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Making Money Visible: Digital Money and Financial Precarity amongst Chinese Migrant Workers

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Tom McDonald

In the summer of 2016, I and my students were in the industrial city of Shenzhen, South East China, conducting a small exploratory study aimed at gaining an overview of migrant factory workers’ attitudes towards digital money platforms. Over two weeks, we had spoken to many migrant factory workers, uncovering a range of differing attitudes towards the platforms and their use. On one extreme, some migrants seemed to conduct almost all of their daily economic life through these technologies, ranging from purchasing snacks in convenience stores to sending remittances back home to their villages in rural China. At the opposite end of the spectrum other migrants largely eschewed these technologies in preference of cash transactions for the majority of uses (Figure 1). Plenty of migrants lay somewhere inbetween, adopting particular features of the platforms as suited their own lives. As is so often the case in anthropology, the ‘data’ reflected not clear observable correlations, but rather a ‘mish-mash’ of differing preferences and attitudes. However, the popularity of Yu’e bao (an online savings account linked to the Alipay payment platform) stood out amongst our interactions. Almost all of the migrants we encountered used this function, often choosing to keep most of their cash savings stored in this way, instead of using traditional cash deposit accounts with (typically State-owned) banks.

Fig 1. QR codes for digital payment in worker’s canteen (Photo: LC Kwok)

Yu’e bao was attractive for a couple of practical reasons. First, money could be instantaneously transferred out of Yu’e bao and into Alipay for spending, transfer or other purposes. Second, as Alipay was owned by a private company, it could reward savers with interest at a slightly higher rate than competing banks. Although participants were often aware of these benefits, it was another issue – the visible way interest was paid into their account – that seemed to most often appear in migrants’ discussions of these services, as evidenced by the exchange between two male migrants below:

 “Then there’s Yu’e bao… you put your money in there and you get a little bit of interest everyday …”

 “…Because for some people, they don’t necessarily have a lot of money, and they don’t necessarily want to deposit it. Let’s say you put it in, sometimes you’ll earn 0.1RMB, 1RMB, but it’s somewhat small. Seeing your balance growing a little, it’s still [ok]… although the money you earn will never be the same as the devaluation in currency.”

Alipay paid interest into Yu’e bao users’ accounts on a daily basis (instead of monthly or annually, as was the case with banks), while also making both the balance and the daily earnings instantly viewable (Figure 2). It was this increased visibility of users’ savings – rather than the higher interest rates, or added convenience – that particularly appealed to participants. Why were migrant workers particularly eager to have their savings made visible in this way, and what can this tell us about how digital money fits in to the lives of this marginal population?

Fig 2. Display of user balance and daily interest payments on yu’e bao

Part of the answer to this question comes from appreciating the broader context of the financial precarity faced by migrant workers, made manifest in acute anxiety around being cheated out of money. The growth of digital money platforms was perceived to have opened up new avenues through which deception could take place. These risks were also made visible around the communities where migrants lived. Crudely plastered onto the wall of alleyways were adverts for jiedaibao, an online peer-to-peer lending service. “They say it’s a scam,” one migrant worker claimed to me. The State also sought to protect its citizens from other similar risks: every evening a public information video produced by the local police force was displayed on the giant LED video screens in the nearby public square and cinema lobby, both of which were regularly frequented by migrant workers finishing their factory shifts. The video, played at regular intervals, featured a young police officer warning the public to avoid being cheated by taking care not give out their personal details online, and to avoid sending funds to strangers online over social media platforms (Figure 3).

Fig 3. Public information film aimed at tackling online scams (Photo: LC Kwok)

Running parallel to these concerns about online money platforms, many migrant workers also felt a desire to alter their lives so that they would not need to rely on factory work for their income indefinitely. The stability offered by work on the production line came with little room for future progression. Malls and other places located closeby to factories advertised private training courses to learn new skills such as 3D design, hairdressing and beauty treatments, although such courses were expensive, and rarely lead to the kinds of new careers those selling such tuition promised. Migrants also expressed interest in starting business, but were similarly worried about losing income this way.

Understanding this broader context helps us to understand the appeal of Yu’e bao, making migrants’ money – both total savings and also daily growth – more visible to themselves. This appealed to migrant factory workers desire to transform their lives by leaving factory work (with money being deemed necessary for affecting such a change), while ameliorating their fear of losing money through falling victim to cheats or scams. While Yu’e bao’s paltry interest rates may never actually provide migrants with the kind of growth needed for them to realise their ambitions, the platform is nevertheless viewed as a seemingly ‘safe’ place to deposit what limited savings they have, where they can see their money is ‘growing a little everyday’ while also remaining tangible and accessible through worker’s smartphones and mobile apps.

The example of migrant workers in Shenzhen has a broader significance for economic anthropology, confirming Maurer’s assertion that digital forms of money should not be assumed to represent the ‘next stage’ in the evolution of money, or that they are destined to create financial inclusion. Rather, migrant workers in Shenzhen see Yu’e bao as the best option amongst a limited range of places for storing their money because it addresses specific concerns about managing risk while also appearing in accordance with a desire to alter their lives through financial accumulation, even if the rewards of saving this way mean that such aspirations may never truly materialize.

Tom McDonald is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Hong Kong. His first solely-authored monograph, Social Media in Rural China: Social Networks and Moral Frameworks (UCL Press), was published in 2016. He also co-authored the volume How the World Changed Social Media (UCL Press). McDonald is currently investigating digital money in China.

