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17 the politics and semantics of homogeneity
- “No nation of comparable economic power seems so territorially constricted, so ethnically standardized, so culturally contained: Japanese themselves commonly insist that theirs is a small island country (shimaguni), a homogeneous place. Its economic expansiveness is parried by a national inwardness and a disavowal of internal differences along class or ethnic lines, a disavowal most often laid at the feet of culture. The image of Japan as the great assimilator arises to explain away any epistemological snags or historical confusions: Japan assimilates, if not immigrants and American automobiles, then everything else, retaining the traditional, immutable core of culture while incorporating the shiny trappings of (post)modernity in a dizzying round of production, accumulation, and consumption”
(Ivy 1995, 1).Whether it is entirely the outcome of long-range nation-state formation activities by the Japanese state, or in part an outcome of Japan’s physical/cultural/linguistic dis-connection from the Asian Continent, or, more likely the latter overlaid and transformed by the former, national identity in Japan now assumes a high degree of similarity, and the presence of a national habitus that is shared by nearly all of its citizens.
The politics of homogeneity—the various ways that this notion affects relationships between individuals in public—is a central concern for resident Koreans in Kyoto, who, by their official “national” identification, are excluded from becoming Japanese, even when they become naturalized citizens. “Even if I become a Japanese citizen, I still have this Korean ancestry.” One resident Korean in Kyoto explained to me. While the official incorporation regime that prospective citizens must follow demands a public and sincere desire to acculturate to Japanese life, the unofficial exclusions of the national habitus do not admit newcomers into the “We Japanese...” identity.
Koreans who grow up in Kyoto are virtually indistinguishable from their Japanese neighbors, and can easily pass as Kyoto Japanese in anonymous transactions. But when their Korean ancestry becomes known, they sense a shift in the manner in which others will interact with them. They feel the marking that removes them from assumptions that apply within the “We Japanese” group identity.
One alternative, which informs their festival Madang, and also their continuing discourse on international human rights as these apply locally to Kyoto, is to attack the very notion of homogeneity as the basis for a national population. They also take their dual identity, their Korean-Japanese heritage, not as a halving of both traditions: they are not half-Korean and half-Japanese; rather they talk about a doubling of identity: they are both Korean and Japanese. “Isn’t a tree with two roots stronger than a tree with only one root?” a resident Korean asked me, illustrating this position.
What Koreans in Kyoto have not done (yet) in their arguments for heterogeneity is to critique the idea that Japan is naturally/historically a homogeneous society. They may, in fact accept this notion as being valid. But they would still argue that homogeneity cannot be used as the basis for citizenship today. But Koreans in Kyoto are not alone in their tacit acceptance of Japan as a homogeneous society, Even Pharr, who was writing about inequality in Japan, made the assumption that the formation of the nation-state was informed by its homogeneity, which gave the rulers a natural legitimacy to acquire political authority.
- “Education has expanded and developed dramatically in Japan, due to factors that include the priority given to education, which is part of the national character, and rising income levels. Education has been a driving force behind Japan's economic, social, and cultural development.
(Monbusho ibid 1994.)”Pharr (1990, 214) also makes the argument that in Germany, where heterogeneity was (in her argument) more evident, the state could not assemble the requisite sense of commonality to achieve uncontested delegation of political authority (at least until Hitler did so). “The great heterogeneity of Germany, with its major religious, ethnic, and regional cleavages, foreclosed the possibility that any such delegation of authority could have occurred there, even if such a pattern had been more consistent with German traditions. Thus, authority figures at the national level had to evolve methods for mediating among the competing interests of society.”
- “For Adorno, notably, any existing collectivity—under the homogenizing force of monopoly capitalism and fascism alike—could not be but false; truth was buried in nonidentity, to be grasped only in the paradoxical autonomy of modern(ist) art”
(Hansen 1993, xviii).Pharr’s argument that public-sphere formation was possible in Germany because social heterogeneity required additional arenas for mediation also fails to predict the collapse of the public sphere in Germany in 1933, and it implicates a very general historical precondition as necessary for the creation of a public sphere: by this it denies the possibility of the creation of a public sphere as the result of political practice. This last point reveals the lack of critical attention to the position of the notion of homogeneity in Pharr’s work.
Notions of a homogeneous culture
- “...As Tokugawa economic life became more complex, self regulating occupational classes and functional groups developed. But even though the urban worker, merchant or artisan was occasionally made aware that power also emanated from sources other than his own superior or guild, he would still have had no sense of any impersonal political organisation, any possible precursor of the state, that might judge his conduct objectively.’Public’ affairs meant simply the sum of those things that occupied the attention of his superior.
(van Wolferen 1990, 164-165)The word “doushu” is described in Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary (Fourth Edition) in its adjectival form as meaning “of the same kind [sort, description]; of the same family [species]; similar (in kind); same; identical; kindred; allied; congeneric; congerous; homogeneous; of the same race.” Doushu is the Japanese term used for the notion of “homogeneity,” for example, when this is used in describing some national Japanese society. But note that the Japanese term’s semantic field differs from current English language1 use of “homogeneous.”
“Similarity” and “uniformity” in the English meaning are descriptive of the current condition of the object described, and are in semantic counterposition to objects that show “heterogeneity.” In the Japanese borrowing of the term, current similarities are outcomes of a shared ancestry. Similarity of organic objects, including humans, is explained within this term by racial or familial connections.
This brings up a fundamental flaw in the debate surrounding Nihonjinron. This discourse on “Japanese-ness” has essentialized its object to the point where “being Japanese” is an unmarked position that 1) can only be appropriated by certain individuals (i.e., citizens of Japan who have lived their life in Japan); and, 2) the right “being Japanese” can be lost through any of several ways of marking the individual as divergent from a group Japanese habitus.
- “...I am attempting to write of the western nation as an obscure and ubiquitous form of living the locality of culture. This locality is more around temporality than about historicity: a form of living that is more complex than 'community'; more symbolic than 'society'; more connotative than 'country'; less patriotic than patrie; more rhetorical than the reason of state; more mythological than ideology; less homogeneous than hegemony; less centred than the citizen; more collective than ‘the subject’; more psychic than civility; more hybrid in the articulation of cultural differences and identifications—gender, race or class—than can be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring of social antagonism.”
(Bhabha 1990, 292)But for resident Koreans and others who grow up in Japan, the Japanese group habitus, the “harmonizing” homogeneity that sustains the “We Japanese...” discourse, presents an ethnic barrier that no amount of assimilation (assuming there is a desire to assimilate) can overcome. And so, as I talk about the discourse surrounding “homogeneity” in Japan, I would remind the reader that this is not disconnected from discourses of race. So too, the demand by the Higashi-kujo Madang festival organizers that Japan recognize heterogeneity as a human right, is a demand that is not only made to assert cultural difference, but also ethnic and bodily diversity within the nation-state of Japan. This demand is also a local reflective appropriation of “multiculturalism” as a transnational practice with “obscure and ubiquitous” (See: Left) local implications.
1The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language gives the following definition: “1. Like in nature or kind; similar; congruous. 2. Uniform in structure or composition throughout.” The second meaning of the English term more resembles the Japanese term “kakuitsu” [uniform], while the main meaning has lost the etymologically available sense of “same beginning” [Medieval Latin: homo-geneus].
