Escaping Japan

Reflections on Estrangement and Exile in the Twenty-First Century

Blai Guarné, Paul Hansen, Blai Guarné, Paul Hansen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367890278
• eBook ISBN: 9781315282756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The idea that Japan is a socially homogenous, uniform society has been increasingly challenged in recent years. This book takes the resulting view further by highlighting how Japan, far from singular or monolithic, is socially and culturally complex. It engages with particular life situations, exploring the extent to which personal experiences and lifestyle choices influence this contemporary multifaceted nation-state. Adopting a theoretically engaged ethnographic approach, and considering a range of "escapes" both physical and metaphorical, this book provides a rich picture of the fusions and fissures that comprise Japan and Japaneseness today.

1
Introduction

Escaping Japan inside and outside

Blai Guarné and Paul Hansen

This edited book is the result of three conference meetings and two special issue journal editions. The first meeting was the annual AJJ (Anthropology of Japan in Japan) conference held at Temple University in Tokyo on November 7th and 8th of 2009. The second time was a JAWS (Japan Anthropology Workshop) meeting held at the University of Texas at Austin from March 14th through 16th in 2010. The discussions, occasionally heated, that arose during these two forums crystallized into a double panel entitled “Escaping Japan: Inside and Outside” presented at the AAA (American Anthropology Association) annual meeting held in New Orleans from the 17th to 21st of November in 2010. Moving from presentations and debate to the written word, in the autumn of 2012 and the spring of 2013 the journal Pan-Japan: The International Journal of the Japanese Diaspora published a pair of special issues with some early versions of the chapters that are included in this volume.

The editors of this book suggested the theme of ‘Escaping Japan’ for the meetings. Participants were prompted to extend their imaginations and interrogations beyond an account of Japan and Japaneseness in light of commonly accepted social and cultural differences writ large. In so doing, the aim was to avoid rehashing past discussions and to probe for new views and vistas. One way was by opening criticism beyond the articulation of ethnic and cultural difference to the terrain of personal struggles and contestations. For the aforementioned conferences and this book, we were not interested in perpetuating a clear-cut analysis of an ‘us’ verses ‘them’ variety. While some authors do frame their arguments in terms of group belonging and solidarity, we also provided a platform to discuss personal dissent from the pervasive ideology of homogeneity by means of emphasizing the active dimension of individual initiatives, personal commitments, and private expectations of escaping Japan. The objective of utilizing escape as an analytical frame was to incite a critical reflection on estrangement and exile. Our hope was that the project itself could escape pervasive ‘common sense’ and homogenizing discussions of Japan and Japaneseness in order to reveal the fluidity and complexity of contemporary Japanese society.¹ The degree to which this has been accomplished is the question posed to the co-authors of the After Words.

Influenced by the AJJ and JAWS meetings, the departure point for the AAA conference was slightly different. We again proposed escape as an invitation to explore the paradigm of Japanese homogeneity in-depth. In this case, however, we added the context of circulation. In recent years, the concept of circulation has emerged to explain global flows of people, commodities, capital, information and meanings that have led to an exponential increase of physical, social, cultural, economic and political interactions in an ever-more interconnected world. Isolated islands no longer exist – if those with human inhabitants ever did – and Japan is no exception. One can convincingly argue that a number of key post-Pacific War events propelled Japan to be northern Asia’s global gateway. Watershed moments such as hosting the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 or the World Exposition in Osaka in 1970 highlight the pop-cultural and post-Occupation acceleration of such exchanges and the rise of Japan’s position amongst affluent and influential states. Over the last few decades Japan has been a site of increasing social and cultural exchange, where ethnic identities and national bounds are subject to paradoxical tensions in which both continuity and dislocation are involved.² These paradoxical dynamics shape a global scenario whereby the simultaneous bifurcations of connection and disconnection can concomitantly reinforce and undermine static notions of culture, identity, tradition, or what might be considered ‘authentic’ or ‘traditional’.

Cultural analysis has attempted to explain such processes from a number of theoretical perspectives involving ideas of movement and interaction in relation to people, commodities, and discourses in a dynamic system of global flows. For example, Appadurai (1996, 2001) utilizes a five-prong concept of “-scape” to explore the disjunctions involved in the tensions between cultural homogenization and the inclination toward cultural heterogenization in global interactions. Featherstone’s (1990; Featherstone, Lash and Robertson 1995) work focuses on processes of cultural integration and differentiation. Though these are key, now classic, theoretical engagements with globalization, there are many others. Too numerous to enumerate fully in this Introduction, one could also profitably theorize these global comings, goings and stayings through conceptual frameworks such as connection and disconnection (Ferguson 1999, 2006), glocalization (Robertson 1992, 1995), cultural hybridization (García Canclini 1995) and global mélange (Nederveen Pieterse 1995, 2004), creolization, global ecumene and cosmopolitanism (Beck 2009; Hannerz 1992, 1996; Mathews 2000), and transnationalism (Iwabuchi 2002), to outline some approaches we have referred to elsewhere (Guarné and Hansen 2012).

