On the Margins of Japanese Society

Volunteers and the Welfare of the Urban Underclass

Carolyn S. Stevens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134757084
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The popular perception of Japanese society is that it possesses a homogeneity and cultural conformity unlike anything to be found in the West. In fact Japan has its own underclass living outside the mainstream in economic circumstances that are radically different to the more usual perception of a wealthy and sucessful society. Carolyn S. Stevens has produced a new study that intimately explores the lives of Japan's social outcasts as well as those volunteers who seek to help them and as a consequence become socially marginalized themselves.

1 A purehabu with a view

Anthropological methods and approaches

THE METAPHOR

“A room with a view”, borrowed from the title of a novel by E.M. Forster, is an apt metaphor for the methods anthropologists use to study culture. They select a field site, meet with informants, learn the language and other ways to communicate, and try to witness and record the events that are interesting and relevant to the broader understanding of the target society. Anthropologists must position themselves to have access to information; they must find rooms with good views of the surroundings to observe a broad range of social life.

When looking for a “room” from which to study the margins of Japanese society, I tried to find one with many windows to view as much as possible. There were several “rooms” connected to my research: my apartment in the residential area of Kikuna, Yokohama city; the library at the International House of Japan, Inc. in Tokyo; and the office of the Kotobuki community center located in a low-income area. All were “rooms” with different “views” of Japanese society. In my apartment, I learned to live like a Japanese person, tutored by my lively seventy-three-year-old landlady. In the International House library I read many books on Japanese society written by Japanese and Western scholars which analyzed the customs that my landlady taught me. At the community center I listened to the life stories of those who came and went through the doors, but I found few books in the library that addressed the social life of the contemporary poor in Japan.

One room that gave poignant insight into this part of Japan was the space on the second floor of a temporary shelter, or purehabu in Japanese, built in Kotobuki Park at the New Year’s holidays. From that window, I saw homeless day laborers brushing their teeth outside their shelters, middle-class housewives in brightly colored smocks preparing lunch for them, and college students setting up bloodpressure meters in neat rows for the day’s free medical check-up. Labor union officials drank barley tea and watched over the crowd while a few grade schoolchildren chased around a soccer ball. Rich and poor people were spending the most important Japanese holiday together. There were moments of bickering between some laborers and volunteers; all was not in perfect harmony, but at least these different groups of people were trying to get along, all together in one space for this one week of the year. This was an unusual view of Japanese society, a social system that I had previously understood to be more rigidly separated and defined.

My chosen “view” of Japanese society was colored by my previous experiences in the United States. While doing course work at Columbia University for my doctorate degree, I spent every Saturday afternoon in a New York City soup kitchen. This weekly meal service was held in the basement of a large Catholic church on Sixth Avenue near my apartment in Greenwich Village. My participation in the volunteer group did not come from religious zeal for charity but rather from a lack of financial resources; I didn’t have the spending money to keep up with my investment banker friends who went shopping, out to dinner and to the theater on their days off. Working in the soup kitchen gave me something to do, kept my mind off being left behind, and kept my budget in control. It also showed me the human side of poverty. Men and women who panhandled in subways were formerly faceless “problems” New Yorkers had to deal with; now they were people with names, good and bad personalities, and always interesting life histories. No longer was I a passive observer. Working in the soup kitchen got me involved in one small struggle against poverty in America.

Leaving this all behind for three months, I spent the summer of 1989 in the Tokyo area. I stayed with friends, taught English to Japanese businessmen and searched for a dissertation topic. By chance, an American friend who had been living in Japan for thirty years asked me about life in New York. Alice had seen photographs of homeless people in American news magazines; were these grim articles a true representation of the situation in New York, she asked. Times were bad in New York, I replied, but through volunteering at the soup kitchen, I had resolved some of my frustration with life in a large city. Though my weekend efforts may not have changed world poverty, I was an active participant in my local context. Alice thought that was interesting and told me about a group in Kotobuki, an area in downtown Yokohama, that did similar work. She gave my phone number to a member of the Yokohama International Women’s Club who could give me an introduction.

A few weeks later, equipped with two years of college-level Japanese, I was on a train to meet Ishii Sachiko,¹ a Japanese woman I had never seen before, in the heart of this Yokohama “slum” called Kotobuki. Alice’s friend had contacted Ms Ishii, who worked at Kotobuki’s Christian-sponsored community center. Ms Ishii agreed to spend an afternoon showing me around and thus my research in Kotobuki began. I returned to my final year on campus armed with a field site and a single informant, which was enough to get me through my advanced certification exams. I conscientiously sent Ms Ishii greeting cards during the next year to keep lines of communication open. When I returned to Japan in 1990 to attend language school I began volunteering at Ms Ishii’s office once a week, doing English translations of the center’s newsletter to send to the Yokohama International Women’s Club. After my language training ended, I spent two more years volunteering, socializing there and learning about the people of Kotobuki full time.

