

The family feeling is continuous... Yet the concept is larger than the individual, and the family ultimately embraces the home, the place of work, society in general, the nation, and the geography of Japan itself.

...

Our houses are small. Yet even the humble family knows delicacy in food. Husbands work, celebrate a little with male friends, return to the love of the family circle. Wives bear and warmly rear the sweet children, chat with neighbors, study the arts or enjoy television. Small gifts express the appreciation of each other....” (n.p.)

This vision of an hermetically sealed island nation/family with a single national philosophy/heredity takes the imagined-nation concept described by Benedict Anderson (1983) to a level of detail rarely found in other nation/states. Those enabled to subscribe to this concept, through dint of birth, language, and education (Japanese public schools), are expected to inscribe its message on their bodies and practices.

Japan's Sister: the Girl:
“She astonishes us, the modern young girl who is our Sister. Breathing the air of democracy, she wants to be ‘more equal’ than anyone. Fiercely, she pursues university studies, or starts a career in offices, department stores, factories, and the professions. Her earning career usually begins earlier than those of young men, so her whims have great power over manufacturers. But the old virtues live in her; she is also tender, warm, accomplished in the graceful arts. Youth in its golden fling sometimes worries us. Yet we know our Sister is growing into the sensible wife and devoted mother who is the virtue of our Japan.”
(Here is Japan, 1964)

This nationalization of lifestyle contributes greatly to the lack of available individual lifestyle imagination. To fit into this national imagination—this second skin of nationality—not only requires assuming the epic history of the nation as that of one’s own past, but also, subscribing to a lifetime of practices, from cram schools and national exams, to drinks and sex out with office mates, or classes in ikebana (flower arranging) with “the girls.”

Japan's Mr. Average:
the White-Collar Man:
We understand him, and love him, our representative White-Collar Man. The visitor might find him baffling: well-educated, even sophisticated, open to new ideas and new ways, yet suddenly curiously naive and sentimental. He aspires, through a company career, to the full life in the modern sense. For this, he will endure the wearying crush of the over-burdened commuter trains twice a day. Dutiful husband—he often defers to his wife—good father, hardworking, he still has extra vitality for active leisure.
(Here is Japan 1964, n.p.)

Daily practices thus acquire a (curiously) patriotic cachet, and so commuting for three hours a day with half a million others is not just a personal circumstance, but a collective—national—duty. To refuse, to complain, to allow the shadow of dissatisfaction¹ to cross one’s face, is to also step outside of the national circle.

Japan's Hope: the Student:
The Student is our future. He is complex and uncertain today. The moods and rebellions of young people all over the world are known to him through his studies and growing international contacts. The Student feels responsibility for his country. When moved to political protest, he may resort to mass demonstrations. But we have faith in him. He studies harder than most of the world's young people; great personal sacrifices are made to meet the challenge of severe examinations. The Student knows his life is still to come. He prepares for it thoroughly.”
(Here is Japan, 1964, n.p.)

What is missing from this national family are the governmental and corporate institutions and executives who make the big and little decisions about its course and future. This vision of a homogeneous national community hides “Japan’s father: the bureaucrat.”

Japan's Mother: the Housewife:
The Housewife is the heart of our world. As bride, mother, and wise grandmother she is the warm link between many generations. Her ways changed with equality in modern Japan. The voice of the Housewife today is an economic force, influencing consumer prices. Desire for privacy with her own husband and children accelerates the trend toward living in apartments. As new appliances free her from pre-war drudgery, the Housewife, too, influences leisure patterns. Fashionable, intelligent, in formed, she is even more vital in the lives of husband, children, and grandchildren amid today's changing Japan.
Here is JAPAN 1964, n.p.
GOTO NEXT ROLE

And what is also missing are the other people, the strangers who cannot acquire the naturalized national lifestyle, because it, like the land itself, comes from HERE.

Japan's Brother: the Worker:
“When Japan began to industrialize, our Brother, the Worker, had two great inherited assets: the Farmer's diligence and a magnificent tradition of handicraft dexterity. Today, the Worker builds mammoth ships faster and cheaper than anyone else. The Worker stood in the ruins of defeated Japan, bent his back, and rebuilt the industrial structure to current heights astonishing the world. Today, too, he raises his voice through the trade union movement, and contributes his thoughts and opinions to free society.”
Here is JAPAN
GOTO FIRST ROLE

The model Japanese roles described in Here is JAPAN are now a generation old, and wearing thin, even among those who might have been the most eager to acquire them thirty years ago. “Japan's Mother: the Housewife” as an image of the modal lifestyle goal is not simply removed from the daily realities of working women in Kyoto, but that the conditions of their employability further push them into circumstances where the imagination of a chaste, dutiful housewife becomes exotic to the life-style imagination.

“...they [the Japanese] were not earthlings, but native to this star [Japan]. Faces were kin to each other in a gentle absence of expression.”
Visit to a Green Star 1964².

Korean youth in Kyoto can only fail if they try to be “Japan’s Hope: The Student,” or even “Japan’s Brother: The Worker.” If we center these positions according to entrance into Japan’s universities or the workforces of its major production companies—these are goals that young Koreans learn not to desire. Only “Japan’s Sister: The Girl” remains available to young Korean women, and then only because these positions are already reduced to the dominated gender³ in Kyoto.

The gendered aspect of each of these roles is not superficial. The Student is male; so too The Worker. Women in Kyoto face a life where public life and public space is still coded by, of, and for men. But these spaces and lives are also coded as Japanese, and Korean’s need not apply.

But then it is not also easy for Japanese youth to acquire these same positions within the “national” family today. Jobs are scarce, and competition for university entrance has become a mind-numbing struggle with few winners. Many more students and their families cope with a life of expectations that has suddenly, and unalterably, become diminished⁴ by a disappointing outcome in the competition for school admission. But enough Japanese youth do acquire the positions so revered in the national narratives of life-style success that this success—for all of its continuing difficulties (the life of a salaryman or his housewife is not an easy one)—gets reproduced as a general goal. And outside of these generalizable, but ultimately personal life-style paths, Japanese youth can also count on continual reminders of their responsibilities to community and the state.

This comment threads into the next, another portion of Here is JAPAN. Visit to a Green Star

¹Dissatisfaction is expressed, but in private, or when drinking, as the drink becomes an excuse for shifting the frame of conversation beyond the limits of self control. In Kyoto, drinking is a ready alibi for raised voices, exaggerated expressions, and behaviors that would usually be frowned upon in public—anecdotally this includes punching out your boss. Getting drunk means never having to say your sorry. It is an extremely useful social solvent in Kyoto, but its use as such is restricted to males.

²“Visit to a Green Star” is a short story that was included in Here is Japan, as an allegory of a visit to Japan. The self-distancing of this place, this Japan/Green Star, from the Earth narrativizes the nativist movement in Japan, that has in many ways tried to separate the archipelago from the Chinese mainland, and then from the West.

³There is no “Japan’s Brother: The Boy.” A male who does not achieve a career as a skilled worker, or better, a salaryman (white-collar) position, has failed to enter into a valued position within the national family.

⁴More than half of the students in my classes in fairly prestigious private Japanese universities (Ritsumeikan and Doshisha) were profoundly disappointed in their failure to be accepted to their first-choice level universities (such as Tokyo or Kyoto universities). By the time they were sophomores, they knew precisely which companies would be recruiting them, and for what type of jobs. Their future life-styles were fixed beyond their control. By 1994, however, most companies were cutting back on hiring, and so a proportion of these students would soon find themselves in the limbo of having graduated and not being employed.