Local Spaces and Identities— atarimae nationalism

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There is little one can do to escape Japanese national cultural representations within Kyoto. In fact, most of the several million annual tourists (and most of these on organized school trips from other Japanese cities) are there to indulge in this local/national spectacle. The calendar and streets are cluttered with events and places that remind resident and tourist alike of Kyoto’s place in the nation of Japan. But for those who are excluded arbitrarily from being Japanese at all, in a place where all is the minimum—for there are no hyphens¹ in Japan—these inclusive Japanese events merely highlight their exclusion. This exclusion works on many levels.

I introduce here a work of Nihonjinron that I use as an example of the model for uniform identity formation in post-War Japan. Here is JAPAN was published in1964 by members of a generation that had experienced World War II and its post-War economy. It prescribes the roles of the next, post-War generation, the generation blessed to live in a Japan that had already achieved industrial miracles. The nation is now (1997) at the point where the third generation of post-War population—those born after 1985— is reaching its teen years, and this new generation will face a future where a slow growth economy, an ageing society (Japan’s birth rate is annually among the lowest in the world), and transnational culture (by 1999 Japan’s cable television will grow from three channels to more than 300) are central lifestyle features.

Here is Japan was published five years after mass protests against the government’s renewal of the security treaty with the US had failed to alter Japan’s official policy, this book affirms the necessity of all Japanese to live in a harmony that is at once the outcome of their mutual ecological and genetic heritage, and also the means to continued prosperity. In Japan, the “’60s” was a time when the government ministries succeeded in destroying the last of the adversarial labor unions, replacing these with “company” unions where “harmony” with management was the watchword. By 1970, in the middle of the Vietnam War, when the mutual security treaty was again up for renewal, opposition to this had become only window dressing for the state, a sign that opposition was allowed in democratic Japan. And by 1990, the only noises of opposition heard in Tokyo were the ear-splitting loudspeaker trucks of right-wing gangsters who could extort cash from politicians by threatening to either praise or vilify them.

“...the LDP [Japan’s Post-War ruling political party] as a whole regards furusato-zukuri as the means by which to forge a new ‘cultural state’ (bunka kokka) in tandem with a ‘new Japanese-style welfare state’ (‘Nihonsei no atarashii fukushi kokka’)...”
(Robertson 1991, 26).

I use Here is Japan as an example from a period in Japan when the state had first acquired the budgetary means to promote national programs aimed at cultural transformations. These programs included the new fast rail lines (shinkansen) that linked many of the outlying regions of the nation to Tokyo, and made day-trips to provincial centers possible. Such rapid transportation became the vehicle for later programs, such as the “Discover Japan” (jisukabaa Japan) campaign of the Japanese National Railway, launched in 1970 (Ivy 1995, 34). This was the period in which the institutional roots of the later (1980s) “furusato” program that Robertson (1991) describes were made.

I want to simply suggest that the roles outlined in Here is Japan—the Mother, the Everyman, the Sister, the Brother—continue to be one source for personal identity formation, even, ironically within the resident Korean communities. I would also suggest that these roles are, in large part, the locally constructed variant of the model for a bourgeois worker/consumer family that is found in many other states. For decades, television programming in the United States was dominated by images of model suburban families (“Leave it to Beaver,” “Father Knows Best,” etc.). Such models are not the only ones available, and are subject to parody and ironic reappraisals, but when promoted not only by the media, but also by a national educational system, they acquire a potential hegemonic position within the state.

“In this organization, the story plays a decisive role....It even has distributive power and performative force (it does what it says) when an ensemble of circumstances is brought together. Then it founds spaces....By considering the role of stories in delimitation, one can see that the primary function is to authorize the establishment, displacement or transcendence of limits”
(de Certeau 1984 123).
Here is Japan was a collaborative work of governmental, corporate and academic minds, who sought to encapsulate the entire story of Japan’s modernity as an essentializing cultural narrative of heredity (race), community (family), and ecology. It is a self-ethnography and a prime example of a story that seeks to delimit a space.

Here is JAPAN is helpful in understanding something else, something more than the articulation of the typical bourgeois family: it speaks also of, and tells an authorized story of the nation in terms of the family, it articulates the state as a national family. This is not a casual metaphor, but an organizing principle meant to explain the proper relationship the state and its citizens.

