Local Spaces and Counter-identities
HERE is a description of the historical connections between the space that became Kyoto and that of the Korean Peninsula. This description looks only briefly at the major contours of this connection before it moves to more recent attempts to manage this past within narratives of nationalism. These narratives are the primary myths (alibis) that legitimate the continuing separation of those persons who are native to Kyoto—but who are called “Korean”—and others who are native to Kyoto and who are hailed as “Japanese.”
It is against the current construction of Japanese national identity and nationalized sites of culture that the zainichi Korean community in Higashi-kujo Kyoto directs its counter-public actions. In particular, the target is the notion of uniformity [kakuitsu] within this dominant identity, the sense that difference itself is wrong (actually, in the Japanese language a most common word used to mean “wrong” means “to differ” or “to disagree” [chigau]; so too, the word “change” [hen] carries the meaning of “strange,” or “suspicious.”). Culturally, uniformity is tied to the message of a shared national/racial/linguistic heritage—which results in a predictable (as the story goes) homogeneity among Japanese citizens.
- “Compression and acceleration are the order of the day: children absorb more information even as cram schools repackage it and test makers reformulate tests; electronic bidets and specially designed shampoo sinks crowd into nonexistent domestic space and impose new standards of hygiene; taped bird calls provide instant natural stress relief telephonically. And for the unguarded vacant moment, there will always be the ibento (event), the festivals of capitalism (which have incorporated the once traditionally festivals marking nodes of agricultural time), the planning of which has become a much heralded growth industry”
(Field, “Resident Korean Literature...”).
Today the construction of uniform identity—across the entire nation, but here, within Kyoto— utilizes at times a national(ist) narrative of “family” (kazoku) as a trope for nation (koku). This, again, is not new: the imperial family and the body of the emperor served a similar function in prior times. As we will soon see, the “nation as family” preserves the logic of a model form of paternalist family: a feature that needs to be remembered when “the family” is so presented.
The nation-as-family metaphor fronts the closeness of the nation as a whole. But it also disinherits those who cannot claim national “family” ties. And it also shuns those “children” who are different or who would chose not to obey the family’s “father”. These orphaned persons become strange-ers, outsiders (gaijin, a general and slightly pejorative term for all foreigners).
