Local Spaces and Identities— state, market, shrine

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In state-nations, as in nation-states, the state is not the lone producer of widely available identity narratives and tokens, although in the former, the state may attempt an outright hegemony of expression. Various religious institutions have long held personal identity to be within their domain. Industry also looks to the schools, or provides its own schooling, for the bodily disciplines they desire for workers on the job. And the capitalist market, where consumption behavior is informed through identification between the consumer’s bodies and consumed objects, is an increasingly public arena for the display of life-style based identities.

However, when industry, religion, and the state work in concert, a condition that may occur through coordination during times of crisis (such as wartime), or a condition that may be fostered through a strong, centralized state apparatus, such as a state-nation (see also State-nation modernity), which holds the means to either directly control or indirectly guide industrial and religious organizations, a “hegemony of representation” is possible. Yurchak (1997, 166-167) describes this condition in the former Soviet Union:

“In the case of late socialism the hegemony of representation can be visualized as a symbolic order of tightly interconnected signifiers that were exclusively state controlled and permeated most aspects of everyday life in the official sphere. These were verbal formulas (structural elements of the politicized discourse of the official sphere, such as names of Soviet institutions and public organizations and formulaic phraseology of official speeches), visual images (posters, pictures, placards, monuments), mass rituals (Party and Komsomol meetings, elections, and November and May parades), the topics in the media, literature, popular culture (all of which were controlled by centralized bodies and ministries), and tightly structured events of daily public life (the use of public transport, work at a Soviet enterprise where wages were centrally fixed, study in a Soviet school with centrally adopted curriculum, and shopping in a Soviet store with unified centrally controlled prices and choices).”

According to Yurchak, the main response to this fog of representation in the Soviet Union was neither dissident activity, nor active participation, but rather a cynical removal of emotion from these representations. Over-saturation did not promote an orthopostural (See: orthoposture) attitude in the persons of Soviet citizens. Quite the opposite: the signs and slogans, the parades and spectacles became invisible through their ubiquity.

Yurchak (Yurchak 1997, 167-168) quotes Vaclav Havel, who noted how, when the omnipresent expressions of the state became so utterly predictable, they also became invisible/silent parts of the “panorama of everyday life.” But also invisible were counter-expressions, kept from the street (if not from back regions of everyday life) through official controls. Even though the street was filled with state spectacles, it remained devoid of all counter-expression.

“Through the self-construction of the self in violence, the hardman came to signify the self-contained and autonomous singularity of his community. The hardmen came from “hard” places like “The Hammer,” “The Bone,” and “The Nick.” As one hardman put it, “I live in the toughest area of Belfast. As you walk down my street, each house is harder than the next. I live in the last house on the street.” There was a reversible transfer of moral substance between the hardmen and their communities. The differential relation of the hardman to other men became a metaphor for the relation of the hardman's community to other places.”
(Feldman 1991, 53)
Embodied (personal) habitus, family habitus and neighborhood habitus can acquire a homology that allows them metonymic access to each other: they can each stand in for the other. This also means they cannot be casually separated. Korean residents talk about the onus of not acting “Korean” in their neighborhoods, so as to maintain the neighborhood’s image.

In various nation-states the multiple sources that inform identities results in a tension, which sometimes develops into a discursive negotiation among these institutions. In the United States, for example, there is an ongoing, if at times backgrounded, discussion about just where life-style “values” should be acquired, with “the family,” “the church,” and “school” competing with each other, but mostly against “the street” (or commercial TV) as the source for such values. In the case of the Soviet Union, the state’s monopoly on public expression transformed all other expressions into counter-state expressions. Discourse in public could then be labeled as dissent against the state. But even where “the state” has not achieved an outright monopoly on expression in public, a “hegemony of representation” is possible.