In conversation with these perspectives, ‘circulation’ has emerged as a novel research approach focused on the cultural analysis of global interactions. As Tsing outlines, “many things are said to circulate, ranging from people to money; cultures to information; and television programs, to international protocols, to the process called globalization itself” (Tsing 2000: 336). To speak of circulation is to discuss the day-to-day breaking down of ethnic, cultural, language and national boundaries globally: for example, the diasporic movement of people, democratic activism through social media, or reactions to counter circulation such as the information restrictions of authoritarian regimes. For Tsing, however, circulation is not a productive analytic device if utilized to only highlight the movement of people, things, ideas, or institutions. The concept must grapple with how that sort of movement depends on defining tracks, grounds, scales and units of agency. In this sense, she utilizes an evocative image: “we might notice the channel as well as the water moving” (Tsing 2000: 337). This is a resonant idea that has similarly been articulated by Lee and LiPuma (2002) with the notion of “cultures of circulation” in an attempt to define circulation as a cultural process “with its own forms of abstraction, evaluation, and constraint, which are created by the interactions between specific types of circulating forms and the interpretative communities built around them” (Lee and LiPuma 2002: 192). In so doing, they reframe the idea of circulation as a ‘cultural process’ by overcoming its definition as the mere movement of people, ideas, and commodities from one culture to another.³

In a similar move, Valaskivi and Sumiala (2014) have applied the notion of circulation to the study of current social dynamics, developing it as a theoretical and methodological tool for cultural analysis. With this aim, they posit three particularly relevant perspectives to consider: non-linearity, action, and materiality. Firstly, they acknowledge circulation as a non-static and non-linear process which is best explored through tracing and tracking, following the wayfaring path of different social actions and encounters. In their analysis, they note that “some of these traces lead us to new paths of circulation, while others may wither away. Old traces disappear and new ones are established” (Valaskivi and Sumiala 2014: 234). Secondly, circulation is related to practice as a form of action. It is an open-ended process that is shaped by tensions, contradictions and ambiguities that are represented, reproduced and sustained in the circulation process itself through which ideas, things and people are assembled. Finally, there is the materiality of circulation as a movement of animate and inanimate objects and agents embedded and co-evolving in ideas, affects, beliefs, ideologies, emotions, fantasies and fears which are, in their approach, fore grounded by media institutions and technologies, as the material realms channelling and consequently shaping as well as being shaped by circulation. Thus, circulation is rooted in material conditions whereby bodies, technologies, networks and physical objects play an active role of co-articulated becomings, through the physical places and virtual spaces that they circulate in, through and with.

All of the above approaches stress the conceptualization of bounded physical or virtual to-ing and fro-ing over and beyond attention being directed towards other forms of displacement; forms that may, or indeed may not, include geographical mobility but clearly do entail definitive personal, social, and experiential shifts. That is to say, simply, cultural theory in regard to circulation has largely been based on collective variables to explain the causes and effects of human flows, for example migration, diaspora, or transnationalism. This being the case, escape works as a perfect counterpoint to circulation and its frequent lack of focus on the personal or individualized dimensions of experience. It also embodies continuity and dislocation, surpassing and bypassing, but never breaking away in a definitive manner. Although, generally speaking, escape might be assumed to highlight the geographical displacement of people – and, for example, the implications enfolded in these breaks such as the formation ‘multicultural identities,’ – it need not necessarily involve any physical movement at all. One cannot simply assume that a change of location indexes a shift in identity. Escape directs us to take note that circulations (currents and flows) are not solely a question of physical dispersals and traceable geographical mobility, but rather can be an issue of personal transformation, of ‘moving’ and ‘being moved,’ in the broadest sense of these terms. As Giddens (1991, 1992) has pointed out, self-understanding, individualism, and self-realization have become major forces in contemporary societies, something to which Japan is not aloof.

