Local Spaces and Identities— normalcy and the state

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“Taste is a practical mastery of distributions which makes it possible to sense or intuit what is likely (or unlikely) to befall—and therefore to befit—an individual occupying a given position in social space. It functions as a sort of social orientation, a 'sense of one's place', guiding the occupants of a given place in social space towards the social positions adjusted to their properties, and towards the practices or goods which befit the occupants of that position”
(Bourdieu 1984, 466).

What is most of interest to us here is the notion that normalcy itself, and participation in this, can also be authorized by the state as, for example, a privilege of citizenship. Turn this around from the perspective of the subject, and we find an entire Umwelt that is shared among citizens in a locale within a nation, but that is kept from others who are thus estranged from behaving in a normal manner, and who can, at best, only mimic normality.

One way of explaining how this is so is to see how the state can link the unmanaged Umwelt (in Goffman’s sense) to habitus (in Bourdieu’s sense): that is, to weld the connection between what is normal with what is automatically tasteful and proper in everyday life, with the latter carrying also a meaning of proper to a national (citizen) population.

“Through the economic and social necessity that they bring to bear on the relatively autonomous world of the domestic economy and family relations, or more precisely, through the specifically familial manifestations of this external necessity (forms of the division of labour between the sexes, household objects, modes of consumption, parent-child relations, etc.), the structures characterizing a determinate class of conditions of existence produce the structures of the habitus, which in their turn are the basis of the perception and appreciation of all subsequent experiences”
(Bourdieu 1990, 54).

When we consider that nationality can be ascribed not as a blanket identity, but as an inherited habitus—e.g., within the discursive formation of “the nation as family”—then we can see how a national Umwelt can also become the “personal” property of a nation’s citizens, a heritage as discriminate as an aristocratic title. In this way, nationality begins to show a homology to class: forming identities that are thickly constructed from within individual, family, and, finally national histories. When Bourdieu describes habitus, he attempts to show an individual’s perceptions and expectations, (i.e., her Umwelt), becomes proper to her. It is not simply self-generated, but has been applied to the self, and supplies the social space proper to the individual. This proper Umwelt is articulated in a “system of preferences” that is the product of an intersection of practices and histories:

“...every economic agent acts by virtue of a system of preferences proper to him or her, but which is distinguished only by secondary differences from systems of preference common to all agents placed in equivalent economic and social conditions. The different classes of systems of preference correspond to classes of conditions of existence, and thus to economic and social conditionings which impose different structures of perception, appreciation and action. An individual habitus is the product of the intersection of partly independent causal series. You can see that the subject is not the instantaneous ego of a sort of singular cogito, but the individual trace of an entire collective history” (1990a, 91).

Bourdieu points to family and class as the sources for an individual’s inherited habitus, but where the state has overcoded these with narratives of the nation, then the nation (as family and/or class) also becomes a source for an inherited habitus.

Anderson, as Sedgewick (1992, 239-240) noted, attached “nationality” as a required feature of identity under conditions of modernity. Everyone is expected to be able to answer the question: “What is your nationality.” For many people this reply would be a straightforward one: “I am...”. And for all but about one percent of people living in Japan, the reply would be simply “I am Japanese.”

The fact of Japaneseness as a ubiquitous feature in everyday life within Japan has itself become “atarimae.” For example, people of Japanese appearance (such as Japanese American¹s visiting as tourists) are often expected to behave “as Japanese.” When this expectation is violated the transgressor (the tourist) may be subject to ridicule.

“‘In the modern world,’ Benedict Anderson writes, ‘everyone can, should, will “have” a nationality, as he or she “has” a gender’. The implication, I think, is that just as every culture has some mechanism—different mechanisms—to constitute what Gayle Rubin refers to as a “sex/gender system,” a way of negotiating back and forth between chromosomal sex and social gender, so every modern culture and person must be seen as partaking of what we might (albeit clumsily) call a “habitation/nation system.” The “habitation/nation system” would be the set of discursive and institutional arrangements that mediate between the physical fact that each person inhabits, at a given time, a particular geographical space, and the far more abstract, sometimes even apparently unrelated organization of what has emerged since the late seventeenth century as her/his national identity, as signalized by, for instance, citizenship”
(Sedgewick 1992, 239-240).

Japaneseness is coded in skills that can only be mastered from a life that must be lived within Japan: in Japanese language fluency and dialectal specificity, in a Japanese name, in an official residence, in familial connections and a history of gift-giving and taking, and in the practical everyday manners taught in Japanese schools. But how Japaneseness becomes atarimae, and the consequences of this situation for non-Japanese persons living in Japan, and the means to shift national identity away from an inherited habitus and into the project mode of the Umwelt—these are issues of some importance for Koreans living in Kyoto. But we also must see that being subjected to a national habitus also constrains the individual’s capacity to construct one of their own (see: Projects of the self/Projects of the state).

