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Disasters Digitized: Participatory Archiving and Collaborative Commemoration

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Ryo Morimoto

Although much has been said about the triple disaster—earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdowns—in Japan in March 2011 (hereafter, 3.11), the upsurge of digital records and efforts to archive them in and outside of Japan after these events have been less discussed. These archives are populated not only with born-digital artifacts (e.g., photographs, audio files, video footages, websites and blogs) but also digitalized artifacts (e.g., bureaucratic documents, pamphlets circulated in temporary shelters, 3D renditions of tsunami-damaged buildings). As of June 2017, more than six years after 3.11, there are over 60 digital archive projects, hosted by the local and national governments, private and non-profit sectors, and academic institutions, all with the goal to preserve and transmit digital(ized) traces of the past. Disaster digital archives are both a collaborative space where survivors are delegating “the responsibility of remembering” (Nora 1989:13) and a touch-point where the meaning of reconstruction (fukkō) are performed and negotiated.

In Japan, disaster archives are conceived not merely as a tool for information storage, retrieval and transmission. They also have come to play a key role in disaster reconstruction. In June 2011, the Reconstruction Design Council in Response to the Great East Japan Earthquake released a document entitled “Toward Reconstruction: ‘Hope beyond the Disaster’” which lays out 7 principles of disaster reconstruction design. According to the first principle, the foundation of reconstruction rests on survivors’ ability to mourn and commemorate the dead. Therefore, reconstruction efforts should be geared toward preserving records of the disaster so that they may be analyzed scientifically and the lessons learned from them can be transmitted across generations and throughout the world. However, this document does not specify what is worth preserving, how these materials should be preserved, and what constitutes reconstruction/fukkō from the disasters. These stipulations come to be worked out and materialized through the process of assembling an archive. The act of archiving, as Derrida reminds us, “produces as much as it records the event” (1995: 17).

If the content of an archive matters deeply, then so does its medium. Social media platforms like Twitter have transformed the way disasters are experienced locally and globally (see Johnson 2014; Yoshitsugu 2011) with implications for efforts to archive and memorialize disasters online. Emerging digital technologies enable the seamless recording and instantaneous sharing of an event as it unfolds, transforming each user into a curator and achiever of the everyday (Giannach 2016). Although the digital documentation of disasters might seem as straightforward as snapping a photo on your smartphone, digital records are difficult to preserve, in part because so many of them are produced, and in part because rapid technological change leads to shifting standards of usability and technical formats (Flecker 2003). The vastness, transiency, and instability of digital material require deliberate preservation efforts and continuous investment in human and technological resources.  

Moreover, while digital disaster archives can ensure more immediate and broader circulation of information than traditional archives, the openness digital technologies affords has posed limitations on what can be preserved in the present. In the case of Japan, most disaster archive projects shy away from sharing images that include people’s faces, since making these images public risks violating Japanese right of likeness and privacy laws. In order to share these images, archivists must either painstakingly pixel out individual faces, or obtain formal consent from each person appearing in the image.

As I have discussed elsewhere (Morimoto 2014), making disaster archives digital often, ironically and despite the best intentions, involves removing traces of subjectivity and therefore risks the potential forgetting of the individuals involved. For example, the project lead of the Michinoku Shinrokuden archive at International Research Institute of Disaster Science at Tohoku University insists that disaster archives should try to preserve “correct” information about the past events. Although a survivor’s narrative of escaping from the tsunami by a car is certainly a harrowing and memorable story, it might not offer an empirically informed lesson to future, potential victims. During 3.11, huge masses of people attempted to evacuate by car, leading to a traffic gridlock that ultimately increased the number of disaster-related deaths. When archivists historicize the past with the particular goal of reconstruction (“building back better”) in mind, the tendency is sometimes to commemorate the disasters themselves, rather than the lives they touched or destroyed.

The Japan Disasters Digital Archive (JDA) project at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University approaches the commemoration of past disasters differently (Figure 1).

Fig 1. The Japan Disasters Digital Archive Homepage (JDA Introduction Video). Ryo Morimoto

Unlike other projects, JDA does not preserve most of its materials. Instead, it hosts links to digital materials shared by over 15 partner projects in Japan and the U.S., thereby acting as a digital networking portal. Moreover, with its personal collection-building feature, JDA is designed to foster a collaborative virtual environment. When users access the archive, they are exposed to an ever-expanding group of fellow archivists: from affiliates of archive projects who share links to their archived materials, to the ordinary user who submits a personal testimonial or blog she discovered online along with her personal photographs of the disasters, to the historian who creates a public collection within the archive in order to understand the interaction between public and private actors in disaster relief efforts. In this way, JDA preserves traces of user participation and interaction, while creating records of the user-oriented reconstruction of past events, and of the collaborative construction of cultural memories in the present.