Situated Digitalization

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Introduction to the Series of “Digital Anthropologies in East Asia”

Yi Zhou

In 2012, the Google policy analyst Andy Yee claimed that East Asia finally began a second digital revolution which was transforming the region from manufacturing digital hardware to creating digital content and services. According to Yee, this second stage of digitalization was more innovative and valuable: it has turned East Asia into a digital hub reliant on creative industry rather than a digital factory reliant on cheap labor. Developing digital content such as video games and smartphone apps for the massive number of global users has also boosted the digital economy in East Asia and allowed East Asia to compete with the United States. More recently, a similar claim has appeared in many news outlets: East Asia is rapidly catching up to North America in the development of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), the pinnacle of technologies that will lead to a third kind of digital revolution in the region (e.g. South China Morning Post, December 31, 2016). These claims – often made by market researchers, government consultants, and journalists – reveal a simple understanding of digitalization based in the linear development model of economics that assumes the digital (r)evolution will trickle down from developed countries to developing countries, from the West to the East.

Such a narrow understanding of digitalization obscures the “critical nodes” (Mazzarella 2006) of digital development in East Asia, as it fails to situate the process of digitalization within its local conditions. For example, data processing – particularly, marking and labeling objects in images – is a key step for developing algorithms. Algorithms are then used for A.I. development such as image recognition and machine learning. Since data processing is labor intensive, it requires cheap and disciplined workers. In the high-tech industrial park in Guiyang located in southwest China, Chinese digital companies hire young students from a nearby vocational school to process data. These students are being pulled out of the classroom and pushed into the market of A.I. infrastructure development for six hours a day even before they graduate (Synced 2017). The line between a digital hub and a digital factory is rarely clear cut in China (as well as other countries in East Asia) because the diligent, low-cost, and flexible labor is the driving force behind its digital production. It is also worth noting that this vocational school is a welfare project launched by the government to help ethnic minority students from poor families access education. Ironically, these students now are low paid and highly disciplined digital proletarians. The well-intentioned project aimed at poverty alleviation unexpectedly, and yet unsurprisingly, provides a new type of cheap labor for A.I. development in China. Mirroring this reality, the process of digitalization reveals its deep ties to local conditions and reliance on the complex interactions between the state, the market, and citizens.

Our series “Digital Anthropologies in East Asia” thus aims to situate digitalization within its local conditions as a way to capture two critical moments (nodes) of digital development. The first is the critical moment of “digital becoming.” Digital technologies and content are not once-made entities spreading from the western center to the eastern peripheries. Rather, they are invented and developed by local policies, knowledge of the indigenous market, and people’s needs and desires, etc., in a particular society. Such a process of “becoming” often results in unpredictable technological innovations, unique uses of digital products, and intriguing sociotechnical changes. Our series thus traces the “becoming” moments of A.I., social media, digital archives, online discussion spaces, and virtual currency, etc., in China, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong. Capturing these “becoming” moments illuminates the dynamic process of digitalization in the obviously connected yet clearly differentiated countries of East Asia.

The second is the critical moment of “digital connecting.” Digital technologies and products are not objects that human societies create and put in use. They embody the capacities to reconfigure existing social relations and shape new webs of connections both on- and off-line. Over the past several decades, cultural anthropologists have paid considerable attention to the forms and values of social relations in East Asia. There is a long-standing body of literature describing guanxi (personal connections) in China, wa (group loyalty and harmony) in Japan, and inhwa (harmony between unequals) in Korea. But, how do digital technologies reconfigure guanxi, wa, and inhwa? What new socialities and modes of belonging emerge in East Asia in the digital era? How do digital technologies make new connections among people living in different regions of East Asia and connect East Asia to the other places in the world? How do these reshaped and newly shaped relationships impact social fields and political domains in East Asia? Drawing ethnographic materials from their respective research, the contributors show how cyber forums, video archives, internet celebrities, and mobile devices, etc. invent new avenues for social interactions and community-building. These virtual and actual connections re-channel collective desires and political aspirations in East Asia, refashion people’s imaginations of East Asia’s position in the world, and reshuffle the power relations between East Asian countries. Capturing the moment of “digital connecting” attends to the transformative power of digital technologies and grounds the social effects of digitalization in a local context.

Situating digitalization is critical. It is a critical method for digital anthropologists to scrutinize the mutual transformation between digital technologies and human societies. It is also a critical standpoint from which digital anthropologists can have meaningful dialogues and develop comparative frameworks. Finally, it is a critical tool for anthropologists to engage with the public and participate in conversations on digital development. Currently, market researchers, government consultants and journalists tend to dominate these conversations. However, anthropologists could use empirical data to redirect these conversations and begin to dismantle the linear development model underlying the mainstream discourse. It is with this goal in mind that we start the series.

Editor’s note: We will publish 10 articles from June to October, two articles per month.

Yi Zhou is a contributing editor for the Society for East Asian Anthropology’s column. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Anthropology Department of the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on digital media, affective labor, and governmentality in China.

Digital Outsourcing and Japanese Call Center Workers in Dalian, China

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Society for East Asian Anthropology

Kumiko Kawashima

May 16, 2017

Editors’ note: This is the fifth piece of the series “In and Out of Japan.”

