Local Spaces and Identities— middle class democracy

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“For example, in 1930, 84 percent of the populace —peasants and workers—possessed only 50 percent of the nation’s household income, while 24,000 families, or 0.0019 percent of Japan's households, held over 10 percent of the aggregate family income of the nation. At the very top of this pyramid were nineteen families with annual incomes of over a million yen each, while, at the bottom, 2,232,000 families each had incomes of 200 yen or less. As for power, political authority remained in the hands of an oligarchy that emerged to replace the Bakufu and its regional rulers; meanwhile the masses ended by sacrificing their lives on the battlefields or in the burned-out cities of 1945 Japan
(Hane 1982, 11).”

Inequality cannot today be legitimated in Japan through an acknowledgment of hereditary difference—of an heritable class prerogative—at least not within the discourse of democracy that the state maintains in Japan (while also maintaining an emperor). Indeed, the notion of “democracy” in Japan is centered on the idea of social equality, rather than on ideas of “freedom” (of choice, of speech, etc.) which is perhaps central to this notion in the United States. Equality in Japan is mostly pinned to the broadening of its middle class, and to a narrative of economic opportunity, rather than to a wider sense of individual equality in interpersonal relationships, or in relationships to institutions. kone and kane: connections and money are two arterials of power that belie the discourse of some eventually universal middle-class Japan.

The discourse on homogeneity in Japan sometimes alludes to everyone being “in the same boat.” Here too it conceals the fact that the boat has several decks. Forty years of economic growth has allowed many families to make the climb up a deck or two, and so reinforce popular notions of equality/opportunity in Japan. But this very movement in society (and the looming potential for downward movement) also displays popular notions of actual social inequality based on connections to institutions.

“The aim of school education must be to foster the healthy development of each individual. Courses of Study for schools and the Course of Study for Kindergartens have been formulated as curriculum standards that ensure the actual achievement of this ideal in schools throughout Japan and ensure that specific levels of education are attained. All schools in Japan base their educational activities on the Courses of Study for schools or the Course of Study for Kindergartens....
...Priority will be given to fostering respect for Japanese culture and traditions. In addition, efforts will be made to increase understanding of the cultures and histories of other countries in order to foster qualities that will enable Japanese to live successfully in the international community.
(Monbusho webpage: JAPANESE GOVERNMENT POLICIES IN EDUCATION, SCIENCE AND CULTURE 1994,
PART I, Chapter 1)”

A positive sentiment about opportunity for personal advancement is fed by stories of those who, through draconian self-sacrifice (usually in collaboration with the “education-mother” [kyouiku mama]) and sheer ability, find their way into Tokyo University. The tales of dire circumstances during and after World War II, stories now mostly gleaned from grandparents and television, remain vivid reminders of how bad times can get. And the larger story of Japan’s emergence as an economic superpower is big enough and visible enough for most people to have their own small version of it within their families.

The great majority of families in Japan (apart from many rural families) would admit to improved circumstances, and would have to credit elite government and industry executives who control more of the state’s economic brain than they now like to admit— given the current downward trend in the economy. But these stories tend to conceal the less spectacular statistics that would reveal the overall picture of who gets picked by the bureaucracy¹ to join Japan’s “economic brain.”

“...In a modern, industrial state—whether it be France, the United States, or Japan—this equation of citizenship and ancestry is no longer tenable. No modern solution is possible in maintaining a narrow, defensive ethnicity through contrastive separation that diminishes or incapacitates the individual. The individual cannot adapt or adjust through systematic denial of another culture. The minority group cannot escape considerable damage from such prevention of cultural assimilation. A defensive minority identity, by its very nature, is maladaptive in a complex modern society.”
(Lee and Devos 1981, 380)

Hartoonian (1988a) contrasts the new (post 1960s) governmental programs with those of Pre-War Japan. He asserts that these new programs embrace materialism and commodification, allowing “abundance [to] serve as the bond for reinforcing forms of ‘Japanese-like’ social relationships... (5)... the new representation appeals to the ethos of an exceptional culture (identical with ‘nature’) in order to explain the irreducible and unique source of Japan’s status... [this] reveals the operation of a newer division between... the ‘Japanized View’ and the ‘Westernized View,’ now facing each other as absolutes standing outside of history, accountable only to an unchanging ‘nature’ (read as culture) and ‘race’” (468). The state made a new “boat” out of the post-War economic “miracle,” but attached this even more to a naturalized “Japaneseness.”

“This [Cornel West’s work] reminds us that the importance of the ‘exclusion of exclusion’ appears at the level of sexuality, ethnicity, and interest more strongly than any other: identity politics has been motivated in part by a struggle against those persons and practices excluding us because of our differences, a motivation which has called into question those exclusions operating within identity groups”
(Dean 1996, 42).

This picture of how the state viewed culture as a national project, which is also evident in Visit to a Green Star, transforms personal success within the system to a vindication of true Japanese nature. Curiously, failure to find personal success reveals not the inadequacy of the Japanese spirit to the task at hand, but some defect in the individual—perhaps the surfacing of some residue of non-Japaneseness. The growing numbers of homeless persons camping out in abandoned buildings in Higashi-kujo, or under Kamo river bridges strain the “we Japanese” self-identity, and need to be ex-communicated as loafers and delinquents.

These new kawaramono (“river people:” the older Kyoto name for outcaste vagrants) move (and get moved) spatially and discursively into the marginal places of Kyoto where the only emerging counter identity to the “we Japanese” that now excludes them is today the plastic “Korean” identity being promoted by the Higashi-kujo Madang festival community. In fact, the Madang organizers welcome and include Japanese day-laborers.

¹Curiously, there is more of an expectation that opportunities exist for personal advancement than is warranted by the available legal and social guarantees. Most people I spoke with in Kyoto were confident that hard work and talent would pay off. And, during decades of economic growth there has come a growth of opportunities for many. It is only in the last five years that the expectation of continuing prosperity has faded, and so, in the next decade, a decade of economic restructuring, the public’s trust in the meritocracy will be tested.