And here we also should remember that the Japanese “national habitus” is not be equally shared among those who make the claim, “I am Japanese.” There is, for example, a national habitus for men, and another for women (and virtually none for non-heterosexuals). There are also vestiges of the old class habitus (most evident in the imperial family, and in those who dwell in buraku areas). At times, the national habitus is doubly coded, for example, when it is also written into legal statutes (or, in Japan, into administrative codes in the absence of legal statutes). Ursula Vogel (1994), looking at the position of women under contracts of marriage within the legal conditions of citizenship, describes how citizenship can be used as a means of gender domination.

In Japan, the legal means to acquire Japanese citizenship are a practical equivalent to acquiring the national habitus: language, name, and behavior all figure into the naturalization process. This may be why the annual per capita naturalization rate in Japan is about that of the annual per capita homicide rate in the US (a statistic that says something about both countries). And then after the legal hurdles are finished, a new citizen still must somehow acquire the lifetime background history that enables one to behave properly “Japanese.” Having the official document is not enough. Most people who gain Japanese citizenship consider that this will be of value to their children, who stand a better chance of properly wearing this as an inherited/inherent status.

Here we can finally see why there are no hyphenated Japanese ethnic designations. There are no step-siblings for the national family. One is either all the way inside or completely out. Unfortunately, despite attempts at this, the Japanese state has not been able to have only Japanese citizens as residents within Japan. As mentioned above, most of Japan’s “foreigners” were born there—their ancestors having been victims of the Japanese colonial enterprise—and so their outsider status represents a day-to-day, life-long, on-going exclusion: usually the dominant feature of their lifestyle in Japan. And it sometimes seems that the more they can mimic “real Japanese” the more rigorous the exclusions become.

“Dubois' concept of 'double consciousness' is only the best known resolution of a familiar problem which points towards the core dynamic of racial oppression as well as the fundamental antinomy of diaspora blacks.
How has this doubleness, what Richard Wright calls the 'dreadful objectivity' which flows from being both inside and outside the West, affected the conduct of political movements against racial oppression and towards black autonomy?”
(Gilroy 1991, 4).

Against the uniform field of atarimae Japaneseness shared by ninety-nine percent of their neighbors, these “gaijin” stand out as strangers, as different, and necessarily—in the sense that they are not properly habituated to the local space—wrong. It is from this position of difference and proximity that thousands of Kyoto’s Korean residents have gained a perspective edge on life in this city. The vast majority of individuals finds that the effortless fit between their Umwelt and Japaneseness gives them no reason to question the oddity that these should be conjoined in this manner.

But when “Koreans” in Kyoto can readily pass as Japanese when they want to, and still experience daily discrimination based upon their “paper selves,” on documents that mark them as foreign, then the misrecognition of nationality as habitus surfaces as a mode of racial oppression.

Field (Beyond envy...) notes, “There is no question here of speaking for the subaltern (one major difference in the situation of Korean-Japanese and African-American literature is that [the former]... contends with claims of undiluted homogeneity and therefore utter indifference to any minority cultural production); the subaltern must speak for the majority, remind it of its own oppression.”

If there is to be a place of refuge and resistance from the modes of national-discourse domination in Kyoto, then it is a place that first needs to be imagined, and this imagination is today being produced in Kyoto in communities of its resident Koreans. Here are the counter-expressions that would remake Japanese identity into a slippery habitus: one that might need active attachment to retain, one that might get lost or removed in favor of a habitus form from an individual’s own reflexive Umwelt. A source of these counter expressions in Kyoto and in Japan can be found in resident Korean literature and in new cultural festivals.

Why festivals? Why not simply take advantage of the fact that, in Japan, the state cares little about what gets published (as long as this does not concern the imperial family or include photos with pubic hair—although the latter is also now possible ever since Madonna book Sex was allowed into Japan uncensored) since it is in firm control of what gets most widely read? Festivals are what I call cultural/political/spatial local-motives: they occupy public space, they articulate identity features, they force the expression of passion, and they open to the potential for democratic participation. As we will see, it is entirely possible for the state to co-opt a festival for its own use: removing control over the content, and exerting a top-down, non-democratic administration. The event still might look festive. But in a sense I will develop in the coming chapter, it has lost its claim to being a festival.

¹Japanese Americans who visit Japan commonly complain of the discomforting experience of violating the expectation of “Japaneseness.” Europeans face no such expectation, however, those who stay on in Japan can also not expect to ever experience such an expectation on the part of others.