 

The Dalian Software Park, which opened in 1999 as the city’s first IT park. Kumiko Kawashima

In 2003, the first Japanese-staffed call center opened in Dalian, a north-eastern city of six million people dubbed China’s “Green Silicon Valley.” Thousands of Japanese workers have served consumers across Sino-Japanese borders, alongside their bilingual Chinese colleagues. They are recruited in Japan and sent to Dalian’s IT parks in one of the country’s oldest and largest high-tech zones. Due to their status as employees of local subsidiaries, they are paid in the local currency at, or even below, the Japanese minimum wage level. But their experience complicates the image of offshore call center workers as “cyber coolies” in the “new colonialism” of digital outsourcing.

Commuters hurry to their offices in the Dalian Software Park, the city’s oldest and largest IT park. Mirrorka

The offshoring of Japanese workers to Dalian has evolved into an innovative response to raising cost pressures in deflationary Japan. The Japanese “local hires” are tasked with setting up a new call center, training the local workforce, and liaising with headquarters and subsidiaries elsewhere—all of which were previously the responsibility of expensive yen-earning expatriates on rotational transfers. As the workers gain knowledge and experience, they can be sent back to Japan on short-term “overseas” assignments.

For the workers themselves, the jobs in Dalian provide a chance to work abroad without special qualifications or foreign language proficiency. Underlying the decision to go to Dalian, a city they’d barely heard of, was their deep dissatisfaction with the tightening labor market conditions under long-term recession. One 35-year-old male worker who quit his property sales job to work in China said, “Back then, 95 percent of my life was work, and I wanted more time for myself.” He and other Japanese workers I spoke with during my fieldwork enjoy a higher economic and social status in Dalian than the average local worker.

Japanese call center workers enjoy beer and lamb skewers on a weekend. Sébastien Le Corre

They are particularly proud of their employment at large multinational companies, many of which are on Fortune’s Global 500 list. The Japanese migrant community is well catered to by the strong presence of bilingual Chinese service providers, a legacy of the city’s history as a major commercial powerhouse under imperial Japan’s colonial rule. For the call center workers, Dalian is a refuge from the confines of the Japanese workplaces where hard work reaps neither adequate material nor psychological rewards.

In the globalizing digital economy, things change rapidly, and Dalian’s success in digital outsourcing might be causing its own demise. The rising wage levels of the local workforce are causing foreign investors to look elsewhere, including South East Asia and notably, Japan. The Chinese government is also introducing measures to curb the entry of skilled migrants to provide jobs for its own growing middle classes. Such changes are heightening the sense among the Japanese that their relative privilege in Dalian is fundamentally unstable. Some return to Japan, others try their luck in emerging outsourcing hubs such as the Philippines, yet others stay put for the moment. Their experiences provide us snapshots of the tug of war between global capital and digital labor, and its impact on mobility in and out of Japan.

Kumiko Kawashima is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Macquarie University. Her research interests include labour and consumption in post-industrial society, identity, and social change. Her recent publications include “Service Outsourcing and Labour Mobility in a Digital Age: Transnational Linkages between Japan and Dalian, China,” Global Networks.

Please send news items, contributions and comments to SEAA contributing editors Heidi K. Lam ([email protected]) or Yi Zhou ([email protected]).

Empire of Sound

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Guangtian Ha

A foundational moment in the historiographical study of Islam in China was marked by a light scorn. “You cannot alter the text at will and still claim it is from the original,” the prominent historian Chen Yuan thus expressed his frustration with Hui Muslim scholars in 1928. “Each generation had its own way of transcription. You can easily tell the historical period of a certain record by looking at such transcriptions as 摩訶末 and 謨罕募德.” Chen was exasperated. For both 摩訶末 (mó hē mò) and 謨罕募德 (mò hăn mù dé) are Chinese transcriptions of the name of Prophet Muhammad, and both were rooted in specific historical periods. The variations between different transcriptions are invariably the consequences of linguistic transformation not of just one language, but of innumerable languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Mongol, Tibetan, and other dialects and languages that may or may not have survived to the present time. Whether Muhammad is transcribed as 摩訶末 or 謨罕募德 relies on the specific trajectories of sounds as they migrated between languages, and across speech and script since at least the twelfth century when the Mongol Empire began to conquer vast territories in Eurasia. An Arabic-speaker of a certain dialect might have pronounced Muhammad in a particular manner, giving it a distinct sound which would later be heard by a Persian-speaker who used the Arabic script to transcribe the sound. This written word might then be vocalized by a Uyghur literati, heard by a speaker of Middle Chinese, and transcribed by the latter using the Chinese script into摩訶末, to eventually romanized by me, an anthropologist living in the twenty-first century, into mó hē mò, using the Pinyin system which was inextricably the product of modern Chinese nation-building.

The circulation of sound shows the reconfiguration of power: empires rise and fall; different languages acquire dominance due to the political favor they incidentally receive. Nation-states, those who gather themselves in the ashes of the Mongol Empire, the Chinese Empire, and the Ottoman Empire—to mention only those most pertinent here—intervene in sound as much as in text to build their hegemony. Nationalism occurs at the middle level—it strives to dissolve both what transcends it (the universal sacred language) and what subtends it (the particular local dialects/languages). Imagined communities in the form of the modern nation are based as much in homogenized sound as they are in print capitalism. Chen Yuan’s exasperation is symptomatic of a particular historic moment: the general language reform advocated by the politically-minded Chinese intellectuals also triggered a concomitant reform among the Sino-phone Hui Muslims, many of them enthusiastic amateur historians of Islam in China. They either consciously or unconsciously standardized key Islamic terms in their quotations of historical records. Increasingly they used 穆罕默德 (mù hăn mò dé) for all different transcriptions of Muhammad, thus erasing traces of historico-linguistic shifts, as though it had been 穆罕默德 all along. Transcription, presumably the ad hoc relationship between heterogeneous sounds and diverse scripts, is replaced by transliteration, arguably the flattened relationship between texts. Sounds are lost; history is silenced.

