National spaces and identities— Information overload

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Government publications continually stress the government’s subservience to the desires of the population, a position supported by polls verifying “public opinion” in support of their programs.

The City of Kyoto publishes a free monthly magazine as well as a newspaper to applaud its own programs.

Government sponsored commissions work on determining responses to thorny social issues, and their reports are also available through governmental publications delivered free of charge to every mailbox, as well as being reported on by the Japanese press.

Such commissions may take several years to attain a recommendation on their topics¹, but in the interim, the state can announce that the problem is under study. This glut of government-supplied information (which is not, however, information about the government, apart from applauding the services it provides the public) adds to the Overcoding, Coding, and Recoding of public spaces as places managed by the government...with access allowed to the public.

One outcome of the pervasive narrative of meritocracy—a story that the system under which all Japanese citizens live (Koreans and other foreigner citizens do not have entry into this system) places the best people into positions of power, and that, from the vantage point of their chosen/elevated (erai) position, everything that can be done on behalf of the lives and life-styles and the future of “We Japanese” is, of course, being done—is the assumption that the ken of people in executive positions is necessarily greater than that of the average citizen.

This story also hints that the rest the nation—the great majority who have neither the responsibility nor the perspective that only those who are in positions of power can acquire—cannot understand fully the circumstances that need to be understood in order to assemble an informed opinion. For this reason, all of the necessary opinions are somewhere being formed and will find expression² at the appropriate time. Because virtually all of these times and their expressions take place in Tokyo, Kyoto (like other non-Tokyo Japanese cities) plays a greatly reduced role in national debates over policy.

place holding

Kyoto Prefecture’s glossy Kyou magazine is one of several media that local governments use to keep the citizenry informed about various government programs and services. The cover of this month’s issue presented the County’s “gift” to Kyoto for the City’s 1200th anniversary: mounted police in pseudo-Prussian uniforms. Posters of these police were also widely posted. Whether or not Kyoto needed this gift was a matter of some debate. I overheard one comment to the effect, “Just what we need. We ask for a fancier life-style (seikatsu) and we get fancier cops (keisatsu).” The title “Kyou” in Roman letters elides the homonym for the kyou of Kyoto (actually “kyouto:” the place) and the word “kyou” which means “today.”

This type of practice is a form of what I call “place-holding.” Place-holding occurs in physical as well as discursive spaces. Place-holding is most obvious when the government has nothing to say on a topic, but still stresses that it will have something to say sometime later.

A posting to the “Dead Fukuzawa Society” internet list noted that in Japan everything that is not regulated, everything that does not have some governmental rule, is impossible. In the US, to the contrary, he noted that everything that is outside of government regulation is fair game. In my work with the Korean Ministry of Culture and Sports, I have noted the former also holds in Korea. The idea of organized expression outside of government control is problematic.

Place holding also occurs when the government creates “government-sponsored non-government organizations”³: organizations that might have been otherwise created within civil society, except that this space has been already taken by the state. Kyoto City’s new Institute for World Human Rights, created as a part of the City’s 1200th anniversary year celebration, acquires resources and visibility that an independent organization would need massive amounts of capital to match.

So too, the city-founded League of Historical Cities (formerly the “World Conference of Historical Cities”) includes Kyoto as one of 25 historical cities in the world—a designation that UNESCO would later deny Kyoto after reviewing the current condition of the cityscape.

Kyoto’s new mounted police were poster material for the national fall traffic safety campaign: “the 1200 year of Kyoto’s building: [Let’s have] everybody show Kyoto’s traffic manners.”

Out on the streets, the holidays, which are fairly numerous in Japan (due primarily to the fact that each new Emperor gets one), offer instances of “time-holding.” Apart from “Golden Week” (a springtime multiple-day national holiday that serves as the only real vacation that many Japanese will ever take), the other national holidays tend to be occupied by state-sponsored events that can, of course, be ignored (you can stay home), but not easily countered. “Sports Day” and “Culture Day” (both formerly Imperial birthdays) are holidays when the City’s apparatus goes to work overtime providing athletic meets and public plazas where the city’s politicians are conspicuous amid a potpourri of cultural offerings. There are no competing events of any size on these days, no counter-articulations for the holiday.

“Space-holding” is particularly noticeable in Kyoto, due to the lack of public open spaces. Apart from scattered tiny play areas (usually a swing-set and a sand box) and a couple larger open areas near the river, there is a lack of spaces available for un-managed physical play in Kyoto. Schoolyards are locked after school, and university grounds are never available to the general public. The City continues to build sports facilities (pools, and courts) that it operates in an organized manner, but it refuses to create spaces that can simply, without prior approval, be acquired for casual play.

This City of Kyoto’s Housing Bureau pamphlet describes its plans to create open spaces within the city: plans that call on neighbors to replace their current housing with high-rise housing that sits on only part of the reclaimed space. The cover displays the City’s current modest achievements in this effort, a program marked by a lack of funding, a lack of regulatory constraints, and a lack of commitment by the City to use city property for open space. NOTE: the space on the upper right (with the red umbrella) was recently redesigned to prevent homeless persons from sleeping under the umbrella.

Open civic spaces are also in short supply. The open space in front of the City Hall has become a parking lot. Private residences and commercial buildings are constructed to the edge of the sidewalk (or to the street where no sidewalk was designated) without setback regulations that would open up space for public use. And where there are openings in this wall of inaccessible space, most of these are memorials to an Imperial person or event, or gateways to religious spaces (Shinto shrines or Buddhist temples)—spaces guarded either by custom or by actual guards (or both) against appropriation as a place for resting or conversation.

The street in Kyoto is devoted to auto and truck traffic. Despite the fact that many of the streets were designed with only pedestrian traffic in mind, there are few places and times where automobiles are not allowed. Even the City’s own festivals make room for traffic today. Decisions about traffic are made by the City, and so here too, the City chooses to hold the space of the street for a use it controls.

¹A government commission on education reform, after long deliberation, in 1985 presented the opinion that Japan needed to foster “individual creativity.” The Ministry of Education responded that any curriculum changes would require at least twenty years to implement.

²This delegation of opinion, of expression, explains both the silence below and the silence above: the reluctance of citizens to organize groups that propose national counter expressions; and the hesitancy of public officials from openly commenting on important issues. This silence leaves the space of expression open to others, but only those with the right credentials. For example, academics, preferably from one of the national universities, may become regular guests on television talk shows, where they speak from a position of (learned) authority while not having to claim responsibility to a political process. These are also courted by the national government as members of advisory committees that are formed to study vexing social issues.

³I have been told that in Indonesia this term is actually used.