Transcultural Japan

David Blake Willis, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, David Blake Willis, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134204014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Relazioni internazionali

Transcultural Japan provides a critical examination of being Other in Japan. Portraying the multiple intersections of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, the book suggests ways in which the transcultural borderlands of Japan reflect globalization in this island nation. The authors show the diversity of Japan from the inside, revealing an extraordinarily complex new society in sharp contrast to the persistent stereotypical images held of a regimented, homogeneous Japan. Unsettling as it may be, there are powerful arguments here for looking at the meanings of globalization in Japan through these diverse communities and individuals. These are not harmonious, utopian communities by any means, as they are formed in contexts, both global and local, of unequal power relations.

Yet it is also clear that the multiple processes associated with globalization lead to larger hybridizations, a global mélange of socio-cultural, political, and economic forces and the emergence of what could be called trans-local Creolized cultures. Transcultural Japan reports regional, national, and cosmopolitan movements. Characterized by global flows, hybridity, and networks, this book documents Japan's new lived experiences and rapid metamorphosis.

Accessible and engaging, this broad-based volume is an attractive and useful resource for students of Japanese culture and society, as well as being a timely and revealing contribution to research scholars and for those interested in race, ethnicity, cultural identities and transformations.

Part I
Introduction

1 Transcultural Japan
Metamorphosis in the cultural borderlands and beyond

David Blake Willis and Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu

Takarazushi: a microcosm of a changing Japan

What could be more Japanese than sushi?

Sushi symbolizes traditional Japan for many people, but a recent visit to Takarazushi, a premier sushi restaurant in Kobe, revealed another side of this complex modern society. The rice may have been decidedly native, but the seafood was striking in its variety and origins. Though visibly less dramatic, the diversity of the people was no less astonishing.

To begin with, there was Takeshi, our friend and Takarazushi’s sushi master. Few occupations speak for Japan more than being a sushi master, but Takeshi lived in America for six years and has an MBA from the University of Wisconsin. He told us later in the evening that the man to our right, a solitary diner introduced to us as Kimura-san, was a Korean whose family had been in Japan for 70 years. The blond woman at the end of the bar, speaking fluent Japanese and joking about the shellfish, turned out to be a Russian. The night before, there had been two women from the Caribbean chatting with Takeshi in their Jamaican lilt and cautiously trying the sushi.

Ryo, one of the kitchen workers, was from Brazil, the descendant of grandparents who had emigrated there from Okinawa. Jo (Jiang-guo), his co-worker, was a Chinese student of engineering at Kobe University. Momoko and Shizuka, the two waitresses, were college students who had recently returned from America and Australia. These two young women knew what it was like to be treated as the “Other” from their experiences overseas, not to mention how Japanese feel toward women who have lived abroad. Momoko’s parents ran a nursery that had children from “Other” backgrounds, including Peruvian, Brazilian, Vietnamese, and mixed race children. And then there were the two of us.

While the diversity of origins revealed a new Japan, there were also signs of the old Japan. The red-faced Japanese man to our left treated us as if we were there for his amusement, commenting on the hair on our arms, our tall noses, and our long legs. How amazing it was that we could eat sushi! Clearly to this man we were Others who were not part of Japanese society. We have lived here for much of our lives, however, and have identities as members of Japanese society that are deeply embedded in our experiences.

Figure 1.1 Takarazushi, Kobe, 2006. (Photo: David Blake Willis)

When we became members of Japanese society has as much to do with the Japanese and their changing attitudes as it does with us, of course. Stephen was born in Japan, has Japanese ancestry, and was a national government employee for many years, but it required persistent effort in middle age to obtain a Japanese passport. David reminds his university students who compliment him on his skill at chopsticks or the Japanese language that he has been in Japan longer than they have and that his two grown sons are Japanese. Both of us have watched carefully as Japan has globalized.

