Japanese Cinema and Otherness

Nationalism, Multiculturalism and the Problem of Japaneseness

Mika Ko

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135238858
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the last 20 years, ethnic minority groups have been increasingly featured in Japanese Films. However, the way these groups are presented has not been a subject of investigation. This study examines the representation of so-called Others – foreigners, ethnic minorities, and Okinawans – in Japanese cinema. By combining textual and contextual analysis, this book analyses the narrative and visual style of films of contemporary Japanese cinema in relation to their social and historical context of production and reception.

Mika Ko considers the ways in which 'multicultural' sentiments have emerged in contemporary Japanese cinema. In this respect, Japanese films may be seen not simply to have 'reflected' more general trends within Japanese society but to have played an active role in constructing and communicating different versions of multiculturalism. In particular, the book is concerned with how representations of 'otherness' in contemporary Japanese cinema may be identified as reinforcing or subverting dominant discourses of 'Japaneseness'. the author book also illuminates the ways in which Japanese films have engaged in the dramatisation and elaboration of ideas and attitudes surrounding contemporary Japanese nationalism and multiculturalism.

By locating contemporary Japanese cinema in a social and political context, Japanese Cinema and Otherness makes an original contribution to scholarship on Japanese film study but also to bridging the gap between Japanese studies and film studies.

Part I

Nationalism, multiculturalism and the problem of Japaneseness

1 Nihonjinron

The ideology of Japaneseness

What this reflex produced was a conception of Japan as a signified, whose uniqueness was fixed in an irreducible essence that was unchanging and unaffected by history, rather than as a signifier capable of attaching itself to a plurality of possible meanings.¹

In order not to change, everything has to be changed.²

Introduction

All countries lay claim to uniqueness. As some of the scholars such as Stuart Hall and Homi Bhaba suggest, countries identify themselves in relation to their others.³ Or, put differently, nations assert their difference through a contrast with other countries. However, there is one country which believes that its culture is ‘uniquely’ unique. This is ‘Japan’. Since its emergence as a modern nation–state, Japan has been obsessed with its alleged uniqueness, and its uniqueness has continuously been narrated in a set of discourses called ‘nihonjinron’ (discourses of Japaneseness). The types of nihonjinron are varied, and sometimes they are not coherent. Some of them are even conflicting or contradictory to each other. Yet, strangely, they all advocate the uniqueness of Japan. In this respect, although the two quotations indicated above may appear to contradict each other, they may also be seen, in fact, as two sides of the same coin. While the second quotation is originally from Luchiano Visconti’s film Il Gattopardo [The Leopard] (1963), it is used by Kang Sang-Jung to describe post-war Japan. More than anything else, it perfectly explains how nihonjinron function. In order to legitimise its uniqueness, nihonjinron have kept changing their content.

In this chapter I shall explore the historical development of nihonjinron. The nihonjinron dealt with here relates to race–ethnicity discourses, the core of which is the emperor system (tennō-sei) or the myth of the unbroken imperial lineage, to which all Japanese are linked by blood. The chapter consists of two main parts. The first part briefly looks at the historical development of the ideology/discourse of Japan’s racial and cultural homogeneity and its link to the emperor system. The second part illustrates the trend of internationalism, multiculturalism and cultural hybridity in contemporary Japan and its collusion with right-wing nationalism. This part also provides an overview of theories, developments and critiques of multiculturalism and cultural hybridity. While the chapter is primarily intended to serve as important background information for the discussion on ‘Cosmetic multiculturalism and contemporary Japanese cinema’ in Chapter 2, the latter part is also closely linked to the issues concerning Okinawa and the zainichi (the Korean residents in Japan) as well as their cinematic representation, which are dealt with in other chapters.

The historical development of the myth of Japan’s racial homogeneity

The emergence of modern Japan and the Kokutai ideology

The origin of the discourse/ideology of Japan’s racial homogeneity goes back to the late nineteenth century, when the Meiji government mobilised state nationalism for its modernising project, namely the creation of a modern and unified nation–state. As Michael Weiner suggests, the modality of nationalism in the Meiji period was ‘one which idealised cultural and “racial” homogeneity as the foundation of the nation–state’.⁴ At the core of Japanese state nationalism and dominant discourse of ‘Japaneseness’ was the concept of kokutai, which is usually translated as ‘national essence’ or ‘national polity’. The centre of the kokutai ideology was the emperor and the rule by an unbroken imperial line, to which all the Japanese were linked by blood. The emperor was defined as a father of the nation, one to whom all Japanese people were obliged to pay absolute loyalty and obedience. Yoshino Kōsaku argues that this notion of kin lineage or ‘Japanese blood’ functioned as a ‘quasi-racial’ symbol.⁵ As Robert Miles and Annie Phizacklea point out, ‘ “races” only exist insofar as people think, and behave as if, they exist’; the term ‘race’ does not correspond to an objective, biological feature but to a discursive construction.⁶ Similarly, the ‘Japanese race’ is a merely ‘imaginary’ category which represents, in the words of Bruce Armstrong, the ‘racialisation of imagined community’.⁷ It is also the legitimisation of a quasi-religious foundation of the emperor system.

