National spaces and identities— discourse, discussion, and dissent

---

Before I continue to talk about “being Korean” in Kyoto, I will explore briefly some of the contingencies of identity formation in Kyoto, particularly the inescapably present narratives of “We Japanese.”

The hegemony of the state (or, increasingly the national marketplace) over space and time in cities like Kyoto is maintained by the overcoding of the practices it supports through the use of national narratives that reposition alternative articulations as “anti-Japanese.” But control is rarely articulated in these terms. Instead one finds the obverse: “We Japanese don’t do such and such.” Or as Japanese cosmetics producers claim in defense of prices well above European levels for cosmetics: “We Japanese have very sensitive skin.”

“A free city for international cultural exchange is one where peoples of any country may assemble freely and in peace, regardless of race, creed or social system, for the purpose of cultural exchange.”
Kyoto Declaration
In the 1970s Kyoto’s government declared the city open to cultural exchange. By this they hold a position in the discourse on “internationalization,” a position hollowed by their refusal to hire foreign residents to city or prefectural positions.

This coloring of the space of discourse—the mapping of national symbolic onto a space that is only national because of this mapping—eliminates the crucial zone where public discourse can occur without this being labeled “dissent.” While discourse in a public sphere may lead to forms of active, and radicalized dissent (e.g., sedition), the public sphere itself (as such) cannot survive unless it also opens up to reforms that are constructed within the dominant space of discourse.

In 1993, the Japanese Government was forced to allow foreign rice imports because of a harvest shortfall. But the last thing the Government apparently wanted was to give the Japanese consumer a taste for high-quality foreign-grown rice, which sells on the open market for about a tenth of the price of good quality Japanese-grown rice. So they imported large quantities of mid-quality long-grain rice from Thailand¹, and mixed this with the other rice they imported. The resulting blend was difficult to cook consistently, and it was a poor ingredient for sushi. This government pamphlet, “Cooking points on how to steam delicious imported rice,” emphasized the many essential differences between Japanese and other rice, but did little to resolve the problem of cooking this. It finally recommended putting a lot of sauce on the stuff to cover its strange taste.

When the state fills the media with constructed opinions of its own programs it is holding the place where an independent opinion might be found in other circumstances. There may be actually nothing to say, apart from an assertion that “those persons with the most information and the best minds are considering the problem.” But this assertion takes the place of other statements, which must be considered premature until the government findings are announced.

The inputs that the state has into population lifestyle goals and expectations hold the place in the “cultural imagination” (or the “cultural imaginary” as Stallybrass and White call this [1986, 193]) that might have been occupied either by individuated imaginations, or by competing ones provided by other sources, by capitalism, say, or religious institutions. Often, the state answer questions it has, itself, raised, or tries to push other questions into more manageable directions.

The cover of a pamphlet entitled “tegami” [letter], the City of Kyoto, as a part of its annual human rights campaign [jinken kyanpeen], encourages people to send more letters to one another. The inside back cover text reads: “From me to you, a message of love” and it recounts the five example letters the pamphlet contains: letters between parents and children when they are apart, or to a favorite friend or someone sick, or from a Resident Korean woman to a sympathetic former elementary school teacher.²

Robertson’s (1991) work on the Nakasone government’s national cultural policy of “furusato-zukuri” [“hometown making”] describes how the government, foreseeing undesirable cultural effects from Japan’s rapid urbanization—namely a severing of the most pervasive thread of Nihonjinron, that of an intimate tie to the land—sought to prevent this through a reattachment of younger Japanese to the places where they or where their parents had been born.

“‘Old villages’ are presumed to have existed in harmonious tranquility until vitiated and transmogrified by outside forces—such as westernization, industrialization, and urbanization. In the furusato-zukuri literature, change for the worse is described as precipitated by external agents. Change for the better, on the other hand, is presented as a wholly Japanese undertaking, a rallying against intrusive foreign agents.
(Robertson 1991, 29)

Many of those who ventured back to their furusato were simply reminded of the many reasons that compelled them (or their parents) to leave. For urbanization in Japan has had many adverse effects upon rural communities. And as a counter-cosmopolitan strategy, the program had virtually no discernible effect after ten years. And the strength of the Japanese currency of late has, instead pushed hundreds of thousands of Japanese tourists into international travel circuits.

Cultural and social programs at the national and local governmental level, programs undertaken by the state specifically to correct the attitudes of the population in relation to some identified problem, rarely view the workings of the state itself as a part of the problem. When the City of Kyoto advertises its “365 days [a year] human rights campaign” with messages that offer paternalist advice on how everyone should act with greater kindness toward each other, it hopes to avoid the questions of those who have tallied the social and economic circumstances and consequences of human rights violations in Kyoto.

“In the following lectures I will try to show how governmentality was born out of, on the one hand, the archaic model of Christian pastoral, and, on the other, a diplomatic-military technique, perfected on a European scale with the Treaty of Wesphalia; and that it could assume the dimensions it has only thanks to a series of specific instruments, whose formation is exactly contemporaneous with that of the art of government and which are known, in the old seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sense of the term, as police. The pastoral, the new diplomatic-military techniques and, lastly, police: these are the three elements that I believe made possible the production of this fundamental phenomenon in Western history, the governmentalization of the state
(Foucault 1991, 104).”

Place-holding discourses create totalizing messages, answers that carry with them (and that reinforce) rationales that are difficult to argue against. “If Japanese individuals held the tight-knit cooperative spirit of the ‘Old Village’ and a personal connection to the future well-being of their rural hometowns, then they would be invested in voluntary service to maintain these interests.” And then the state could rely on mass voluntary cooperation with its internal programs. And, “If everyone were nicer to each other, human rights abuse would disappear.” There is thus no reason to blame the city for this problem: it is everyone’s responsibility.

Further discussion about the types of knowledge and understanding that would allow people to become nicer (and not simply act tolerant) toward others, or about the government regulations that now allow for discrimination—these are not ever included in some next step in this discursive process. There is, in fact, no next step, only the next campaign, which will pick some other metaphorical message to hold the very same place.

But these formally announced cultural attitudinal campaigns are only the rare discursified tip of a larger practical arena, where instruction is provided in the home, at the workplace and in school, but where the practice is done on the street.

¹The Thailand Government bristled at the bad press the Thai rice received in Japan, and noted that the Japanese Government had purchased an inferior grade of rice. After a few months, pure Thai rice (the only imported rice that was not blended) literally could not be given away in supermarkets, and, when the next harvest arrived, the Japanese Government exported tons of this to Africa as foreign aid.

²That the City has (at least an interest in showing) an interest in human rights could be a positive beginning for such efforts. However, after decades of annual campaigns, the city still does not address the major human rights issues in Kyoto: the lack of civil service employment for non-citizens; sexism in the workplace; and the persistence of buraku discrimination.