17 Nihonjinron

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“ Returning now to the Japanese case, one might say that it represents racism in the sense of being genetic determinism, because the Japanese are strongly aware of their ‘racial’ and cultural distinctiveness from other peoples and because they closely associate ‘race’ and culture. In the ‘race thinking’ of the Japanese, the second aspect (‘racially exclusive possession of a particular culture’) predominates over the first (genetic determinism). The concept of ‘property’ suitably expresses that sense of Japanese uniqueness, since possessiveness is its main attribute. Exclusive ownership is claimed upon certain aspects of Japanese culture.

Nihonjinron describes a discourse (ron) in and about Japan the topic of which is the Japanese people (nihonjin). Coming out of academic reflections that helped inform the Meiji reformation in the mid-nineteenth century, it later acquired its nationalist and racialist vocabulary through interaction with more global discourses on nation and race. Nihonjinron is not atypical of discourses in and out of Japan—and in and out of anthropology—that attempt to encapsulate essential configurations of qualities that mark a national population as distinct in itself and from its neighbors. In the pre-War period, cultural configurationalism in anthropology linked tribes and their practices (including language) to a history made unique by isolation, and made possible and meaningful through practical adaptations to the surrounding environment and subsequent linguistic (symbolic) formations.

“The Japanese philosophy is deeply embedded in our individual consciousness, and it is a way of life we preserve through all the revolutionary changes of time... .... Virtue is expressed in mutual concessions.
The family feeling is continuous... Yet the concept is larger than the individual, and the family ultimately embraces the home, the place of work, society in general, the nation, and the geography of Japan itself.”
Here is JAPAN

The mixture of ethnography, ecology, biology, nationalism, and racism that each supplied facets to this discourse has left a residue of meanings that are all present when “We Japanese” is called upon to make a statement or defend a policy. While individual writers at different times may front one or two areas of the larger family of meanings within nihonjinron, by not divorcing their remarks from the remainder of meanings that are active within the discourse, their works promote readings that are simultaneously all-of-the-above.

The other point concerns the Westerners’ sense of difference as fundamentally one of superiority. This is understandable as racism arose in the West as an ideology to rationalise colonial expansion and domination The sense of difference of the Japanese from the others (westerners) in the prevalent discussions of Japanese uniqueness has been basically that of horizontal difference or difference in kind. (This does not mean that the sense of superiority is absent among the Japanese as in the case of their attitude towards the Korean minority in Japan.) Many of the nihonjinron of the 1970s have presented the image of the Japanese as simply being very different without explicitly claiming superiority, though some literature has discussed the strengths of Japanese society.... The important point to be noted here is that explicit claims of Japanese superiority have not been so common as non-Japanese readers, who may equate the Western style of racism with race thinking tout court, might have supposed.”
(Yoshino 1992, 29)

The side of nihonjinron that separates Japanese people, in their bodies, their desires, their abilities, and their sociabilites, from other peoples (and most often and most noticeably in value-laden terms from their continental neighbors—Koreans) is less of interest to me than the amount of commonness that is ascribed within Japan in order to bolster this differential cultural calculus.

It seems that for the Japanese to be different, they all, at some essential level must be the same. Internal differences are muted, discarded, and disavowed in this process. The Ainu and the Rikkyu islanders disappear. Yoshino (1992) goes to some length to show that “racialism” in Japan cannot be transparently conflated with Western ideas of “racism.” But then transparently conflating any such notion (e.g., culture, gender, paternalism, etc.) would be problematic. And where Yoshino would use this practical/semantic problematic to defend nihonjinron against the claim of “racism,” his conclusion rests on the proposition that Japanese “racialism” is so intertwined with “culturalism” that no strong genetic determinism is implied.

The claims made in this video (and in other parts not show here) include the idea that Japan’s ecology has created a unique society, which spontaneously (along with its religion—Shinto) developed through the use of rice cultivation, which was imported into Japan in pre-historic times. The notion of an unchanging cultural tradition that informs current society, and which, though the guidance of Shinto practice, provides a moral ground for living, is presented as a local (national) heritage which is at once historical and genetic.

The video produced by the Jinjahoncho to deflect attempts by foreign growers to open Japan’s internal rice market (a move that would save the Japanese consumer several hundred billion Yen every year; and cost the government-run food agency, and also farmers, as much) is a good example of nihonjinron from the 1980s.

“The Japanese mode of thinking and behaving is habitually associated with the ‘Japanese race’, itself an imaginary notion, in perceptions of Japanese identity. This perceived relationship itself, in turn, depends upon the ‘uni-racial assumption’ of respondents, according to which the racial homogeneity of the Japanese is unchanging.”
(Yoshino 1992, 120-121)

This conclusion fails to adequately theorize the cultural underpinnings of “racism” in the West, and it also fails to read the quotient of “racialized” meanings in the terminology (such as “homogeneity” which in Japanese carries a central uni-genetic meaning). To an extent greater than he allows, assumptions of race, and of blood and heritage may enter into the discourse even when overt arguments are not made on the basis of race. And so the racist elements of the nihonjinron discourse are perhaps more difficult to recognize and to counter than are the more overt elements of racism in the West.