Takarazushi is a microcosm of a changing Japan, of new cultural flows and old traditions. The fish and other marine products come from the seas around Japan and from all corners of the globe: Africa, Southeast Asia, the Atlantic, the Pacific, and South America. The customers and workers, too, represent not only a more traditional Japan, but a diversity that forces us to look more deeply at this dramatically changing society.

Living in the borderlands

Japan is undergoing a metamorphosis, a transformation that began in its cultural borderlands and is now spreading throughout the country. This is a territory being remapped gradually and gingerly, yet unmistakably. Sojourners, immigrants, and long-term residents alike, some “looking” Japanese, some not, are now part of the fabric and life of Japanese society. And while they are not yet as visible as in multicultural societies like America or Brazil, their numbers represent, surprisingly, about the same level of diversity as the United Kingdom in 1990 (Lie 2001: 4).

More and more Japanese, in fact, even resemble our friend Dennis Chang. Of Indonesian, Indian, Chinese, and Malay ancestry, Dennis hardly “looks Japanese.” Since 9/11 he is often stopped at borders and carefully questioned. Some people assume Dennis is American because of his name, and his impeccable English. But his Japanese is also fluent, and in the spring of 2004, a little over five years after first coming to Japan, Dennis received a letter from the Ministry of Justice informing him that he was no longer a foreigner and had now become Japanese. Dennis was among the 15,000 persons who naturalized that year, becoming one of the country’s new citizens. For Dennis and many others, including some of the authors in this book, questions of identity and place are not just academic.

We are writing this book because we care about what happens to the people in the cultural borderlands and transnational crossroads of Japan. Many of us live in these borderlands and see them as revealing the dynamic contradictions, complex textures, and multiple levels of reality found in contemporary Japanese society. The dividing lines between Japanese and Others, including conceptions of what is “pure” and “impure,” are no longer so clear as they were once assumed to be. These new and complex contexts reveal a transcultural world that is overlooked when we are preoccupied with conceptual dichotomies and dialectical oppositions. What we are seeing instead is a transcultural, transnational society with fluid boundaries, constant change, and often innovative cultural formations. These developments speak for “imagined communities” (Anderson 1994) that have become very real indeed in today’s Japanese society.

Transcultural Japan seeks to complement earlier works on difference in Japan by focusing on the social construction of alternative realities in the Japanese context, on questions that lead to reflexive narratives and on cultural transformations in transnational contexts. We are especially sensitive to the social and political manipulations of cultures, their identities, and their representations. We would like to emphasize (1) the changing nature of Japanese society; (2) the increasing openness and countervailing opposition in Japan to difference, whether of oldcomers, newcomers, or those Japanese who come from historically marginalized populations; and (3) the tensions and frictions which are the result of these changes in Japan.

This book is an articulation of how this is happening in Japanese society. Rather than stable, bounded cultural wholes, the transformations taking place concern constellations of relationships and how they create “fluid and shifting social entities” (Crehan 2002), something very much at the center of these narratives. Too often in the public discourse of difference in Japan the actual interactions of peoples at the level of popular culture and the agency of minorities themselves have been left out, and these are often the very venues of social transformation. Telling the story of Others, of minorities, in Japan, “requires an appreciation not only of the changing landscape elements but also of the partial, tentative, and shifting ability of the storyteller to identify elements at all” (Tsing 2001: 453).

The writers in this volume attempt to avoid or at least lessen the depiction of the diverse peoples of Japan as communities separate from Japanese society, by instead seeing them as integral parts of the whole. The marginal then becomes of crucial importance to the mainstream. We have tried to be cognizant of the dangers and move beyond the fragmentation and divisiveness of separately studying specific groups, which decontextualizes and reinforces the “uniqueness” or separateness of each subject studied as they are examined in isolation from larger social and economic forces. Our focus on reflexivity and narrative here is an attempt to deal with the problem of what some scholars have called “an othering of Others.”

We thus felt it was important to “write against culture,” as represented in traditional accounts of the Japanese and minorities that lead the reader to conceive of groups of people as discrete, bounded entities (Abu-...