From Korea to Kyoto— Nativist constructions

From Korea to Kyoto— Nativist constructions

Even as notions of race were discursified in ethnological writings in Europe/America in the 19th century, notions of Japaneseness were also the product of ethnological speculations. One task of doing ethnography today is to rethink these earlier anthropological notions.

The discourses that have shaped the collective imagination of “Japaneseness” over the last couple of hundred years included centrally a string of “nativist” writings that were influential from be beginning of the nineteenth century, and which both heralded and warned against cultural changes. Here is one situation where the term “ultra-conservative” has an appropriate use, for these foundational ideas about Japaneseness were intended not only to conserve the present into the future, but to reanimate an authentic local/national past as the source for the present. And one of the primary tropes of this “Japanese” past was the village. As Hartoonian (1988) put it;

“Increasingly, it was believed [by nativists in the late Tokugawa period] that the Tokugawa village possessed a structure of ties based on relationships in place and blood. These relationships combined to create a natural communal unit. The strategic purpose of such a claim was to show that such structures were reinforced by a variety of communal, cooperative activities, which made possible the reproduction of the peasantry's means of social existence. People lived, worked, worshiped, and died in the same place, with others to whom they were bound by natural relationships of kinship, friendship, and, above all else, divine necessity. This is not to say that Tokugawa villages lacked classes or hierarchical status relationships. But regardless of social distinctions, the village was able to enforce communal responsibility and, thus, reproduce the character of the cooperative, communal unit, despite the prevailing impulse toward “private activity.” Even though villagers might pursue their private interests, the weight of the communal consciousness, which stressed kinship and necessary reciprocity as natural endowments, still guaranteed the performance of crucially important activities ensuring reproduction. The place of the village became the “natural environment” for carrying out reproduction. The village and reproduction were complementary; one was unimaginable without the other” (244).

While Japanese colonial emigrants were lured to the mainland with films that showed wealthy villages where Japanese customs ruled, immigrant laborers to Japan were made to fit into a cultural “mold” enforced through police surveillance, and police-run mandatory cultural education. This film, made by the Japanese government in the 1930s shows the good life for Japanese colonists in Manchuria. Notice the Shinto Shrine and the abundant harvest.
NHK TV

Kinship (blood) and residence (place), as exemplified in the model Japanese village, became the media through which communal identity and personal claims to belonging were forged.

“...In using the term incorporation regime, I refer to the patterns of policy discourse and organization around which a system of incorporation is constructed. All states develop a set of legal rules, discursive practices, and organizational structures that define the status of foreigners vis-à-vis the host state, and the forms and boundaries of their participation in host polity institutions”
(Soysal 1994, 32).

Later, when colonies were being set up on the mainland, the image of the village needed to become mobile, but only one way: Japanese colonists were able to become the progenitors for new villages in Manchuria or Korea, but laborers from these colonies were not allowed to establish official residences within Japanese villages or towns. These diasporic populations, often fleeing the economic ruin of their own villages under Japanese colonial administration, became strangers on the Japanese home-front. They were strangers, but not, as we shall see, permitted to remain individually or collectively strange.

The Japan-as-village narrative continues to be used as a trope to describe modern Japanese society. In this clip from a promotional film of the Jinjahoncho (made in the last decade), the structure of ancient village life is said to provide the answer to the riddle of Japan’s unique culture. Of course, this is a riddle that begs other, deeper deconstructions.

For decades, resident Koreans have faced the paradox of widespread assimilation practices that require them to learn to act “Japanese” and to reject and despise Korean cultural practices, while also being excluded from all claims of proper Japanese identity. One of the Madang organizers asked me, “Don’t you think that our situation resembles that of blacks in the US?” To the extent that African Americans are not allowed symbolic identification as “American”—to the extent that, to paraphrase Gilroy, ‘there is no black in old glory’— I would certainly have to agree.

Koreans, Taiwanese and others who came to Japan were subjected to a host of incorporation regimes aimed at controlling their movements and actions, and at lessening the cultural impact of their presence in Japan. Never meant to be absorbed into the host society, they were, none-the-less, forced to behave in a “proper” (Japanese) manner.

Here was a “melting pot” incorporation regime where the pot already had its lid on tight, and so all the cultural “melting” among immigrant groups— colonized peoples filling the bottom end of the labor market for the rapidly industrializing Japanese economy: mostly Koreans and Taiwanese men performing bracero work in mines and infrastructure construction projects (mostly railroad tunnels)—took place on the outside of the pot. The bitter irony of being taught to resemble Japanese persons while being kept apart from the latter in areas where Japaneseness brings cultural, social, and economic advantages is not lost among Koreans in Kyoto.

This Domestication of immigrant laborers is a policy that has continued since the beginning of the century. And it is against this aspect of Japanese government policy and associated social discriminations that Koreans living in Kyoto today construct counter-discourses and practices.