Local Spaces and Identities— The outcome is silence

---

The Korean identity moments that resident Koreans face at home, on the street, and in schools, are not shared with the remainder of the city’s population, (which has other moments, coded in other ways). And so, each moment takes the individual away from that shared feeling of belonging that is so assiduously assembled for Japanese citizens in Kyoto. Capitalist consumer identity moments and desires flow over all boundaries in Japan, but again are shared unequally because of ethnic, class, and gender domination in this arena. Resident Koreans are more likely than most to find themselves on the silenced subject end of the domination of money as a means of expression.

“Consensus is a horizon that is never reached....”
(Lyotard 1984, 61).
“Abstract space, the space of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism, bound up as it is with exchange... depends on consensus more than any space before it”
(Lefevbre 1991, 57)
“The 'normal' exercise of hegemony in the area which has become classical, that of the parliamentary regime, is characterized by the combination of force and consensus which vary in their balance with each other, without force exceeding consensus too much.”
(Jenks 1993, 83).

Later in this chapter I will be discussing how the international market place is working in an increasingly oblique manner to the aims of programs for national(ist) identity formation, and how individuals may be able to find a space in this divide for counter expressions. But first, I need to complete this introduction to the application of notions of homogeneity, and a resulting uniformity of identity/behavior that is the main source for the social exclusion of resident Koreans (and other foreign residents) in Kyoto. All activist groups—consumerist and ecology advocates, feminists, and groups of Koreans—make their counter positions against this façade of a uniform consensus.

the apparatuses of normality

This “consensus,” which is warranted mainly through the silence of complaint or dissent, is tied to a narrative of sharing—a shared history, ecology, heredity, and suffering by a population which is authorized to self-identify as “Japanese.” And this narrative is supported by institutional practices that are provided to a citizenry that is always within the ready reach of the state.

The notion of an inherent uniformity of being and imagination among those who would make statements beginning with “We Japanese...” is certainly of a kind that is promoted in many states as a positive expression of shared patriotic belonging.

“On December 18, Kyoto City unveiled the [Kyoto Action Plan], a compilation of activities to be launched by the 1999 (Heisei 11) fiscal year. Made up of 216 projects, the [Kyoto Action Plan] is central to Mayor Masumoto's strategy for 'building a bridge to 21st-century Kyoto' during his first 4-year term in office. The general cost of the plan will be 550 billion yen [about US $5 billion]. It has three cardinal programs: 'Kyoto Vibrant,' 'Cheerful & Vibrant City Office,' and 'Grand Vision for 21st-century Kyoto.' Together, the programs focus on five areas: people, city, industry, culture and nature. Mayor Masumoto declared his wish to invigorate Kyoto using this plan, and announced it would be identified with the catch phrase 'People- City-Dreams Vibrant City: Kyoto'
http://www.city.kyoto.jp/index_e.html: “Hot News,” December 18, 1996.

“We Americans believe in freedom” is a phrase no US Senator would hesitate to repeat. Elsewhere (Caron 1997) I have discussed the general problematic of desiring to belong to modern “population cohorts,” such as national populations—a desire signalled by the enthusiasm with which statements beginning with “We [insert nationality here]...” are spoken. A desire to belong to any group, I suggest, might be better directed at groups where some form of mutual trust is available.

In any case, the idea of a singular, communal national imagination, which Anderson (1983) described as the basis for the formation of modern nation-states, is today increasingly inadequate to describe the realities of cosmopolitan transnationalism found in most localities—but not, as yet in Japan. If there is an exceptional quality about modernity in Japan this has been produced by decades of official refusal to admit internal heterogeneity. Few states in the world today stake as much of their claim to national identity on a history of isolation and separate (unique) heredity as does Japan.

As Ivy (1995) noted, the “refusals of heterogeneity” in Japan are multiple and real:

“Japan emerges as the armature of intense preoccupations with essential national-cultural identity, continuity, and community that mark and remark it with the signs of totality. The effort to sustain this totality announces itself in every tourist advertisement, every appeal to ‘home’ (furusato), every assertion that ‘we Japanese are modern, but we have kept our tradition,’ every discourse on public (Japanese) harmony. This effort to maintain the self-sameness of Japanese culture thus exposes itself by its denial of social difference—race, ethnicity, class. This denial is not sheerly ideological, for the policies of the Japanese state and historical contingencies have determined that in fact those differences are reduced: less than 1 percent of the population of Japan are non-Japanese citizens, so say the official statistics. There are strong structural, institutional, and legal denials and controls of ethnic and racial differences; there are refusals of heterogeneity at many levels. While anthropologists and historians attempt to find difference, resistance, and ambiguity in Japan—and of course any polity as vast and affluent as Japan must generate differences, if only by negation— there is an equal necessity to come to terms with what is a powerfully normalizing and standardizing nexus of institutional, legal, and socio-cultural apparatuses” (26).