I originally wanted to do research directly about the social organization of the homeless in Japan. There were many homeless men living around Kotobuki and Ms Ishii had told me about a group called the Thursday Night Patrol, which circulated through the neighborhood assisting homeless men. By participating in this group, I thought I could meet and interview many informants. I soon realized my first project was unrealistic; first of all, most men refused to speak to me. Those who did often laughed off my questions or soon became angry at me for prying. I could barely understand the regional dialects and slang of many of the men who did agree to speak with me. After a few attempts I saw that I could not conduct meaningful interviews at this stage. And why should I be able to? What did these men, having been through the worst life has to offer, have to gain by telling me their life stories? They had experienced the hardship while I had experienced none, and only I was to benefit by their story-telling when I graduated from an Ivy League university with a degree built upon the narratives of their lives.

I was discouraged by my lack of success and angry at myself for my naïveté. However, I felt my chance encounter with the people of Kotobuki was still important. The volunteers did talk to me, about their lives, about Japanese society, and about the problems they faced after becoming involved with Kotobuki. I met men and women, some of whom had left behind comfortable lives to live in Kotobuki and work with the elderly, sick, poor and homeless. I met students who, angry because of the political oppression and social discrimination they perceived in their society, had fought bitterly and parted ways with their teachers, family and friends. I met nuns who preferred blue jeans and tee shirts to habits and were willing to leave their church’s strict tenets behind when counseling young Asian sex workers about birth control. My experience as a volunteer gave me access to a previously unrecorded section of middle-class, liberal Japanese society. I decided to study the volunteers and the volunteer organizations in Kotobuki. I met with activists, nuns, ministers, housewives, students and medical professionals who donated their time and skills to improving the standard of living of the residents of Kotobuki.

I volunteered for two years. Though many of the initial barriers that existed between me and the Kotobuki residents never completely disappeared, there were some residents who took me into their confidence. Volunteering became the lens through which I looked at Kotobuki’s social problems such as poverty, aging and discrimination. It seemed superficial to examine volunteering without considering the social problems that caused the residents’ marginal status, and thus the need for volunteer services. Furthermore, the only way I could build a relationship with a marginalized person was by taking on the volunteer role. The relationship between the volunteer-giver and the client-receiver was unequal, but if not for the volunteer activities, the relationship would probably have not existed at all.

Often informants looked at me with a disbelieving expression equivalent of “what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” In Japan, there really is no reason for a “nice”, educated young woman to be in Kotobuki talking to homeless men. My Japanese friends probably thought I should be cultivating myself in other ways in order to improve my marriage and professional prospects, such as taking lessons in sports or the arts, reading the latest best-sellers, traveling to broaden my horizons, and so forth. It was fine to study Japanese culture, but why would one choose to study the most miserable section of society?

My association with the lowest classes in Japan appeared strange to many of these Japanese friends because my work stood in contrast to the somewhat high social status I temporarily enjoyed in Japan. As a foreign student from the well-established Columbia University (I was often asked if I had ever studied with the famous Professor Donald Keene, a celebrity in the Japanese public eye), I was an honored guest and was treated with respect by local academics and government officials. Though I would always be an “outsider” and, at most, a temporary guest, Japanese friends and acquaintances were concerned about the impression I would have of their culture. They tried their best to show me the finer aspects of Japanese life. People I had only casually met would often give me valuable gifts and insist on taking me out on sightseeing outings. I was invited to dine several times at the home of my landlady’s brother-in-law, a renowned professor of psychiatry at Keio University. My Japanese friends worried I was troubled financially because of the high cost of living in Japan, so they introduced me to potential clients for English tutoring or translation jobs. Because my undergraduate degree was from Harvard, clients paid me high fees, so my income was comfortable. I took a part-time job as an English conversation tutor to a Japanese celebrity who took me to some of the best restaurants in Tokyo, gave me front row seats to concerts at the Tokyo Dome and allowed me the use of his car a few times when we stayed out past the last train back to Yokohama. Quite literally, I saw the best and the worst of Japan during those few years, from the back seat of a Nissan “Presidential” limousine to the front line of the homeless men queued up for a free meal on New Year’s Day. This book is about the best and the worst of Japanese society: the discrimination and the loneliness felt by those marginalized by poverty, ethnicity and disability; the frustration felt by the privileged who do see the suffering, the sacrifices these people make when expressing their opinions and the indifference shown by those who choose not to acknowledge the problems.

ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES AND METHODS

Over the many years that anthropologists have looked at Japanese society, various approaches and methods have been used to express first-hand fieldwork experiences to the second-hand reader. How does one present the sights, sounds and emotions of time spent in a foreign country to those who have never been there? How does the anthropologist confront a seemingly arbitrary set of data and end up with a coherent picture of the foreign culture’s social, political, economic and religious systems? The following section is a discussion of ethnographic approaches and methods that influenced my fieldwork; it is not meant to serve as a comprehensive survey of anthropological research methods but rather is included to give readers insight regarding the processes of transforming my fieldwork experience into written form.