A Trans-Pacific Family Recitation. The eldest son, in California, skyped in, holding his son in his arms. Guangtian Ha

Above is part of the research I have been conducting for the past three years at SOAS, University of London. As a component of the larger project titled “Sounding Islam in China,” my work is a historical, linguistic, and ethnographic examination of the vocal rituals among the Jahriyya Sufis in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in northwest China. I am interested in the evolution of “unorthodox” Islamic sounds—those articulations and pronunciations that are frowned upon, marginalized, and criticized, yet on second thought, might in fact have been the dominant sensory mode for Islam’s continual hold among ordinary Muslims, most of them presumably illiterate for much of history. The hegemonic rules of pronunciation and the elevated register of classical Arabic are in themselves contingent political formations. “Unorthodox” sounds may have been the norm rather than the exception among many Muslims around the world. When a Qur’anic reciter from Saudi Arabia feels offended and enraged when he cannot recognize the sound of Jahriyya recitation as that of the holy book, and finds this recitation an outrageous degradation of the orthodox sound, he is perhaps closer to ideology than he is to history. The presumed unity of the global Muslim community supposedly united by the shared commitment to the teaching of Islam, begins to fracture when we move our eyes away from text—whose integrity is carefully guarded by elites—and focus on sound.

Reciting the Qur’an in the graveyard, as the tomb closed behind the deceased. Guangtian Ha

These “unorthodox” sounds are not merely remnants from defunct histories. They continue to live among the Jahriyya Sufis in northwest China; they weave socio-musical relations on a daily basis in the prayer hall, and regularly interpellate listening subjects during aurally impressive collective rituals of recitation; they also compete with and contest more recently mediatized “orthodox” sounds of Islam from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Indonesia, which enter the Jahriyya world by means of social media. Acoustic legacies of medieval empires, still vibrant in their ritual incarnations, vie with forces of new empires of sound. At the site of the intimate senses lies the battlefield for global religious ideologies and a constant re-making of one’s relationship to (one’s own) history. From local phonetics to globalized media, sound provides us with a special and especially interesting entry point to examine questions of varying scales that pertain to contemporary Muslim societies. A group of Jahriyya Sufis in rural Ningxia in northwest China, therefore, leads us to examine the clash and collusion of empires from history to the present. As such, an ethnography of them, which I am now finalizing (Sung by the Praise: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in Northwest China), may also offer a possibility to reconsider the promises and limits of the traditional text-centered approach, which continues to find its resonance in the treatment of Islam as a discursive tradition in some contemporary anthropological works on Islam.

Guangtian Ha is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Music at SOAS, University of London. He has conducted extensive fieldwork among the Jahriyya Sufis in northwest China and is now finalizing a book manuscript based in this research on religious chanting. He received his PhD in cultural anthropology from Columbia University in 2014.

Cite as: Ha, Guangtian. 2017. “Empire of Sound.” Anthropology News website, April 24, 2017. doi: 10.1111/AN.411

 

English Teaching in, out, and through Japan

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Raluca Nagy
Editors’ note: This is the fourth piece of the series “In and Out of Japan.”

Film director Takeshi Kitano advertising the ECC Foreign Language Institute, one of the largest language schools in Japan. Eric F.

Various life courses emerge from teaching English in Japan: short-term and long-term stays, transformation into other professions or increasing precarity among a cohort of mostly uncontracted freelance workers. In this piece, I highlight those who move in and (then) out of Japan, taking our curated series from a focus on people coming to Japan to people who choose to leave.

Tyrone, an Australian now in his late 30s, worked as a school teacher back home before deciding to venture abroad. After a three-month challenging experience in India in autumn 2005, he joined a friend working at Nova, one of the biggest suppliers of ALTs (assistant language teachers) in Japan, and taught English for two years in a small town in Mie Prefecture. Life was, in his own words, “the good old times when a salaryman would see you in the train and come and ask you to teach him English for 5000 yen an hour.”

In 2007, Nova went notoriously bankrupt. Tyrone made do with hectic freelance work and eventually found a stable teaching position in Tokyo. When I met him, in the autumn of 2012, he was at the start of his fourth year with the school but had decided it would be his last. He was tired of a general deterioration of the ALT situation, a recurrent complaint during my research.

Tyrone also experienced an “exodus” of peers after 3/11 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and felt isolated. Even though he loved Japan and had started to feel at home, he was not as immersed as he thought he should be, despite his now proficient in Japanese and membership of a local union. Governmental improvements in July 2012 concerning the residency system failed to cure his general discontent. Tyrone started applying for jobs in Korea and Taiwan, where at the time the English teaching industry seemed more dynamic. By December 2013 he had found his “most stable contract so far” in Taiwan, where he still currently lives and works.

