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Local Spaces and Identities— interrogating the familial
For a few, estrangement from the “national family” brings personal release—an opportunity to explore other identities— but for most people in Kyoto, the threat of estrangement is a subtle terror. Opting-out is always possible for anyone who is within the national identity fold, but once out, the way back is difficult at best. However, there is a time between childhood and adulthood when some degree of deviance has been institutionalized, and increasingly fetishized as the only period in one’s life when self expression (usually group-inspired) is possible. Many college students also go through a phase of exploring alternative life-styles, including, recently, foreign travel in much greater numbers (see: Four years of heaven). Those who do not go to college may join in youth gangs (see: bosozoku) for a time. But by the time of adulthood (at twenty years of age) these “anti-social measles” infections are expected to have passed.
“Giving that sense of freedom and that ‘something’” This ad done for the organization of commercial broadcasters, uses a montage of world events and Japanese events together with an astronaut whose identity has been made strange by his hair (strangely cut and colored) and his eyes (a light hazel color). Is he Japanese? Of course, but of that tribe of young Japanese seeking out adventures and identities in those few pre-adult years they have for themselves. “Something, something free...” the women sing in English. Increasingly the “something” Japanese pre-adults are seeking leads them out of Japan.
This is also the time when adult buying habits are formed, and so Dentsu (the world’s largest advertising agency) appeals directly to this age cohort and then to nostalgia for this time of life, with commercials that show young Japanese acting free and strange.“I want to be strange (hen na hito),” one of my spouse’s Japanese college students admitted to her. He had died his hair red1 and matted it into dredlocks. Spending hours at a tanning salon, he had darkened his skin, and he wore tie-died t-shirts with Bob Marley’s photo on them. “I want to be Jamacian.” He hung around reggae bars in Kyoto, and bought all the CD’s he could afford.
“What happens after graduation?” I asked him one day.
“I cut my hair and put on a suit,” he admitted, with resignation. After all, he was only playing at being strange, using the narrow opening of freedom that four years in a Japanese college provides, but knowing when to reenter the national “family”.
Strange by birth
Korean’s in Kyoto do not have the luxury of being strange by choice. They have “strangeness” applied to them with their Korean names. They turn strange the moment when they become thirteen years of age and must by law go to the local city office (kuyakusho) and register as Koreans. In families that are more open about their Korean status, their children carry this badge of “strangeness” to primary school every day. Some carry this off with skill and determination, while for others, the strangeness of “being Korean” is something they would do anything to be rid of. The literature about the experience of being Korean in Japan, particularly during childhood years, is characterizable by a common narrative thread of moments of black despair. More than one zainichi Korean in Higashi-kujo spoke to me of suicidal moments, and of relatives who had chosen this alternative.
1The use of the vegetable dye “henna” to mark one’s desire to be strange (hen na) is a curious homonym. Almost all the women in my college classes died their hair into some brunette shade (anything but black), but the red-red look of henna dye was reserved for those with picaresque outsider identities. Juvenile gang members (bosozoku [literally “crazy tribe”]) in junior high schools or in vocational high schools do this, as do bohemian types in colleges.
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