In Kyoto, there has been for decades a strong congruence between the efforts of the government (e.g., monbusho, the Ministry of Education, the successor to the Pre-War naimusho, [Home Ministry]) to teach expectations about normative behavior, and similar efforts of nation-wide Shinto religious organizations (notably the Jinjahoncho, which controls tens of thousands of Shinto shrines, and also runs the Boy Scouts, and which was also formerly part of the naimusho), and government/industry organizations (such as MITI, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry [Tsuushousangoyousho]) that control the “cram schools” (juku) where more than half of Kyoto’s junior and senior high-school students spend their after-school hours.

Here we see Cub Scouts learning to behave correctly at a Shinto festival in Shiga-ken, near Kyoto. The use of governmental funds for events held under Shinto auspices is not legal under Japan’s constitution, however, the courts have been known to agree that the overall event may also be a social event for the benefit of the community, and allow governmental participation¹ [See also: The courts]. Governmental, religious, and social organizations in Kyoto often overlap in ways that are not commonly seen, nor sometimes allowed (because of freedom of religion restrictions) in the United States.
Photo by author

The triumvirate of government/industry/shrine organizations, sharing a common paternalist posture toward the population, provides a collective message that avoids internal schisms that might promote a critical distance in the receiver. The messages may or may not be couched in the racial metaphors of “Nihonjinron,” as illustrated by the quotes from Here is JAPAN.

And, in fact, the metaphors and the aesthetics used change over time—and here we are talking about time stretching back to before the beginning of the century (the Post-War Occupation period provided its own messages, but failed to break the thread of the narratives that preceded it). During this time, new media have been called into service, as when televisions were introduced at the time of the current emperor’s marriage, and more recently, when the City of Kyoto provides (and so monitors) internet services for its citizens. But the message of a single, universally/uniquely Japanese way of living and behaving, is the common thread that spans these decades.

Kyoto City’s weekly “Shimin Shinbun” (Citizen Newspaper), is published by the city, and distributed through the neighborhood associations (chounaikai). Its contents list the many programs and events happening in city-run facilities (culture, sports, health). This one highlights events that are said to provide a “Timeslip to the Heian Era,” as a part of the City’s 1200th anniversary of the construction of Kyoto year-long celebration.

Various ministries and offices concern themselves with certain arenas of information, and manage these with internal goals, and so coordination of this message is not always perfect (as when the Ministry of International Trade and Industry encourages the consumption of imported goods that the Government Food Agency would prefer to discourage). But then coordination is not necessary when the message is being overcoded with regularity from several sources.

Later we will see some of the ways in which the “We Japanese...” message is deflected and countered upon reception, for now, I would like to stress that the history of embedding a “We Japanese” discourse into other discourses, implicates those counter discourse that would comment upon the other discourses as first extracting this “We Japanese” construction.

BRUTUS magazine, a “Generation X” life-style journal, presented its Kyoto 1200 issue with the stereotype photograph of public school children in uniform posing with Kyoto geisha (also in uniform). The headline reads “Now to Kyoto’s 1200 year Kingdom” and the subtitle reads, “One more time [here is] an adult school trip... Kyoto...summer...Play!” This is the image of shinjinrui that the government promotes when it sends 4 million school children to Kyoto every year.

Increasingly today, comments on the problems of the intergenerational transfer of official narratives—Japan’s “Generation-X,” the so-called shinjinrui [“new humans”] is the first generation without direct experience of war and post-war economic hardships—announce the fact that the reception side of this narrative needs more research (See also: Ivy 1995, 55-59).

Inside the same issue of BRUTUS, we find other modes of reception and production of the image of “Generation X” in Kyoto. Here a group of cross-dressing men pose on a bridge in Gion that is famous for photographs of geishas and tourists. The pop culture market seeks out playful and exotic parodies of the “We Japanese” posture.

Indeed, the rise of income levels, and the targeting of Japanese populations as consumer cohorts, has altered the valence of the available media inputs in favor of the marketplace. Increasingly, it is Japanese consumption habits that informs the content of the “We Japanese” discourse.

¹Oddly, this line of argument never seems to lead to the next logical step: a protest about the exclusive use of Shinto religious ceremonials during official community events.