Jamie Coates

Editors’ Note: This article is part of the series Digital Anthropologies in East Asia.

In 2008 a small group of Chinese business owners gathered together to propose the official declaration of a new Chinatown in Tokyo. Ikebukuro, the second busiest station in the Northwestern corner of Tokyo’s central loop-line, had attracted growing numbers of Chinese students and entrepreneurs in the preceding decades, and in the eyes of some had already become a Chinatown of sorts. The proposal was touted as a means of rebranding already existing networks of Chinese businesses in the area, hoping to mirror the success of historic Chinatowns in Japan, such as in Yokohama and Kobe. Ikebukuro’s Chinatown designation was intended to represent the new overseas Chinese community in Japan. Migrants from the People’s Republic of China grew to become the largest non-Japanese minority in Japan in 2006, and are mostly made up of those who followed education-oriented pathways into the country after 1985. From student-workers and trainees, the earlier generation of this migrant group have since established themselves as independent business-owners and/or employees in Japanese companies and public institutions. The majority however, are relatively young with fluid identities, diverse interests, and quickly changing ambitions.

The northern corner of Ikebukuro hosts over 300 Chinese-owned businesses and its municipal district (Toshima ward) is home to more than 13,000 Chinese nationals. More significantly, the station connects to many wider networks of Chinese sociality in the city. The official government response to the Chinatown proposal was that the Chinese community was too new, and too disengaged from local Japanese organizational activities to warrant official recognition. The phrase ‘let’s start from a dialogue’ (mazu kōryu kara) was repeated in various media reports at the time, exemplar of the polite yet distinctly conclusive way Japanese institutions reject these sorts of proposal. Unable to gain official approval, several of the initial proponents of the Chinatown proposal side-stepped Japanese stakeholders by producing a ‘Tokyo Chinatown’ website that links to various social media. In turn, Ikebukuro’s unofficial Chinatown status has been supported by some Japanese scholars and activists, serving as a symbol of new urban diversity in Japan.

Two young women streaming from an Ikebukuro bar. Jamie Coates

From these accounts one might assume that the Chinatown proposal reflects a newly forming Chinese community in Ikebukuro, as well as its tense relationship with local Japanese officials. However, the growth in digital forms of sociality and their intersection with new mobilities has ensured that many Chinese community-forming practices in Tokyo have taken on less territory oriented dynamics. Based on fieldwork in Ikebukuro, the Chinatown proposal by no means reflected the patterns of sociality and identification among the majority of ethnic Chinese in Tokyo, nor Ikebukuro. In fact, the Chinatown’s rejection was met with sighs of relief among many of Ikebukuro’s circles, with people stating that Chinatowns are an older form of sociality no longer fitting the way Tokyo’s relatively new Chinese population want to live their lives.

One young woman from Shijiazhuang told me that Chinatowns do not reflect how her peers imagine places such as Ikebukuro. She continued, stating the Chinatown and its accompanying website and ideals, for instance, were ‘dead’ (si). In contrast, the intersection of smartphones and social media has ensured that Chinese sociality intersects with wider patterns of otherness in Tokyo. One young man from Nanjing, for instance, even jokingly said to me ‘Tokyo’s Chinatown is online (wangshang)’. While Tokyo’s Chinatown may be ‘online’, it does not follow patterns of strict co-ethnic identification, nor was it disconnected from analogue spaces in the city. Rather than connecting to a single ethnic enclave, digital Chinese sociality in Tokyo connects multiple Sinophone social media platforms to a heterotopic spread of bars, restaurants, social clubs, churches, schools, and various other spaces tucked away within the urban spread of the city. Some of these spaces were clustered around major stations such as Ikebukuro, Shinjuku and Ueno, but this was not always the case. Moreover, this kind of spatial arrangement suggested less about Chinese social life in the city than it did the ways the relationship between digital and analogue life intersects with Tokyo’s already heterotopic qualities.

A woman selling steamed buns in Yokohama. Jamie Coates

The choice of platform in negotiating these many connections and places reflects the differing scaling effects of digital sociality. These scales cut across extant associations between ethnicity and place in Tokyo, following logics of conviviality and practice more so than ethnic identification. At the same time, the conviviality of shared meanings, particularly in terms of joking, ensured that certain social media platforms had aggregating effects. WeChat, for example, was decidedly Sinophone, whereas platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (which are technically banned in mainland China), were used to navigate multi-lingual networks of practice in Tokyo, such as fan groups, artist collectives and nightlife based friendships. Private WeChat groups such as one titled ‘the mental asylum’, which I followed during fieldwork from 2014-2016 were born out of chance encounters in bars across Tokyo, and became a site for the circulation of private images that parody Chinese pop culture, as well as complex Sinophone language games. Others, such as a group of Chinese-speaking artists, musicians and documentarians formed out of shared interests and eventually became an inclusive space for Chinese-speaking people from around the world, including me. These groups were spaces of constant chatter, and frequently turned into face-to-face meetings throughout the city to sing karaoke and eat Chinese food.

Chinatowns in Japan, much like in other parts of the world, have stood as a curious means of territorializing ethnic groups in the city. Yokohama’s Chinatown emerged out of legal restrictions on the occupations and spaces Chinese workers could enter in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. From the 1980s it was refurbished and reinvented to become a place where ethnic Others were celebrated as consumable and desirable. However, the new Chinatowns of Tokyo appear to differ. From the legal, to the cultural and political, the spatial dynamics of Chineseness and otherness in Japanese cities has taken on new patterns in recent years. Enabled by digitalized sociality, the young Chinese population in Tokyo reflects a diversity that is nowhere but everywhere, aggregated in terms of practice and shared interest, and resistant to the demarcation of ethnic enclaves, such as those embodied in the term ‘Chinatown’. 