JDA has been developed with an eye toward pedagogical use. Classroom activities involving JDA at Harvard University, Emory University and Tohoku University illustrate the possibilities of participatory disaster archiving. Students have used JDA in public presentations geared toward teaching the wider public, in Japan and abroad, about the global significance of 3.11 (Figure.2).

Fig 2. Tohoku University students visiting Harvard in September 2015 and giving a presentation about 3.11, intended for the wider Cambridge Japanese Studies and Digital Humanities community. Ryo Morimoto

In this manner, digital archives can lead to off-line, cross-cultural communication and commemoration. U.S.-Japan collaborations around digital disaster archival projects like JDA invites us to consider how novel tools and technologies might challenge the relationship between national identity and collective memory, and the divide between east and west.

 

Ryo Morimoto is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, where he also serves as the manager of Japan Disasters Digital Archive. His research examines shifting local perceptions of radiation exposure in post-nuclear accident Fukushima, and the cultural history of representation surrounding radiation, radioactive materials and nuclear energy. 

Devaluing Human Labor

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Shuang Frost

The rise in economic inequality associated with technological displacement is one of the defining issues of our time. Last year the White House reported that recent advances in AI will result in the obsolescence of millions of low and medium-skill jobs and the depression of wages for ordinary workers. This prediction echoes an emerging consensus in social scientific literature: that the trend of widening inequality will only accelerate as more firms move to achieve cost advantages by replacing labor with capital. To glimpse a future of dire technological inequality, one need look no further than the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the wealthiest regions of America with the highest rates of eviction and homelessness. As Russel Hancock, president of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, recently explained in an interview with MIT Technology Review, “When we used to have booms in the tech sector, it would lift all boats. That not how it works anymore.”

So what is driving this hollowing out of jobs at the bottom and middle of society? Is it simply the case that increasingly intelligent and efficient machines are outmoding their human counterparts in all but a narrow set of economic activities? Certainly this is not the whole story. The tech industry’s reshaping of society has been driven not only by technological factors, but also deeply social ones. In the past two decades, tech firms have engaged in a dialectical process of emphasizing the superiority of technologies and simultaneously devaluing human labor.

As machine capability expands into new realms of human activity, it inevitably replaces some of the human skills and knowledge needed to get jobs done. This in turn is thought to cause a deskilling of workers (think for example of the secretarial profession after the advent of the personal computer). But there is also a concurrent process of enskillment which takes place. Social scientists have shown that with the advent of any new technology, workers must acquire new skills and apply their embodied knowledge in order to make the technology useful. As Cristina Graseni argued in her book, Skilled Vision, “there is no fixed algebra of skill and machine by which an increase of technology means a decrease of skill.” This is because human workers are not just the users of technologies, but also their active re-inventors.

Take for example the transportation industry. In the past five years, the spread of ride-sharing platforms has led to a fundamental reconfiguration of urban transportation and a supposed deskilling of the transportation industry. The remarkable growth of these technologies and the rise of the world’s most valuable start-ups— Uber ($68billion) and Didi ($50 billion) — has been predicated on a business model of substituting professionalized, monopolistic service providers (i.e. traditional taxi companies) with decentralized low-cost labor. Reports show that in some American cities, the hourly income of Uber drivers after expenses falls below minimum wage. In China where fares are much lower still, many drivers claim that they can barely cover costs.

This radical reduction in wages has justified by claims that transportation is a deskilled profession and that service providers are merely acting as extensions of technologies (such as GPS navigation and customer-driver pairing algorithms).  However, I found in my research of ride-sharing industry in China that such characterizations are misleading. Firstly, ride-sharing services depend upon the knowledge, skills, and social relations of drivers. After joining the platform, drivers learn which smartphones work best with the app and which telecommunication networks offer the most reliable service in the areas that they operate. They develop strategies for making customers happy and boosting their user ratings. The drivers form online communities to share tacit knowledge about things like earning subsidies and promotions and avoiding getting caught by the police in places where the app is still illicit. Though these processes of enskillment, knowledge-making, and socialization often go unacknowledged by ride-sharing firms, they constitute an indispensable human infrastructure that enables the smooth functioning of technological platforms.