Gavan McCormack argues that the myth of ‘Japaneseness’ as a quality of monocultural, blood-united, preordained people which evolved in the process of state-building of the late nineteenth century penetrated into the very souls of Japanese people.⁸ He goes on to say that ‘it was never negated although the historical reality was very different from myth’.⁹ It is true, as Oguma Eiji points out in his elaborate work on the history of Japanese self-images and on the historical background of nihonjinron, that the myth of Japan’s racial homogeneity has functioned as a ‘dominant self-portrait’ of Japan and the Japanese.¹⁰ It has been narrated repeatedly in various contexts such as those of politics, economy and culture, and this created the illusion of an unchangeable Japanese essence. However, although the connection between Japanese nationalism and images of racial homogeneity was still emphasised, as both Tessa-Morris Suzuki and Oguma demonstrate, the idea of racial purity was in fact challenged by that of Japan as a racially heterogeneous country in pre-war and war-time Japan.¹¹

Discourse of racial hybridity in pre-war and wartime Japan

The kokutai ideology claimed that Japan was an organically united society. It saw the basis of the Meiji state, in which the emperor was placed at the top, not as ‘power’ but as ‘descent’ or, more specifically, as the ‘emperor’s blood’. Although the self-images of racial purity ignored the fact that ethnically different Okinawan and Ainu had already been incorporated into Japan, in the beginning the kokutai ideology seemed to harmonise relatively well with, or to be supported by, the idea of racial purity. However, once Taiwan and Korea, with their respective populations, were incorporated into imperial Japan/ese in 1895 and 1910 respectively, it became obvious that the idea of racial purity was no longer able to support the kokutai ideology, which claimed unique blood-bounded Japaneseness. In order to legitimate Japan’s geographical expansion, race-related discourse needed to be rearticulated into one which praised the diverse origins of the Japanese people, since the kokutai ideology stressed that rule by the emperor was ‘natural’ authority rather than an exercise of political and military power. By 1920, then, the idea of racial hybridity had become the dominant ideology of the imperial Japan, serving as a pillar of nationalism and of the kokutai ideology.

Generally, the discourse of hybridity challenges essentialism.¹² However, this was (and still is) not the case in Japan. In pre-war and wartime Japan, the idea of racial hybridity was articulated as a form of Japanese nationalism and essentialism praising the superiority of Japanese ‘blood’ and its ability to assimilate other ethnicities and cultures. In other words, racial hybridity was reduced to another essentialist notion related to Japanese ‘uniqueness’. Likewise, its tie with the emperor system remained a key element. While claiming that the Japanese were not racially pure but mixed, Kita Sadakichi, a historian and one of the strongest proponents of Japan’s racial hybridity, argued in 1918 that the ‘strongest bond’ uniting the Japanese was ‘the presence of “a single imperial line existing from time immemorial” ’.¹³ Morris-Suzuki helps to explain what enabled the discourse of ethnic hybridity to be meshed with kokutai ideology:

This construction of ethnicity, therefore, did not abandon the image of the national ‘family,’ but merely reinterpreted it in metaphorical rather than biological terms: now the emperor was depicted, not as a literal blood relative of all Japanese, but as the descendent of ancestors whose role had been to unite the diverse people of Japan into a single political and cultural community.¹⁴

As such, Japanese nationalism now claimed that the ‘uniqueness’ of Japan was attributable not to its racial purity but to its ability to assimilate different racial groups and to create an organically united society. Even the Japanese Ministry of Education clearly stated in 1942 that the Japanese people were not, at origin, racially homogeneous but ethnically hybrid created through the mingling and assimilation of indigenous people and immigrants from the Asian continent in ancient times, and then the sense of a united ethnic group was fostered under the emperor.¹⁵ This rhetoric became widely mobilised to serve the policy of kōminka (‘imperial subjectification’) – a policy of assimilation mainly designed to turn the populations of Okinawa, Taiwan, Korea and the other Japanese colonies into loyal and submissive ‘Japanese imperial subjects’. The rhetoric of racial hybridity mobilised in the kōminka projects implies a sense of racial equality and harmony. However, an interpretation along this line would, of course, ignore completely the opposition and resistance of the colonised and would hide the repressive reality of colonialism. No matter how vociferously and generously the claim of isshi-dojin (‘being equal under the emperor’) was made, there was a distinct racial hierarchy among the ‘imperial subjects’, not to mention discrimination and oppression.