As Tyrone’s story illustrates, teaching English in Japan flourished up until the best part of the 2000s; but constant economic decline, panics spurred by tragedies such as 3/11, and competition from markets in neighboring countries have made English teaching a precarious form of employment. With less incentive for native speakers coming from well-off countries (US, UK, Australia, Canada), in recent years this industry has attracted different labor pools, such as well-educated young people from the Philippines, either based in Japan or teaching by correspondence.

In August 2016 MEXT (The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) promised to bring JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) numbers back to their 2002 peak levels. These promises are coupled with other measures to increase English proficiency by the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. How such incentives will affect a volatile industry remains to be seen. As it stands, the precaritization of English teaching in Japan challenges the assumed trajectories and power differentials of mobilities East-West and North-South.

Raluca Nagy is research associate at the University of Sussex and the Free University of Brussels. Her overarching interests are healthcare and mobility. It is from this perspective that she has been following the livelihoods of English teachers in Tokyo.

Please send news items, contributions and comments to SEAA contributing editors Heidi K. Lam ([email protected]) or Yi Zhou ([email protected]).

Bakugai! Explosive Shopping and Entangled Sino-Japanese Mobilities

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By Martina Bofulin and Jamie Coates

Editors’ note: This is the third piece of the series “In and Out of Japan.”

This poster parodies revolutionary slogans to promote Daigou. It says: “Intermediary shopping for the masses! Add a brick to the building of socialism, struggle until the end for the great pot of socialism.” Jamie Coates

Chinese mobile subjects and their practices occupy an ambivalent role in contemporary Japanese society. They are the saviors of Japan’s sluggish economy but seen as the instigators of social problems: mass tourism, intensive shopping and crime. Chinese “newcomer” migrants are the largest minority in Japan (since 2006), and as tourists are the most numerous visitors (4.2 million in 2015). The complex intertwining of these various types of mobilities—human, material, financial—between China and Japan increasingly point to the emergence of a transnational field that blurs the distinction between migration, tourism, and trade. This trend is exemplified in the recent phenomena of “explosive buying” (bakugai/baomai) and “shopping through intermediaries” (daigou).

The neologism bakugai emerged in the Japanese media as a response to reports of intensive shopping by Chinese tourists. It has since filtered into Chinese as baomai and spurred the employment of native Chinese speakers in all large department and drug stores throughout Japan. Chinese consumers spent roughly 12.2 billion USD, or around 41 % of all international tourism consumption, in Japan in 2015 (JTA). The most desirable items were cosmetics and health products (baby formula, skin whitening products), followed by electronics (washlet toilets, rice cookers), and high-end designer brands. Many of these products are not bought for personal consumption, but as gifts or personal favors.

The popularity of bakugai/baomai has given rise to Japanese media reports about unruly Chinese tourists and their excessive shopping habits, fueling the ongoing global image of the “ugly Chinese tourist.” Representations range from concerns about over-crowding to worries there will be no stock left for domestic customers (e.g., a particular concern in relation to milk formula). Tourist behavior has also caught the attention of the Japanese media, such as in September 2015 when a pair of Chinese honeymooners assaulted a convenience store worker in Hokkaido.

Migrants living in Japan with excellent knowledge of Japanese products and brands have increasingly acted as informal tour guides for bakugai, as well as buying items as “intermediate shoppers” through networks on social media and then shipping them to customers (daigou). Ling, for example, a Chinese student at one of Japan’s prestigious universities, is always running around department stores, comparing prices, taking product photos and uploading them onto her Wechat account. Ling knew that her success depended on the authenticity she derives from studying in Japan—her contacts trust that she has access to original products and is familiar with new Japanese trends.

Despite the presence of strong anti-Japanese sentiments in China, products from Japan are in high demand, and Japan is still seen as a desirable and modern location. Cross-border trade relies heavily on favorable currency and taxation rates, the price politics of international brands, consumer trust in foreign goods, and media images. These everyday mobilities generate new cultural forms, such as bakugai and daigou, and discursive trends, such as media panics, suggesting new levels of connectivity, simultaneity, and volatility in the Sino-Japanese context.

Martina Bofulin has been interested in different types of mobilities from PRC through the lens of family life and everyday practices and has done extensive fieldwork in southeast Europe and Japan. She is currently a researcher at Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Jamie Coates works on Sino-Japanese mobilities and their effect on young Chinese identities. In particular he is interested in the role migration and media play in young Chinese efforts to re-imagine co-ethnic and regional ideas of commonality. He is currently a visiting fellow at Sophia University.

Please send news items, contributions and comments to SEAA contributing editors Heidi K. Lam ([email protected]) or Yi Zhou ([email protected]).

‘Purification From the Start’ – Recycling in the Buddhist Organization Tzuchi, Taiwan

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Olivia YA Dung

On an August evening in the 1990s, Chengyen—a Buddhist nun who founded the Buddhist lay organization Tzuchi in 1966—was disturbed by the overwhelming amount of garbage in a night market on her way to give a speech. During this period, after the lift of martial law in Taiwan, Tzuchi was expanding rapidly and had become the largest and most prominent Taiwanese NGO with more than ten million members and ninety thousand certified commissioners worldwide. Also at this time, Taiwan was facing a lack of landfill space and incineration capacity for waste disposal.