Advertisement of taxi-hailing app Kuaidi inside of Shanghai subway (2014). Shuang Frost

Secondly, on ride-sharing platforms a significant percentage of drivers are full-time professionals. Both in America and in China, Uber rolled out subsidy structures that encourage individuals to make driving for Uber their full-time jobs. Drivers are rewarded with “bonus” fares if they stay on call for a certain number of hours per day or complete a specified number of trips within a given week. As a result, many Uber drivers work roughly the same hours as their traditional taxi-driving counterparts. In China, many drivers claim that they rely on bonuses to make ends meet. One man joked that being a part-time driver is like being Lei Feng: you do it only out of a selfless commitment to society. Nevertheless, Uber has consistently refused to categorize drivers as employees. By instead categorizing them as “independent contractors,” the company avoids paying employee benefits, thus keeping the cost of labor artificially low.  

Social tensions caused by technological displacement show no signs of abating. According to a recent study, in the next 10 to 20 years, 57 percent of jobs in OECD countries and 77 percent of jobs in China are at risk of being displaced by automating technologies. The transportation industry will be one of the sectors most affected. Autonomous driving cars and semi-trucks alone could displace the 12-15 percent of the world’s workforce.

This newest wave of displacement is not necessarily a bad thing. Like technological innovations of the past, advances in AI have the potential to free us humans from certain repetitive tasks and enable us to focus on more creative work. However, it is important to consider how the benefits of technologies are distributed and to recognize the value of the knowledge and skills that ordinary workers bring to this socio-technological transition.

 

Shuang Frost is a Ph.D. candidate of anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary field in Science, Technology, and Society. Her dissertation looks at the economic, political, and social impacts of the ride-sharing industry in contemporary urban China. Her broader research interests include digital technology, moral economy, and corporate governance.

SEAA Highlights from Cyberspace to Asia

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The Society for East Asian Anthropology (SEAA) promotes discussion and shares information on diverse topics related to the anthropology of East Asia broadly conceived. We are committed to developing international channels of communication among anthropologists throughout the world who share an interest in East Asia both as a topic of academic inquiry and as a site of academic activity. Here, we highlight our activities over the past year and invite you to join our lively community online (through our website and listserv) and offline.

SEAA column series

Our monthly column for the Anthropology News website features curated series, bringing together scholars in the SEAA around a central theme. Our current series on “Digital Anthropologies in East Asia” examines how digital technologies impact the everyday lives of ordinary people and transform social relationships, labor structures, and youth culture. Previous themes include “Living through Waste and Waste as Lively,” which provided a critical understanding of China’s “trash crisis” and contributed to anthropological studies of the environment. The “In and Out of Japan” series examined mobility against the backdrop of Japan’s population decline. We welcome your proposals for individual articles and thematic series to feature in future columns.

SEAA regional conferences

Keynote speakers at the SEAA regional conference at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Chinese University of Hong Kong

Periodically SEAA brings together scholars for a dynamic regional conference, including Berkeley in 2004, Hong Kong in 2006, Taipei in 2009, and Seoul in 2011. Our 2016 conference was hosted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong and included a diverse group of 160 participants from across East and Southeast Asia, Europe, and North America, who gave presentations on panels ranging from “Emerging Infrastructure of Immigration to China” to “Creative Human Reconstruction of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster” to “Confronting the ‘Grey Tsunami’” and “Ethics, Death and Beyond.” The keynote panel on “Overcoming the Gap between American Anthropology and East Asian Anthropologies” featured vigorous debate among leading scholars in the field on the cultural norms and structural challenges of academic knowledge production in China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the US. Ethnographic immersion in Hong Kong was a highlight of the

Exploring Hong Kong with SEAA President Gordon Mathews. Priscilla Song

conference, including a walking tour of urban renewal and high density dynamics, a field trip to Po Lin Monastery, and dinner at Chungking Mansions (described by SEAA President Gordon Mathews in his 2011 ethnography Ghetto at the Center of the World as emblematic of “low-end globalization”). We invite proposals from potential hosts for our next independent regional conference in Asia.

AAA workshops

SEAA holds professional development activities to nurture emerging scholars in our field, including yearly mentoring workshops and networking dinners at the AAA Annual Meetings. At our 2016 mentoring workshop in Minneapolis, Lisa Rofel, Eleana Kim, and Akihiro Ogawa met with SEAA graduate student members to discuss ways to connect anthropological research to political activism in the Trump era. Our 2017 mentoring workshop and networking dinner in Washington DC will continue to develop these themes; visit the SEAA website for updates.