“The rate of advance to colleges and universities for Buraku students is about half the national average. The high school dropout rate is two to three times higher among Burakumin than non-Burakumin, and employment and marriage-related discrimination against Buraku people are still common. Today detective agencies are employed by families and employers to trace the ancestral origins of prospective employees or marriage partners. Data banks are maintained and computer lists of the names of those believed to be of Buraku origin are secretly purchased”
(Hirasawa 1992, 5-6).
This situation is mirrored in the resident Korean neighborhoods.
See also: the politics and semantics of homogeneity

These apparatuses of normality are, again, common enough elements of what Giddens (1994) has called “disembedding” practices of modernity around the globe, practices used most rigorously by emerging nation-states in creating national spaces out of their territories and national populations out of their peoples. It is crucial, he claims, to see this feature of modernization as a “detraditionalizing” practice—even when the resulting content is a narrative of traditionality: “The evacuation of local contexts of action—the ‘disembedding' of activities—can be understood as implying processes of intensified detraditionalization. We are the first generation to live in a thoroughly post-traditional society, a term that is in many ways preferable to 'postmodern'. A post-traditional society is not a national society—we are speaking here of a global cosmopolitan order.... It is a society... in which tradition changes its status. In the context of a globalizing, cosmopolitan order, traditions are constantly brought into contact with one another and forced to 'declare themselves'” (Giddens 1984, 83).

Modern states have been “declaring themselves” for many decades now, and many of these declarations have not been gentle: racism, colonialism, warfare, and genocide have found a place in the declarations of nation-contra-nation. Even the most rational-discursive forums for international affairs (such as the UN) have allowed the concept of “national sovereignty” to permit a continuance of nation-internal state-sponsored practices of racism, colonialism, warfare, and genocide.

The extremes that states must and do go to in order to “declare themselves” also serves to show the potential imbalance of power that can hold between states and their residents. This imbalance is most evident in state-nations (see: State-nation modernity), where the state’s interests are more complex. But all nations have shared in moments where national identity, most visibly in patriotic celebrations, but also within less visible forms of chauvinism, becomes a project of the state. And this project usually has at its central goal the creation of a shared unity of affect (See also: orthoposture)—a collective, and reliable emotional position among the national population.

Nationalism has joined with pre-national traditions (e.g., fundamentalist religions) in an agonistic discursive project that forces people to “declare themselves.” In an actually “traditional” order, local traditions would be so self-evident and ubiquitous—so utterly normal— that such a declaration would be superfluous. It is only when the ground of tradition has been removed from under practices that confessions are needed.

Today, life-styles are created in counter distinction to this normality. Like all fashions, life-styles are counter-traditional in content. Participation in self-reflexive lifestyle projects creates a break with the “traditional lifestyle.”

The notion, then, of a “traditional lifestyle” becomes oxymoronic when lifestyle becomes reflexively organized, as this is increasingly in late modernity. This is why Giddens calls this time a post-traditional order. A reflexive lifestyle is a lifestyle that seeks to become ab-normal¹, both formally (by achieving a reflexive awareness of normalcy) and in its content (by playing with the content of normalcy). When the normal becomes “kitch” it loses its unmarked normalcy. Here I only want to say that we can expect that the projects of the state in promoting a “traditional lifestyle” are increasingly problematic these days. When linked to a traditional order, state-sponsored normalcy is liable to be countered by lifestyle projects at all levels.

¹Foucault has called modernity a era of confession, but nobody needs to confess to being normal; rather, the abnormal act, the artificial desire, the transgressive practice is the content of confession. A type of normalcy, reconstructed by the state in early modernity, and now increasingly with inputs from the market, has acquired the unmarked—unconfessable—position where a bricolage of “traditions” once informed daily life.