National spaces and identities— Police-enforced “harmony”

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Before WWII, Koreans in Japan, who were also citizens of Japan by right of their Korean heritage under Japanese “annexation,” were singled out by the Ministry of the Interior for corrective socialization, and all were forced to join Kyouwa (harmony) Associations (Lee 1981a, 162). These took the place of neighborhood associations [chounaikai] where similar instructions about proper behavior were provided to other Japanese citizens.

However the “Harmony” associations were operated through the police precincts (as were the controls over prostitution), and were plainly used as a means of policing¹ the Korean population. The society’s membership card became an identity card that all Koreans were forced to carry with them.

“The kyouwakai [Harmony associations] opened lecture/film classes for the ‘general mobilization of the national spirit’, classes on Japanese language, and for Shinto worship, where Koreans were [encouraged] to offer their physical labor (construction or farming) as a service [to the Shrine]. There were also classes on “Japanese Dressing” and on incorporating Japanese culture into the daily life of Koreans.”
(Mizuno 1994, 71)

The contents of this involuntary indoctrination included a combination of Japanese-style home economics, correct manners in public, Japanese-style ceremonial customs (marriage and funeral), proper attitudes toward the Imperial Household and the Imperial State, and also behaviors within Shinto worship, as well as instruction in the Japanese language. Korean children in Japan at that time attended Japanese schools, and no alternative schooling was allowed. But then Japanese children also attended Japanese state schools, with no alternative schooling allowed.

The main difference was the position of the Japanese student within the “We Japanese” [warera nihonjin ha...]discourse. The police made sure that the Koreans acted appropriately in public, but they were not given the authority to appropriate either the discourse of “We Japanese” nor the spaces where this applied. At least the Japanese children were given a participatory narrative of encompassing authority—however completely this had been delegated to “public officials”—and they were, some of them, being trained to enter into government service.

Before the War, alternative public behavior, “acting Korean” on the street in Kyoto, and elsewhere, was not allowed, and the obligatory instructions were provided to ensure that none could escape the expectations placed on proper—Japanese—behavior in public. I contend that this attitude toward the street, as a place that is only appropriate for and available for appropriation by “Japanese” coded individuals has not disappeared either as a program within the State, and as a practical expectation on the street. The presence of non-Japanese tourists and foreign workers is made exotic by this, and a much greater load of “strangeness” is both applied and expected of these “strangers.”

“...There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.”
(Foucault 1990, 27)

In Kyoto, civility is coded through the expectations that have long been informed through discursive regimes practiced at school, in the workplace, and at home. These regimes not only code the behaviors that are appropriate, they also overcode the identities of those who can perform these behaviors “naturally.” Civility describes expectations on behavior in public places. (The current, increasingly visible, debate about “civility” in the United States, is, at one moment, a debate about the voluntary behavior of persons in public.) Civility generally describes the everyday discipline that conforms bodies to these expectations. Public places acquire publicness through many practices: publicness is inscribed in laws, enforced by regulations, and granted and respected through formal and informal practices of those who enter the spaces. But public places are most generally described by the repertoire of practices that are appropriate within them, and by the cohort of individuals who can perform these practices.

The boundaries that exclude persons or groups from participating in public places are not limited to legal definitions of citizenship (for example, when land-ownership is a requirement for voting), but are created also when discursive fields overcode national identity with ethnic background, or when they overcode appropriate public behavior with sexual gender.

Michel Foucault, in his History of Sexuality (1990), described how discursive regimes create silences through the application of power (i.e., from a position of dominance). Silence thus becomes as much a part of discourse as are discursive practices such as texts, and these practices must also be studied in order to reveal the silences they produce and require.

What are discursive “regimes”? These are institutions that have an interest in positioning themselves (and their messages, their codes) within a discursive field. They achieve a position of dominance, I submit, by speaking in a manner that overcodes the space of the discourse (See: Overcoding, Coding, and Recoding).

By inserting the logic of an authoritative discourse—such as national myths of origin—into the content of potentially unrelated discourses—such as expectations on public behavior—an institution, say, a national school system, can overcode the latter with the former, creating a discursive regime that links manners with national identity.

When behaviors in public are marked as “properly Japanese,” alternative behaviors (and all behaviors² by persons who are not visibly “Japanese,” such as Europeans) acquire an unmarked, and unspoken “not-Japanese” connotation. Alternative behaviors may be seen as “wrong”, or “bad” as well. But they are also inextricably “non-Japanese.” And counter discourses about behaviors in public are forced into a position of first challenging the legitimacy of dominant institutions to be arbiters of “things Japanese,” before they can even begin to articulate counter-practices.

This overcoding of the street as a space peculiar to, and only properly appropriated by those who can claim membership in the group “We Japanese,” silences the expressive imagination of those who do not include themselves into this designation. Together, the strategies of “place holding” and “overcoding” result in a hegemony of representation over the articulation of how and by whom public spaces in Kyoto can be appropriated. These discourses have been fully appropriated by the state, with long-time assistance from Shinto organizations and from industry.

Today the main threat to this status quo comes not from counter-state groups, such as civil-society organizations, but from the internationalist, and consumerist discourses of the Japanese capitalist market: i.e. from the growing transnational market-state.

And today it is exclusion from the latter, from the means of accumulating capital or acquiring highly valued life-style commodities, that marks the central exclusionary effect of racial discrimination against Koreans living in Kyoto. But to gain access to the market, they must first recode the popular imagination that preserves the public sphere (such as this is) in Kyoto for persons of ethnic Japanese descent.

Kyoto’s large-scale urban events serve as spectacles for the national cultural education trade (adult tourists, having “been-there and done-that” in school, rarely make a return trip to Kyoto). These events, in content so very similar to other urban events in Japan (they have copied one another for centuries), and in form, so completely scripted that one never needs to see them more than once, are repeated each year not to create a presence in the present, but to evoke the phantasms of a nationalized past—a past where the ghosts of victims of imperial rule should have vanished, except that they are also preserved through the spectacles of imperial (and post-imperial) rule. The continuing presence of a “Korean” population in Kyoto is also an imperial spectacle—perhaps the only non phantasmagoric ongoing imperial event in the city today. Only since 1993 has a group on the margin challenged this national hegemonic hold on Kyoto’s self image. And here is the story of Kyoto, of this outsider group, and of the event that puts them into the center for one afternoon every year.

¹This intrusive police interaction with their lives is a memory that was not severed after the war, when Koreans (and all foreigners) were (and are) forced to carry their foreign resident identification at all times. Foreign residents can be stopped by the police at any time to have their identities checked, although this is not currently a common practice. It remains one of those practices that can become more common should the authorities desire this.

²In a recent (1996) show on Japanese television, the Japanese commentator was interviewing the proprietor of a restaurant in Tokyo. The proprietor was from India, but he spoke absolutely fluent Japanese. After the interview, the commentator expressed the opinion, “I prefer it when foreigners use non-fluent Japanese.” Attempts by non-Japanese to master behaviors that have been overcoded as Japanese will always fail for this reason.