Looking at the four roles proper to citizens something curious is missing. Adult males can be either “Mr. Average,” the salaried worker, or “Japan’s Brother” the factory worker. Pre-adult males are “Japan’s Hope: the Student” while females here are “Japan’s Sister: the Girl” up until they become “Japan’s Mother: the Housewife.” So what is missing here? What is not available as a role available to the citizen is the most important position in the family: where is “Japan’s Father?” This is the place the state (with some, not fully articulated space for the emperor) keeps for itself.

From this space the state’s paternalism guides the future of the national family in collaboration with Japan’s industries, which are themselves most often likened to families. But the national family does not include everyone who resides on the archipelago of Japan. And there are no rules and no histories of adoption into this family.

“Agriculture, the traditional base of the nation, is still hugely important. Japan, in a sense, developed industry in the spirit of her agricultural past. The ancient Japanese ideal was to create a society wherein individuals could equally share the burdens of labour and their fruits. This same spirit infuses the proliferation of new industries which are changing the age-old agricultural landscape at such a fantastic rate today.
The structure of even the most advanced Japanese industries, therefore, differs somewhat from their counterparts abroad. The ‘family’ ideal of the old agricultural days—when the ‘family’ embraced the nation as a whole —imparts an aura of mutual responsibility between worker and employer even if they are making electronic computers.”
Here is JAPAN 1964, n.p.

For example, Korean men in Kyoto do not qualify to be “Japan’s Mr. Average: the White-collar Man.” Companies that hire university graduates for such career positions avoid hiring Koreans on various pretexts—the competition for these positions is intense in any case (women also find themselves excluded). Mostly this exclusion is not allowable under labor regulations, but it is also rare that such practices are successfully challenged in the courts [See also: The courts]. Public sector jobs at almost every level are closed to Koreans and other foreign nationals by laws and regulations that require citizenship for employment—even at the city level.

Korean women in Kyoto cannot hope to become “Japan's Mother: the Housewife” as this role is occupied by those whose husbands work in the companies that do not hire Koreans. The luxury of not working is virtually non-existent among adults in neighborhoods such as Higashi-kujo. The reality of low-paying jobs creates the opposite scenario: the need to keep two or three jobs. While there are always jobs to be had in the service industry² (however, this could change in Japan’s worsening economy), the cost of living in Japan is such that the number of hours per week one needs to work to maintain a minimal life-style are often more than fifty hours.

Young women in Kyoto, including Koreans, under these circumstances, may find part-time work in Kyoto’s sex industry³ to be their only source of employment above the going minimum wage. Kyoto’s sex industry, physically comprising hundreds of hostess bars, lounges, escort services, and “soap-lands” (formerly called “turkish baths)⁴, caters to the likes of corporate and government (and male) workers and visitors. The traditional “pleasure quarters” of Kyoto, some of which are architecturally preserved today, rely more on local haute cuisine (kaiseki ryori) and high brow geisha entertainment, and are only proximally connected with the establishments that offer varieties of sexual attention.

¹While various groups in the U.S. are now dropping the hyphen (such as African-American) as marking them as a subgroup of a higher level “American” (while adding terms such as “European American” to mark the history of European migration as one among many) Koreans in Japan have not even achieved a status that would permit them to add “Korean-” to “Japanese.” It would be interesting to see if a move away from “resident Korean” (zainichi kankoku/chosenjin) toward a Korean Japanese (kankoku/chosen nihonjin) would be possible.

²The lack of persons willing to work for minimum wage (about US$7) in Kyoto has pushed to hourly rate at local fast-food stores/restaurants up to $10 or more an hour. But with the cost of living in Kyoto at something greater than twice that of the cost of living in New York City, $10 an hour does not go very far. As one Korean said to me, “You have to be rich to be poor in Kyoto.”

³While prostitution is illegal in Japan, the laws only cover direct genital-to-genital contact (Constantine 1993), and so there are any number of sexual “services” that are perfectly legal, and in any case, the possibility of being caught in flagrante are minimal. Sex parlors operate a few meters away from the police box near Shijo-Kawaramachi. A variety of “salons” and hostess clubs offer the championship of young women without necessarily leading to a sexual episode, and most women enter this part-time occupation as hostesses, and only then, and only sometimes, move on to more direct (and more lucrative) sexual services.

⁴Kyoto’s many “love hotels” are typically used by couples seeking privacy and fantasy, and are the local equivalent to secluded “lover’s lanes” in the US. These should not be equated with places for prostitution.