The answer looks simpler on paper than it is in practice: ethnographers must choose an ordered social theory to help make sense of the chaos of the field site, to guide their data collection, and to structure their writing of their findings. At graduate school, students were expected to choose a theoretical “camp” to help shape their studies and direct their research. “Theory” was a badge one wore to identify oneself, and in New York in the mid-1980s, we defined ourselves as either cultural materialists, structuralists, neo-Marxists, feminists or postmodernists,² amongst others. Theory held your work together and kept your research from becoming a laundry list of descriptive attributes that made no contribution to furthering our understanding of the world. Which theory you chose was less of a concern than having a strong theoretical base. With a theoretical foundation, the data could be presented in a manner that not only furthered our understanding of the particular culture but also of the nature of culture in general.

When selecting a theory for my research, I wanted to direct the research in such a way that other important data could not be overlooked. For example, if I had chosen an explicitly economic model and found that men were the main breadwinners in the society, I might overlook the contributions that women make to society in other social spheres. I wanted to make sure I did not leave anyone behind in my research; after all, the focus of my work was to study those who had been left behind: the people in the margins. I need to make sure that my theory was suitable to my inquiry, for:

the most important consideration regarding the appropriateness of research methods, which are relatively “soft” in the terms of veritability, is the nature of the articulation between the data and the corpus of orienting theory.

(Harris, 1968:410)

I needed a theory, or a combination of theories, that best “articulated”, logically and meaningfully, social life in the yoseba (gathering place). I looked through some of the books on Japan that I had collected to try to define my theoretical identity before setting off for Kotobuki.

TRADITIONAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO JAPAN

One of the first ethnographies of Japan, Suye Mura, A Japanese Village, by John F.Embree, was published in 1939 and represents the “structural-functionalist” approach to anthropology. Fieldwork was undertaken from 1935 to 1936. Embree was a student at the University of Chicago, under the famous British Professor A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, one of the founders of the British social anthropological school. Radcliffe-Brown and Embree both saw society in terms of a system of pieces that fit together, each piece having a function that tied it to the whole and sustained the piece and, therefore, the system. Embree noted organized economic and social cooperative behavior in the small Kyushu village he studied and thought that this cooperation was the key to fitting together all the pieces of religious, political, economic and social phenomena which constituted Japanese rural society. This way of analyzing Japanese society seemed clean, rational and effective in its descriptive and theoretical applications, but Kotobuki was not necessarily a neatly functioning machine; rather, the pieces that made up Kotobuki were the ones that had been rejected from mainstream society. I could not see Kotobuki as a smoothly operating, independently functioning community separated from larger society. Rather, it was an anathema to the social machine, perceived as many of the things that machine was meant not to be.

About the same time as Embree was writing about his Kyushu village, an American anthropologist named Ruth Benedict was writing a book that remains one of the most often read works on Japanese society today, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (published in 1946). The thrust of her argument is explained in the title: she believed that patterns of human behavior constituted the definition of a particular culture. This idea comes out of the “Culture and Personality” school, a group of anthropologists who believed that culture could be defined as a patterning of emotional, psychological and ethical principles. These principles colored the way members of a particular group interpreted the natural and social phenomena around them, constituting their interpretation of “culture”. These patterns were broad, allowing for individual and regional variation, and explained why certain cultures saw the world in the ways that they did—they had been trained to do so, by the patterning of their personality through culture.

Benedict thought that the psychological concepts of on (indebtedness), giri (social obligation) and ninjo (human feeling) were three traditional concepts that best explained Japanese social relations (Benedict, 1946, 1977). These psychological concepts were ingrained in the Japanese personality through emotional training that began when the child was very young, and this “mind set” followed the individual throughout his or her lifetime. The “Culture and Personality” school’s way of thinking can also be found in the more contemporary works of Doi Takeo, whose book The Anatomy of Dependence (1981) identified the concept amae (which can be translated as “passive love”, “dependence” or “seeking indulgence”) as the psychological process underlying most human relations in Japan, solidifying the family, and other the social groups such as the company.

I found that although the specific notions of on, giri, ninjo or amae were manifested in different ways in Kotobuki, psychological patterning as important to the definition of social relations was a useful notion. As the reader will see, emotional responses to marginality, to being categorized as marginal, to the foreign and to being an “outsider” were crucial to the analysis of the volunteer/resident relationship and volunteer activities in general. I used a variation: one where psychological “key words” gave some explanation for why people behaved the way they did. The word I found in Kotobuki volunteer groups was enryo, or “hesitation”; this concept was connected to notions of in-group and out-group identity, the basis for the next model of Japanese society.

The “group model” is a generalized term many scholars of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 A purehabu with a view: anthropological methods and approaches
• 2 Kotobuki, the “land of longevity”: ethnographic and historical discussions
• 3 The economy of welfare: public and private solutions to social problems in the yoseba
• 4 Taking action: profiles of Kotobuki volunteer groups
• 5 The human side: resident and volunteer profiles
• 6 Rituals “organized” and “disorganized”: examples of solidarity and conflict in the volunteer community
• 7 Helping out and holding back: power and decision-making in volunteer groups
• 8 Conclusion: volunteering as a response to marginality of self and others
• Appendix
• Glossary of Japanese and Tagalog terms
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index