The persistance of nihonjinron statements and theses to the current day Japan is also of some concern (as is the persistance of racism, homophobia, and gender oppression in the West). This concern included Western scholars who continue to reify Japanese uniqueness in a variety of arenas, offering modern adjustments to Ruth Benedict’s war-time¹ ethnography, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1974 [1946]).

van Wolferen makes reference to the practical uses of nihonjinron to defend economic policies in Japan that protect internal markets:

“Very little serious writing by Japanese on anything relating to their society is entirely free of nihonjinron influence. It is also amazing how much nihonjinron has crept into assessments by foreign authors. The possibility of coercion or indoctrination as formative factors of Japanese behaviour is not considered in the universe of nihonjinron imagery. And therein lies its propagandistic force. In the nihonjinron perspective, Japanese limit their actions, do not claim 'rights' and always obey those placed above them, not because they have no other choice, but because it comes naturally to them. Japanese are portrayed as if born with a special quality of brain that makes them want to suppress their individual selves.

It is striking how casually Japanese seem to accept that they are physically 'a race apart' from other peoples. I have heard officials explain to foreign businessmen that medicine manufactured by foreign firms must undergo special tests before being allowed into Japan because of the different construction of Japanese bodies. The former chairman of the association of agricultural co-operatives, Zenchu, Iwamochi Shizuma, once explained before an audience of foreign correspondents that since 'everyone knows that Japanese intestines are about one metre longer than those of foreigners' we should all understand that American beef was not suitable for digestion by Japanese. Visiting Washington in December 1987, the chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party's agricultural policy research council, Hata Tsutomu, also spoke of longer Japanese digestive tracts that had difficulty in coping with red meat.

The great 'scientific proof' of Japanese uniqueness was supposed to have arrived with the famous studies of Dr Tsunoda Tadanobu, who discovered that Japanese brains are essentially different from Western brains or, indeed, the brains of most other people in the world. According to this researcher, Japanese hear insect sounds, temple bells, humming and snoring with the left half of the brain, whereas Westerners do so with the right half.

Dr Tsunoda implies that Japanese reasoning is different from that of other people because they use their two brain halves differently. His testing methods are highly suspect. My impression, based on an account by one of his foreign guinea-pigs, is that auto-suggestion plays an important role. Yet his books sell well in Japan, and his views have been officially credited to the extent of being introduced abroad by the semi-governmental Japan Foundation” (1990, 265).

That a shared history of isolation would create not only cultural differences, but biological ones as well is a central feature of nihonjinron. And this logic of sharing a common and unique history is also available to use against Japanese living in buraku areas who have been isolated from Japanese society, often for several hundred years. The suspicion that these persons now have a divergent biology—that they no longer share the full genetic heritage of the “We Japanese” gives this discrimination its racist undertones. “Lots of people consider burakumin to be different,” a Kyoto University student once told me, “for example, there is a belief that their blood is thicker than that of Japanese.” Just how widespread such racializing notions are, I cannot say.

On a recent (1994) April fools day, Kansai Timeout, an English language, leisure magazine in the Kyoto/Osaka region, printed a phony story which claimed that doctors in Japan had just determined that the reason why Japanese had difficulty learning English was that their mouth was shaped differently from Westerners. A simple surgical procedure can alter the shape of the mouth, and those Japanese who have had this procedure suddenly speak fluently with ease. The magazine’s editors were inundated with requests for more information, and had to circulate a disclaimer in the next issue. For the editors, the very idea that Japanese mouths were different, that this difference might affect English language learning, was an obvious joke (after all, millions of persons with Japanese ancestry who grow up in other countries speak other languages without the need for surgical intervention). But for many in Japan, the joke overlapped with a discourse that they had been hearing for decades, a discourse that is used by government and industry and in the schools, and in the home.

“The objective homogenizing of group or class habitus that results from homogeneity of conditions of existence is what enables practices to be objectively harmonized without any calculation or conscious reference to a norm and mutually adjusted in the absence of any direct interaction or, \a fortiori, explicit co-ordination. The interaction itself owes its form to the objective structures that have produced the dispositions of the interacting agents, which continue to assign them their relative positions in the interaction and elsewhere.”
(Bourdieu 1990, 58)

Despite the failings of Yoshino’s (1990) theorizing about racism in nihonjinron, he is certainly correct to point out that, unlike racism, “Japaneseness” has performative aspects. In this way it is much more like Bourdieu’s habitus. While the entry condition to appropriate this habitus is determined by heredity, continuing sincerity in observing its behavioral constraints is also expected. Those who venture outside its social institutions (e.g., the national school system) and its physical boundaries (e.g., living abroad, or even independent travel abroad) invite suspicion about their desire to remain truly Japanese. The sedimenting outcome of a shared habitus is furthered when sharing becomes obligatory, and the “harmony” that is so often associated with groups in Japan is far less a harmonic congruence of differences (a true harmony) than it is the repetition of similarity, i.e., uniformity. When everyone sings the same melody line, it is a simple matter to see, and to mark, anyone who misses a note.

At Ritsumeikan University, where I had part-time employment, a semester abroad program sent those with a desire to do so (and with advanced English skills) to Vancouver, Canada. But returning students were many times so disoriented (or dis-Oriented) from this experience that special counsellors had to be hired to help them deal with: a) isolation and the loss of connection to groups and friends they had left (for 4 months); and b) various, new dissatisfactions with school life in and out of the classroom. The experience abroad had, in fact, achieved more than it advertised, it had dis-located students from a lifetime of pursuing “Japaneseness.” But it also left them strangers in their own backyard.

¹This work has the ethnographic distinction of being written without the author having ever visited its location. Benedict used interviews with Japanese interred in camps in the US to write this highly influential book.