SEAA is also organizing our first book publishing workshop at the 2017 Annual Meeting, featuring recent authors and acquisition editors from university presses at Cornell, Oxford, Princeton, and Stanford. Sign up at the AAA conference website to join us for a lively discussion on how to develop a compelling book proposal, find the right publisher, survive the review process, negotiate the contract, manage the production process, and market your book.

SEAA prizes

SEAA awards annual prizes for outstanding work in East Asian anthropology, including scholarly books, media productions, and graduate student papers. In 2016, SEAA awarded the Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize to Jie Yang (Simon Fraser University) for her book Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China. Aya Domenig received the David Plath Media Award for her film The Day the Sun Fell (Als die Sonne vom Himmel fiel). The Theodore C. Bestor Prize for Outstanding Graduate Paper was awarded to Adam Liebman, a PhD candidate at the University of California Davis, for his paper “Waste-Product Trading and Colloquial Urban Sociality in Kunming, China.” Join us at the SEAA annual business meeting in DC to find out the winners of the 2017 SEAA prizes.

SEAA: seaa.americananthro.org

Contributing editors: Heidi K. Lam, Yale University ([email protected]), Priscilla Song, Washington University in St Louis ([email protected]), and Yi Zhou, University of California Davis ([email protected])

Japanese Radiation Refugees in Malaysia

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Shiori Shakuto

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

The Japan Club, formerly a Japanese school in central KL, has 4000 members. It hosts more than 20 activity groups for young Japanese families and retirees. Shiori Shakuto

On March 11, 2011, the great Tohoku earthquake shook Japan. A few days later, nuclear reactors on the northeastern coast experienced meltdowns. Since then, a growing number of so-called houshanou nanmin (“radiation refugees”) have fled their homes to live in the countryside or overseas. Their activities and challenges once in their new homes are seldom discussed in public reports or the media. Here, I write about a gendered aspect of the experiences faced by those who have fled to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

I met a woman in her mid-30s in Kuala Lumpur in May 2014. She ran a web design company in Tokyo when the radiation crisis hit Fukushima in 2011. She and her husband immediately evacuated with their two children to her natal home in Kumamoto Prefecture in Southern Japan. But in Japan, she told me, it was difficult to obtain accurate information about the levels of nuclear pollution. The explicit discussion and publication of such material was considered taboo in the context of a national campaign emphasizing solidarity in times of national crisis. Any anxious voices were considered insensitive, if not, hikokumin (unpatriotic). She felt that it was no longer safe to live in Japan. After living in Kumamoto for only half a year, her family decided to move to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.

While this woman relocated to Kuala Lumpur with her husband and their children, most radiation refugees in Malaysia were young mothers and their children. Their husbands typically stayed in Japan to work. These husbands tended to keep their jobs in the Kanto or the Tohoku area for issues of financial stability. They sent monthly allowances and visited their wives and their children occasionally during the holiday seasons.

Sometimes when both parents could not leave their jobs in Japan, the grandparents relocated to Malaysia. One couple in their mid-50s with doubts about the accuracy of Japanese reports regarding radiation decided to take an early retirement and move to Kuala Lumpur. They were ready to host their children and grandchildren in Malaysia if another natural disaster hits Japan. “By living in Kuala Lumpur, we are creating a safe haven for our children and their family,” they said.

Most radiation refugees I met regarded their move as a permanent one. Although they had moved there initially to escape the effects of radiation, many were hopeful about the educational opportunities for their children in Malaysia. One of the young Japanese mothers I met in Penang decided to enroll her daughter in a Chinese-medium school. She told me, “In Japan, children would grow up monolingual. But here in Malaysia, my daughter would grow up to speak Japanese, Chinese and English.”

In a nation that prizes productive labor, housewives and retirees were typically seen as belonging to the domains of the household. It was men who used to be mobile. But the narratives of radiation refugees suggest that when the state fails to protect its own citizens, the opposite becomes the case. It is the fathers who stay in Japan to work while the supposedly “unproductive” are transformed into valuable mobile subjects. In and beyond Japan, women and the elderly have emerged as critically-thinking members of the global community for guarding the safety and future of their own families. They shed lights on the emerging forms and possibilities of reproductive labor in the increasingly connected Asian countries.

Shiori Shakuto has just completed her PhD program in Anthropology at the Australian National University. Her interests focus on the emerging forms of labor and gender relations among Japanese people who move in and out of Japan. Her PhD thesis was on the Japanese retirement migrants in Malaysia.

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

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

by

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]).