Later on that evening, in response to the audience’s enthusiastic applause for her speech, Chengyen called for a movement to obliterate garbage. The speech, later referred to as “using applauding hands to recycle,” is remembered today as the legendary beginning of Tzuchi’s involvement with recycling. That night, a twenty-four-year-old woman from the audience took Chengyen’s words to heart and initiated waste paper collecting in her neighbourhood. The news quickly spread among Tzuchi’s practitioners—the certified commissioners. Gradually, the size and scale of the Tzuchi recycling community grew as the organization carried out Chengyen’s wish, and as her followers worked towards “reserving pure land in the human world,” to promote green consciousness and recycling.

Volunteers separate caps from waste PET bottles in one Tzuchi recycling station. Olivia Dung 2014.

Twenty-six years later, today Tzuchi’s national recycling programme is comprised of 86,594 volunteers, 8,626 community recycling bases, 900 trucks, 316 large environmental education stations, and a network of cadres and administrators across the nation. Miscellaneous recyclables—ranging from plastic bags to household appliances—are systematically collected from markets, shops, residential communities, and businesses by the members. In the recycling stations, volunteers and commissioners squat on low stools, spending mornings and afternoons dismantling and classifying valuable discards: separating copper out of motors, removing small screws from old VCR tapes, cutting out blank white paper from the parts tainted with ink.

“The more meticulously you separate, the better price you get,” one Tzuchi recycling cadre responded to my stunning facial expression when I first saw Tzuchi’s intricate system of classifying plastic packaging materials into eleven categories. “We don’t do this [recycling] for profit, but rather for the earth. It’s like what the Dharma said, if the earth is not at peace, there will be no peace in human minds.”

Plastic bag classification: the referencing sample board can be found in numerous recycling stations across the country (© Olivia Dung 2016)

“Why come to Tzuchi recycling?” I asked Ying, a 68-year-old female volunteer with whom I spent three months separating plastic bags together. It was 11:20 am. Ying and I had just finished sorting four bags of cloth packaging, and drying three bags of disposable raincoats. Ying is a former construction worker. One day after her retirement, she walked into one Tzuchi abode and asked about volunteering. “I couldn’t just sit at home and stare at the television. It drives me crazy. Here is good. You work, you talk, and then the day passes by.” “But don’t you sometimes find this work dirty or boring?” I continued to ask. “Not at all. The more I do, the happier I get,” Ying replied without lifting her eyes from wrapping up the bags. “Why?” “[silence] it’s…it’s… it’s doing huanbao. To make the earth cleaner, isn’t it better? Yeah. And once you’re busy, you become devoted.”

In Tzuchi, “doing huanbao” (做環保) is almost synonymous with “recycling.” The meaning of “huanbao”, an abbreviated term for “environmental protection”, is however multilayered and contextualized religiously in Tzuchi recycling. The organization applies certain tenets of Buddhist thought in their understanding of global environmentalism, addressing the “underlying” spirituality in everyday practices of recycling.

“Like the cycle of four seasons—spring, summer, autumn, and winter—there is a cycle of all matter and beings; these are the eons of formation, existence, decay and dissolution (成住壞空). […] Recycling is to reuse and resurrect disposed materials, to let spirits of materials come back to life for their own purposes. It is a material reincarnation.”

This quote from Chengyen in her book Purification From the Start (2010) illustrates a Buddhist imaginary of recycling as transforming artificial matter into natural beings by inserting a “natural” law in the process—reincarnation. In so doing, the mundane physical tasks of material collection are made into a series of religious practices. And, dealing with endless waste materials has become a sort of religious awakening. In the process of working hard and engaging with waste, one’s mind is liberated from secular materialism and utilitarianism. It molds mind and disposition into a state which dismisses attachments to worldliness.

Tzuchi handout flyer: “ten mnemonic chants for environmental protection” (慈濟環保十口訣) (source: Tzuchi handout flyer)

This way of perceiving recycling resonates with how Tzuchi understands the relation between mankind and nature. For Tzuchi, environmental issues, from global warming to waste problems, are the “symptoms” of a physical reality of Sida Budiao (四大不調)—The Disharmony of the Great Four. Sida Budiao, however, is not a literal description of the four elements: earth, water, fire, and wind. Rather, it depicts an abstract, abnormal, and “unhealthy” status of an organic being—be it humans, the earth, or the universe as a whole — when the regularity is disrupted.

Instead of seeing the causes of the disharmony of the earth (or, “environmental crisis” in other words) merely as a structural malfunction of today’s economic and political system, Tzuchi employs another Buddhist concept of the Kleshas (人心五毒), the Five Afflictions of the Human Mind, as the driving force towards the disharmony of our planet: because we are lazy; we drive instead of walk; we are greedy; and we consume and produce more than we need.

In Tzuchi’s environmental discourse, the relation between humans and environment is therefore not dichotomously divided, as seen in anthropocentric styles of environmentalism which assume that humans need to protect nature from culture. The physical task of recycling, for Tzuchi, is a method to purify the polluted minds which eventually lead to a polluted world. This perspective on how humans and nature are one inseparable organic being attracts a specific group of people—mostly the elderly—to join the army of Tzuchi recycling volunteers.

On the other hand, from volunteers such as Ying’s perspective, the mindless and repetitive tasks of assessing, sorting, and dismantling provide a sort of therapeutic function, which is not altogether different from the concept of occupational therapy. The social goals of environmental protection in Tzuchi recycling are therefore deeply intertwined with individuals seeking salvation. In other words, the process of remaking waste in Tzuchi becomes a means for practitioners to remake themselves.

 

Olivia YA Dung is a Ph.D. candidate in Area Studies at Leiden University. Her dissertation fieldwork examines the practices and discourses of recycling among various stakeholders participating in the national recycling system in Taiwan.