Re-emergence of the myth of homogeneity in post-war Japan

After Japan’s defeat in the Second World War and the subsequent liberation of its colonies and colonial subjects, which accounted for 30 per cent of the entire population of the Japanese empire, the myth of Japanese racial homogeneity re-emerged. As mentioned above, during pre-war and war-time Japan the discourse of racial hybridity was mobilised to legitimise colonial expansion and the assimilation of colonial subjects into ‘imperial’ subjects. Because of its negative association with Japan’s militarism and colonialism, ‘hybridity’ was seen, as Oguma suggests, as an unfavourable image of the ‘new’ post-war Japan, which was now moving towards being a peaceful democratic country.¹⁶ To create this new image of Japan, the discourse of Japan’s racial homogeneity was promoted, mobilsing again the myth that Japan was an isolated island–country whose inhabitants had been, since antiquity, racially homogeneous and peaceful farmers with few foreign contacts or experience of war.¹⁷

Thus, while ignoring the issue of the Ainu, of the Okinawans and of the zainichi, the discourse of racial homogeneity appeared in the post-war Japan as a criticism of Japan’s militarist action, and was initially supported by leftwing intellectuals who opposed the reactionary inclinations of the Japanese government. However, with Japan’s remarkable post-war rehabilitation, the discourse of racial homogeneity started to take on a more conservative, even reactionary colour, with undertones of Japanese superiority. For instance, Ishihara Shintaro, a former writer and Liberal Democratic Party member of the Diet and the current Governor of Tokyo, emphasised in 1968 that Japan was an exceptional country, in which virtually mono-racial nationals spoke one common language completely different from other languages and in which a totally unique culture had been preserved for such an extended period.¹⁸ Similarly, Mishima Yukio argued in his Bunka bōei-ron [In Defence of Culture], a book published in 1969, that Japan was a rare phenomenon, a country of mono-racial and mono-lingual people, and that the continuity of its culture rested on the ethnic unity of the nation.¹⁹ He then advocated the revival of ‘the emperor as a cultural concept’ representing the totality of national culture and uniting national and ethnic goals.²⁰ As such, the discourse of racial homogeneity began to mesh again with the emperor system and became popular, while that of ethnic diversity largely disappeared from post-war discourses of ‘Japaneseness’ or nihonjinron.

The emperor system

In the immediate post-war period, what to do with the emperor system or, more precisely, whether or not to charge the Shōwa emperor Hirohito criminally for his responsibility for the war was a major concern for the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). However, while indicting some members of the imperial family and close advisers as war criminals, for the smooth management of the Japanese population, the SCAP decided to exempt the emperor from responsibility for the war. Responding to the occupation policy, the Shōwa emperor, who had been seen as a living god, formally renounced his ‘divinity’ with his ningen sengen (declaration of the emperor as a ‘human being’) on New Year’s Day 1946. The SCAP defined the role of the emperor merely as ‘decorative’, with no political power. This was endorsed by the constitution, one of the distinctive features of which was the definition of the emperor as a popular sovereign, stating that he was a symbol of the nation. In 1946, the emperor embarked on a series of provincial tours to promote his new role as the state’s symbol.²¹ At the same time, however, it was also a demonstration to the public that ‘the emperor was still here’. Pointing out that the new post-war constitution was promulgated, as in the Meiji precedent, by the emperor rather than by the nation’s people or by the Allied Powers, Takashi Fujitani argues that the Shōwa emperor affirmed the continuity and transcendence of the imperial institution.²²

In the late 1950s, the new image of the imperial institution (or family) was created by the ‘royal wedding’. The engagement and marriage of the then-Prince Akihito to a commoner was hugely promoted and praised by the government with great assistance from the mass media. The event was promoted as a symbol of romantic love, representing a ‘democratised’ imperial family. Matsushita Keisuke, a political scientist, suggests that the public craze over the royal wedding in 1958 marked the emergence of a ‘popular emperor system’.²³ Matsushita argued, rather metaphorically, that, when the curtain of the imperial chrysanthemum was taken off by the new princess, who was a symbol of ‘romantic love’ and of ‘ordinary people’, the same curtain then was wrapped around the entire nation with the help of the mass media.²⁴ He emphasised that it was not the resurgence of the ‘absolute’ and ‘authoritative’ emperor system which the Shōwa emperor had represented. However, what is implied here is that, while the authoritative image of the emperor and of the emperor system had faded away, their ideological role of embracing the nation remained (though in a different and more popular form). The imperial family was no longer an awesome subject, but they were transformed into popular stars.²⁵ Mishima Yukio openly criticised the post-war emperor system for simply helping the US occupation and for losing its dignity by being enmeshed in mass culture.²⁶ Although it is true, as Mishima pointed out, that the emperor system served the US occupation and became trivialised, this does not necessarily mean that it lost its ideological function. While the emperor system was at the core of state nationalism and militarism before and during the war, it became, in post-war Japan, a part of what Michael Billig calls, ‘banal nationalism’, in which the ubiquity of popular images of the imperial household ‘constantly remind, or “flag”, nationhood’.²⁷ Moreover, as Billig suggests, it is powerful because it is trivialised and its ideological function is not consciously noticed.

The ideological role of the emperor system has been analysed by various scholars. Jon Halliday, for instance, calls the ideology inherent in the emperor system ‘Tennōism’ (‘emperor-ism’):²⁸

[T]he key feature is not ‘emperor worship’ as such, but the ‘validation’ of authoritarianism, which in the present stage takes the form...