Japan’s engagement with modernity is surely well-known by some readers, but it is a tale worth briefly repeating given the breadth of perspectives in this edited volume and the hoped-for audience beyond Japanese Studies. During post–World War II modernization, the establishment of the economic and social model of the salaryman (white-collar employees with fixed incomes, life-time employment, and seniority-based wages) and stay home wife/mother (a new twist on the ryōsai kenbo discourse of “good wife, wise mother”) became widely accepted and publically promoted as a normative aspiration alongside the social generalization and acceptance of the nuclear family structure.⁴ These modes of thinking helped to underpin the rise of neo-local households and increased individualism epitomized in the new ideology of the mai-hōmu shugi (the ideology of private and detached home ownership). Originally a derogatory term, as Yoda (2000) notes, this ideology involved a critique of escapist and apathetic tendencies in Japanese society following the social mobilization and political protest against the renewal of the Japan-US Security Treaty (Anpo) in the 1960s. It encapsulated the “displacement of progressive social and political ideals and involvement, withdrawal into the selfish and conformist middle-class domesticity and material comfort of privatized family life” (Yoda 2000: 872). Postwar Japan marked a rapid shift from a largely agrarian to a predominantly urban and industrial society in which the reform of the state and the reorganization of the economy lead to economic growth and the social development of a broadening middle-class seduced by the mass-media slogans of ‘My Home-ism’ and ‘My Car-ism’ (Dower 1993: 27). In this context, the idea of the three imperial treasures was playfully commercialized into a variety of mottos that appealed to consumer desires: the three S’s (senpūki ‘electric fan,’ sentaku ‘washing machine,’ and suihanki ‘electric rice cooker’) during the 1950s, morphing into the three C’s in the 1960s (kā ‘car,’ kūrā ‘air conditioner,’ and karā terebi ‘color television’), and as the 1960s wore on families began to dream of the luxurious three J’s (jūeru ‘jewels,’ jetto ‘overseas vacation,’ and jūtaku ‘house’) in the 1970s (Gluck 1993: 75; Ivy 1993: 247–251; Kelly 1992: 78–79, 1993: 193–203).

Civil movements and demands for participatory democracy that characterized the turbulent sixties were diluted in an ‘American Dream’ inspired bonanza of growth and consumption, in the midst of affluence that imposed conservative conformism on the road to wealth. In the 1970s, the imaginary of an inclusively encompassing middle-class galvanized a nation that increasingly (re)cognized itself as culturally homogeneous and socially uniform. That is to say, Japan became a nation in which the acquisition of a new car and a detached house in the suburbs, concomitant with social respectability and success, were erected as status symbols and cultural markers of national identity. Individualism was effectively subsumed into a social subject oriented landscape that was imagined in the terms of an ‘all-middle-class’ or even a ‘no-class society.’ Such ideas were subordinated to the pervasive ideology of a group-oriented and consensus-based society: Japan as a harmonious and cohesive, though thoroughly modern, nation state. Although the global recession that followed the oil crisis in the early 1970s marked the end of continuous postwar fiscal growth, Japan nevertheless began that decade as the second largest economy in the world, paving the path for the 1980s social atmosphere of financial euphoria and economic acceleration. This abruptly ended with the downturn in the 1990s when the bubble economy burst and numerous events, most notably the Hanshin Earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyō terrorist attacks in 1995 shook the foundations of unquestioned governmental, social and institutional trust (Reader 2000). These events began what is often referred to as Japan’s lost generation (Zielenziger 2006), in which neo-liberal labor reforms affected the personal and professional aspirations of those who entered the job market and had to face the insecurity and precariousness of the “turbo-capitalist” era (Luttwak 1999). The casualization of labor conditions had come to stay. However, this did not only affect young or part-time workers. Income inequalities became noticeable between company’s regular employees (full-time workers that enjoy the benefits of a permanent career-tack position) and non-regular employees (from part-time workers, limited contracted employees and temporary agency workers, to the lowest positions of casual workers and day laborers). Within this neoliberal regime, a precarious and ‘disposable workforce’ was created through the implementation of unstable incomes, lower wages and none of the benefits of a job security system that many workers had been accustomed to. In this context of corporate restructuring and the so-called ‘flexibilization’ of labor, the social ideal of the salaryman and the middle-class family became not only materially unrealizable for many, but was also increasingly contested as a normative construction resulting in what Kawano, Roberts and Long (2014) characterize as a shift toward differentiation and uncertainty. These authors underscore the growing socio-economic disparities commonly expressed in the discourse of kakusa shakai (disparity society). Differences among ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: escaping Japan inside and outside
• 2 Maid cafés: affect, life and escape in Akihabara
• 3 The burden of sobriety: alcoholism and masculinity in Japan
• 4 Robot dreams: play, escape and masculine-romanticism in Japanese techno-culture
• 5 The globalization of melancholic affect: escaping soft power through the literature of Murakami Haruki
• 6 Escaping through words: memory and oblivion in the Japanese urban landscape
• 7 ‘Escaping’ the Hokkaido homelands: Ainu heteroglossia and the performance of Ainu urban Indigeneity in the Kanto region
• 8 Kyoko’s assemblage: escaping ‘futsū no Nihonjin’ in Hokkaido
• 9 ‘Escape’ to a place of familiarity: transforming Japanese tourist imaginings of Taiwan
• 10 Fleeing from constraints: Japanese retirement migrants in Malaysia
• 11 After words
• Index