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

東北からの声https://tohokukaranokoe.org/

David H. Slater

Note: This project was supported by grants from Toyota Foundation, a Kaken grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education, and various sources from within Sophia University.  A more detailed outline of the archive can be found here: Public Anthropology of Disaster and Recovery : “Archive of Hope”(希望ア–カイブ)

David Slater

Of all of the data that has inundated us during this digital revolution, from the flow of images and texts to tweets and links, we have also experienced a loss in our attention to the human voice in narrative. Perhaps this became especially acute for me in the aftermath of the March 11^th, 2011 triple disasters in Japan. Because of the disruption of time and place, of life course and communities, oral narrative has emerged as a privileged way to understand and share this condition within and beyond the affected communities. Digital media has also, somewhat paradoxically, allowed voice and face, those most analogue elements of data, to be gathered and made accessible in ways that were not before possible. In “Voices from Tohoku” we have collected our own interviews into the largest archive of video oral narratives on the 3.11 disasters, and one of the largest oral narrative projects on any topic.

The archive is the work of students at Sophia University who have conducted more than 500 hours of semi-structured interviews throughout Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures from the spring of 2011 until 2015 (when we ran out of money). Thus, unlike some other projects which are primarily portal sites that link to and aggregate other data, our archive contains only the data we have generated ourselves. Our videos are people telling their own story in their own words.

Top page for Voices from Tohoku. David Slater

Most interviews are between 1 and 2 hours long, and the full scholarly archive contains all of these unedited digital videos, almost completely transcribed and thus searchable, which we have made accessible to scholars from Japan, Asia, Europe and North America. There is also an open “community” website with thousands of shorter clips of 1-3 minutes. These clips are geographically and thematically tagged. The website has more than 80,000 hits now—which in the world of oral narrative are rock-star numbers. Our site is plain without impressive graphics and only basic coding. Because it is designed primarily as a way for us to share our interviews with our narrators in Tohoku, it is only in Japanese now (but Google Translate can give you a rough idea).

We did not start as a research project at all. In the spring of 2011, students from Sophia University trucked up to Tohoku to volunteer, working wherever we were most needed until one day, upon seeing our cameras, an old woman in a Miyagi “temporary” housing unit invited a group of our students in because “she had something to tell us.” That “something” ended up lasting many hours over 3 days. She felt that her own government was not very interested in what she, or any local, had to say, and the mass media had already plotted their pre-set narratives. She, and hundreds of others, would rather we took time to record their stories than dig tsunami mud from their living rooms. While this was surprising at the time, it was something we were trained to do—oral narrative interviewing. From then, we began a new schedule: volunteer work in the morning, interviews in the afternoon, and usually nomikai drinking parties at night. Most of my students from Tokyo, not Tohoku. As such, they were enough “outsider” so that local residents wanted to tell them their stories. And when you’ve spent hours, days and weeks in a community doing volunteer work, it is much easier to generate the sort of goodwill and understanding that is so vital to good interviewing.

Interviewer using personal photos as narrative prompts in Minami-Sanriku. David Slater

The archive did not emerge until 2013, after we had been interviewing for almost two years, as we were trying to figure out what we would do with our interviews. In 2012, after an interview, we were told by one fisherman in Rikuzen Takata: “Don’t be like those other ‘researchers’ who just take our stories and disappear. We are busy people; we are only telling you this so you will DO something with them.”  This website is our effort to DO something that will be meaningful to the narrators, to share their stories with each other and with a wider audience.  

Our archive is characterized by not only its scope but also by its diversity. Some narrators start their story on the ‘day of,’ (あの日), as a point of references from which they then move backwards and forwards. (We never asked directly about that day until they brought it up—sometimes it is as important to find ways to forget as it is to remember.) Others start speaking as representatives of their community, offering up continually refined set pieces in ways that (we came to think) sought to reestablish some coherent and presentable face for both the individual as well as the community. There are many hopeful stories of heroic struggle in overcoming challenges, and there are just as many “crying stories” of pain and suffering—but it is almost always more complex than that. At times, the narrators are viciously critical of conceits and duplicity—of the State, of TEPCO (the electric company that runs the Fukushima reactors), or even their neighbors and themselves. Other times, our narrators were halting, feeling their way through a topic, talking to and for themselves as much as for us.

Narrators’ page for Ishinomaki. Each narrator has 3-5 shorter clips, thematically coded and transcribed. David Slater

An archive of scope, structured in a coherent fashion that enables efficient accessibility will outlive most journal articles or books. Moreover, this research model has also allowed us to more fully involve undergraduate students over an extended periods of time than I never imagined, and to collaborate with other researchers, communities, NPOs and social movements in ways that have created scholarly, political and civil potential, that we and others, are only beginning to appreciate and develop.

Sadly, we no longer have funding for Tohoku travel, but we are doing great oral narrative projects in Tokyo of anti-nuke movement, youth protests, irregular labor, homelessness and social justice issues. I am always only too happy to explain how we do what we do, and to collaborate on future projects with others.

David H. Slater is the Director of the Institute of Comparative Culture, and professor of cultural anthropology in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Graduate Program in Japanese Studies at Sophia University, Tokyo.

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. 

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.