 

Report for the SEAA Student Activities

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Tianyu Xie

Jing Wang

Since 2005, Society of East Asian Anthropology (SEAA) has started Graduate Student Mentoring Workshop during the American Anthropology Association annual meetings. Over a decade, the spirit of the workshop has been to provide graduate students with opportunities to communicate with junior and senior scholars in the area of East Asian Anthropology and get better prepared for their professionalization in the field. In recent years, the workshop has been formatted in small-group discussions where students will be able to talk with all mentors.

This year, we continued this tradition and held a lunchtime workshop “Anthropology with an Attitude” in the aftermath of the 2016 American Presidential election. We asked: what is the relationship between politics and anthropology? To what extent has the intellectual substance of anthropology – its methods and techniques, its concepts and theories – been affected by the complex relations of power as we study in the world now?

Five to six participants are paired with a mentor/professor at each table in the restaurant of Ling & Louie’s Asian Bar & Grill in Minneapolis. Photo courtesy Jing Wang

More concretely, we focused on practical issues such as fieldwork and ethnographic writing as ways of engaging with the world. Prof. Lisa Rofel (University of California, Santa Cruz), Prof. Eleana Kim (University of California in Irvine), Prof. Akihiro Ogawa (The University of Melbourne) and Dr. Jessica Lockrem (St. Edwards University) accepted our invitation and became our mentors. We had twenty-five participants from a diverse range of institutions both in the US and from abroad. Participants included Ph.D. students, Post-doctoral fellows and junior scholars from different anthropology programs.

Both mentors and participants engaged in discussions during the workshop.  Questions such as “what we can do in a Trump world” and “is it possible to be an anthropologist and an activist at the same time” were raised by participants. Prof. Rofel suggested that, rather than to think big, we start with “thinking small.” In terms of balancing professional life and other intellectual interests, Prof. Kim used her experience as an illustration of a two-way approach for students who were interested in dealing with different types of audience.

Participants and mentors/professors of the SEAA lunchtime workshop take a group photo in the Ling & Louie’s Asian Bar & Grill. Photo courtesy Jing Wang

Besides the lunchtime workshop, SEAA also organized an informal dinner for graduate students this year. As students for a more consolidated and cohesive intellectual community, we planned to enhance and strengthen SEAA students’ bonding experience by having an informal gathering outside the conference venue. The cozy and relaxing environment provided a space for people to know other kindred spirits, develop networks and deepen relationships from the very early stage of one’s professional career.

After the workshop and informal dinner, we have received positive feedbacks as well as constructive suggestions for holding similar events in the future. One of the participants Wei Ye, a graduate student in the University of Minnesota, expressed his interest in seeing if “there is any kind of SEAA directory that may help folks build their connections later after the AAA events.”

For the workshop, Hua Yu, Assistant Professor Shanghai International Studies University, commented,

The format of the workshop is an innovative way of encouraging the attendants to talk about and reflect on their own research to different students and teachers. The advisers are very helpful in terms of challenging the postgraduates’ research and sharing their own academic experience. I especially like the part of rotating the table and talk to different people about the one research.

Her suggestion of having “a piece of paper containing everyone’s research interest and field” rather than a question list will help us prepare future workshop in a more effective and efficient way.

As for the informal dinner, Silke Werth, Postdoctoral Visiting Scholar in the East Asia Center of University of California at Santa Barbara, responded,

I particularly liked the informal nature of the workshop as it helped us all to talk frankly and discuss questions related to the suggested topic openly but also left room to take the conversation elsewhere…Having this lunch and dinner early in the conference helped to make the AAA feel overall more successful and helped set the mood for the next days.

He suggested that the restaurant for dinner could have been a quieter location “since it was very hard to hold a conversation with anyone but direct neighbors because the restaurant was very loud.” This will also be taken into consideration when we organize informal gatherings next time.

For the benefits of students, SEAA will carry on both events – mentoring workshop and informal graduate student dinner – at future AAA meetings. We will keep feedbacks and suggestions in mind and always work hard to facilitate the growth and development of students and junior scholars.

 

Tianyu Xie is a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at Stanford University. Research Interest: Gender, Kinship, Transnational Venture Capitalism. Research Area: San Francisco Bay Area, Beijing. SEAA Student Councilor.

Jing Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Anthropology Department at Rice University. Her interests include global histories of Silk Road, anthropology of state, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. SEAA Student Councilor.

Japan’s Diminishing Korean Minority

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Markus Bell

Editors’s note: This is the second piece of the series “In and Out of Japan.” 

The gate to Koreatown. Tsuruhashi, Osaka. Photo Courtesy Markus Bell

From the end of the war until 2007, Koreans represented Japan’s largest ethnic minority group. There are currently around half a million individuals in Japan who identify as Korean. This is only surpassed by the number of Chinese.

The number of Koreans in Japan, however, has been shrinking over the last 20 years.Turbulent international relations have played a part in the diminishing number of Koreans arriving in Japan and the number of Zainichi Koreans (ethnic Koreans in Japan) identifying as Korean. During the administration of Park Geun-hye, relations between South Korea and Japan reached a low not seen in many years. This is due to the deepening “comfort woman issue,” the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute, South Korean fears of a remilitarised Japan, and the effect of the 2011 “Triple disaster” in eroding trust between the two neighbors.

North Korea also factors into issues of identity and belonging for Koreans in Japan. Following ten years of nuclear tests and sporadic missile launches, North Korea, from a Japanese perspective, is considered a significant threat. The catalyst for the low point in North Korea–Japan relations was Kim Jong-il’s admission that North Korea had been kidnapping Japanese citizens. Reflecting the broader Japanese public opinion, during an interview with a Japanese policymaker in Tokyo he told me that North Korea had sent spies to Japan via the Zainichi community. All the bouncy K-pop in Seoul does not compensate for North Korean military posturing and state abduction projects. The specter of North Korea contributes to the rise in anti-Korean sentiment in Japan.

The author participates in a Zainichi Korean family ancestor worship ceremony. Tsuruhashi, Osaka home. Photo courtesy Markus Bell

While these issues have a hand in how Zainichi Koreans identify, several further points are central to the diminishing number of individuals in Japan identifying as Korean. First, since the 1990s, reflecting a tendency for Zainichi Koreans to see ethnicity as separate from nationality, it has become more common for Zainichi Koreans to naturalize as Japanese. Furthermore, the number of Zainichi Koreans opting for South Korean citizenship also steadily grew from this time, reflecting the convenience that comes with traveling on a South Korean passport. Only a few hard-core individuals still cling to their North Korean Chōsenidentity cards. I met several of these individuals; they “love” North Korea but balk at the prospect of living there.

Second, the number of Zainichi Koreans marrying Japanese continues to rise. These unions are not political expressions, many fourth or fifth generation Koreans feel more in common with Japanese than either of the two Koreas.

We are entering a new phase in terms of what it means to be “Zainichi Korean.” This shift is symptomatic of temporal, geographical, political, and cultural distance growing between Koreans resident in Japan and each of the two Koreas. Koreans will not disappear from Japan, rather we may see the emergence of a truly transnational community, in which members exercise a flexibility in regard to where they identify. Today, a “third way“ in Zainichi Korean identity politics, seems more likely than ever.

Markus Bell is a lecturer at the University of Sheffield’s School of East Asian Studies. His research expertise is in the areas of migration, kinship, memory, and transnational social networks. He currently teaches a course on North Korean history and society, and migration and Northeast Asia. Follow him @mpsbell.

Please send news items, contributions and comments to SEAA Contributing Editors Heidi K. Lam ([email protected]) or Yi Zhou ([email protected]).

Gratuitous Ancestor Worship—of (and for) Robert J. Smith

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Donald C. Wood

The village of Wakimoto today. In the 1930s, Yoshida’s farm and homestead were located on high ground at upper left. “There’s nobody around,” as Tokyoite visitors always say. Photo courtesy D.C. Wood

I first met Bob in the hamlet of Kurusu in the early 1990s, but he didn’t meet me until two decades later, in the village of Ogata. We did not actually “meet” in either place; I first read his classic study of that community then, and some 20 years later he read my 2012 book (Ogata-Mura: Sowing Dissent and Reclaiming Identity in a Japanese Farming Village). The review of it that he kindly wrote marked the end of his academic publishing career, but the beginning of our friendship. I remain deeply honored by—and grateful for—both.

Bob’s work on regional Japan was grounded in the early postwar tradition, founded on the seminal work of John Embree, in which detailed investigation into all relevant social issues—and the meticulous tracing of change over time—featured prominently. His 1978 book, Kurusu: The Price of Progress in a Japanese Village, 1951-1975, was one of the stars of the canon on which I cut my teeth 25 years ago. I deliberately emulated Bob and the others of his generation when I did the research and writing for Ogata-Mura. The anthropological study of regional Japan, needless to say, has changed much since the time when Bob was one of its active leaders. But in the first chapter of Kurusu, he alluded to two of the most central topics in the current endeavor—depopulation and aging—and another that I believe will soon rise to that level: poverty.

Bob remained deeply engaged with Japan and with its anthropological study beyond his retirement; he is both a historical and a modern ancestor. And these two adjectives well characterize the nature of our brief friendship, which began in January 2014 with my initial email of thanks to him for the book review, and ended with his passing in October 2016. Our correspondence went across our shared countries—the United States and Japan—and through time. I addressed his questions about current politics in Japan, as we disparaged the country’s ruling administration, and he commented on the unfolding situation in the States, as we discussed the political ascent of “that rich guy who keeps on using my name.”

But Bob’s historical tales captivated me the most. He took me to 1946 Osaka, to a chance encounter with Japan’s emperor at Hayama, and to a conference at which “Meyer Fortes leaned across the table and said, ‘Smith, history is a red herring.’” Ichthyological nomenclature notwithstanding, Bob and I shared an interest in historical research, and I benefitted from his comments on my current investigations into the life and works of a farmer/ethnographer named Saburo Yoshida, who was writing about his home village of Wakimoto in Akita Prefecture in 1935-36, exactly when Embree was conducting fieldwork in the village of Suye in Kumamoto.

“I remember being impressed by the sense of continuity from long ago past” (in Japan) wrote Bob. I remember the same about Bob…and a lot more.

Donald C. Wood is an associate professor at Akita University (Akita, Japan) where he has worked since completing a doctoral degree at the University of Tokyo in 2004. He is editor of Research in Economic Anthropology and a member of the editorial board of the Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology.

Please send news items, contributions and comments to SEAA contributing editors Heidi K. Lam ([email protected]) or Yi Zhou ([email protected]).