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Feeling Futures of Diversity in Japan

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Daniel White
September 27, 2023

The global growth of interest in building machines with artificial emotional intelligence sheds surprising light on how engineers in Japan are reimagining diversity through companion robots.

Stories of humans and robots cohabiting harmoniously have long been popular in Japan. In recent years, Japan’s robot manufacturers have increasingly attempted to bring this idea to life by equipping robots with capacities to care for others. For example, Softbank’s four-foot-tall humanoid robot Pepper, introduced in 2014, is marketed as the “the world’s first personal robot that can read emotions.” The animated hologram Azumi Hikari, produced by Gatebox Inc. in 2016, is designed to realize the “ultimate return home” for those who do not otherwise have or prefer a human companion. Fujisoft’s Palro is created as a communication partner for the elderly. And Sony’s pet robot AIBO (1999–2006) and re-released as “aibo” in 2018—a name that combines “AI” with “robot” but that also plays on the Japanese word for “partner” or “pal” (aibō)—is imagined as a constant companion.

Image Credit: Daniel White
Image Description: A small silver canine-like robot is standing on a small stage and facing the camera. To the right of the robot, in the background, is a sign that reads “aibo” in red letters.
Caption: aibo by Sony, featured at a conference on AI in Tokyo in 2019.

In a fieldwork project on the rise of emotional technologies like these, my colleague Hirofumi Katsuno and I ask how practices of modeling emotion in machines are transforming expressions of human emotionality more generally in society. As we have described elsewhere, at the heart of these experiments is heart itself. Across different models of companion and care robots, Japanese engineers attempt to build robots that can express a sense of heart (kokoro) by leveraging artificial emotional intelligence to contribute to a future of human-robot care. Technologies like cameras connected to software that reads facial expressions, for example, or sensors that respond to affectionate forms of touch with haptic feedback can give these robots elementary capacities to display affection.

Intriguingly for many, these machines also raise discussions about whether robots should be granted the right to be considered as legitimate members of Japanese society. While such discussions have stimulated new ideas about how diversity in a future society might be extended beyond human members, they have also raised concerns that a robot-inclusive diversity might come at the expense of other humans.

Robot-inclusive diversity

In 2018, the robotics startup GROOVE X introduced a small furry robot on wheels called LOVOT that was designed for just one thing: “to be loved by you.” In the updated release of LOVOT 2.0 in 2022, GROOVE X shifted its marketing campaigns to add to this message on love an emphasis on diversity. A tagline for the new LOVOT on the company’s official website reads, “All to express the diversity and complexity of life. 10+ CPU cores (central processing units), 20+ MCUs (micro controller units), 50+ sensors reproduce behavior like a living thing. A new relationship between robots and people begins here.”

Image Credit: Daniel White
Image Description: Two small brown furry robots on wheels stare at the camera with LED eyes. One is wearing a beige onesie; the other is wearing beige overalls.
Caption: LOVOT by GROOVE X

When GROOVE X introduced its new PR materials on “diversity,” it also institutionalized what the company’s founder and CEO, Hayashi Kaname, had been promoting for years: the idea of a society of genuine human-robot coexistence (kyōzon). Importantly, the use of the word “diversity” (tayōsei) is applied here to refer to all “living things” (seibutsu), a category which GROOVE X proposes could be inclusive of robots like LOVOT. Thus,GROOVE X’s framing of LOVOT as a “living thing” promotes the possibility of welcoming LOVOT into a future society where “diversity” might be extended to nonhuman robot persons.

Prior to GROOVE X’s latest campaign, at an event called Industry Co-Creation held in 2020, Hayashi outlined in detail his vision of an emerging future of robot-inclusive diversity. Building on themes of diversity and social justice—which had gained attention in global advertising cultures—he proposed to an audience of fellow technologists and mass media that his company’s latest companion robot exemplifies a model of diversity.

What kind of era will the world face in the future? I think we are facing an era of the robot native [robotto neitibu no jidai]. Until now diversity has been used to refer to skin color and gender, but in the future, I wonder if the borders between living and nonliving things will be erased. Ultimate diversity leads to peace. I want to create that kind of technology and disseminate it from Japan.

Hayashi is familiar with critiques of the lack of diversity in AI, where AI media images have been criticized for their explicit “whiteness” and AI algorithms for their ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic biases based on machine learning data. By framing the inclusion of robots like LOVOT into society in terms of global social justice, Hayashi presents robots as equally deserving of it as people.

Other robot advocates agree with Hayashi’s perspective that robots deserve a place in societies as a distinct species. The legal scholar Inatani Tatsuhiko has been working for several years on creating legal codes that can promote a society in which humans and robots coexist in harmony. This is imperative, in Inatani’s view, because there exist no uniform codes of law for regulating human-machine relations in the emerging age of artificial intelligence. He suggests that “rather than trying to determine what the essence of machines and human beings is, everyone should think about what kind of society we want first, and then discuss the distribution of legal responsibilities appropriate for that purpose.”

Inatani further recommends that we gradually develop a “synthesized society” between human beings and artificial intelligence by considering “what we want to be with them.” Inatani’s point is that public discussions on the philosophical nature of humans, machines, and AI cannot provide a useful guide for living well with machines. Instead, he proposes to consider human-machine relationships as an open-ended experiment which will yield new models for harmonious cohabitation.

Together, Hayashi and Inatani—among many others—seek to make a place in society for nonhuman robot persons by reconceptualizing the constituency of Japan’s future publics in relation to emotional and interactive capacities. The future of a robot-inclusive society may thus depend less on the makeup of its members than on those members’ abilities to generate what is seen as socially appropriate emotionality toward others, human or otherwise.

More-than-human or all-too-human diversity?

With such an emphasis on the inclusion of robots into society expressed by figures like Hayashi and Inatani, however, there is reason to wonder if the extension of care to robots may contribute to “socially appropriate” emotions that come at the expense of other humans.

While Japanese society has long been admired for its fantastically imaginative fictional characters and robot friends, it has also been criticized for its cultural homogeneity and far less friendly immigration policies. In fact, some ethnographers of Japanese robotics have pointed to an overt lack of diversity among Japan’s mostly male robotics engineers and its implications for the disproportionate number of robots gendered as female. Other ethnographers have raised concerns that certain government endorsements for employing robotic technologies in the elderly care sector attribute more rights to robots than to potential foreign care laborers, particularly from Southeast Asia. Still others have suggested that while robots may not prove to be a replacement for migrant care workers in Japan, they may ultimately deskill the forms of labor in which they are trained. As James Wright has argued in an intimate study of the use of the robot Pepper in a care home in Japan, these robots are still elementary and need the help of human staff to operate. Accordingly, a better word than replacement to describe the impact of care robots is displacement, as “the introduction of care robots displaces skills and practices,” “direct human-human contact,” and “caring for people.”

Such critiques point to practices in Japan of privileging technological diversity by protecting perceptions of human homogeneity. Importantly, these emerging debates over who will be incorporated into future imaginations of diversity in Japan are playing out in a marketplace increasingly focused on feeling. Corporations defend the value of developing robots that care given a Japanese society in which care is in deficit.

Seeking to capitalize off perceptions of increasing alienation and loneliness in contemporary Japan, given an aging society and decreasing birthrates, companion robot companies release prototypes in part to test how people respond to them affectively. Different designs—a furry robot on wheels (LOVOT), a puppy-like pet (aibo), a headless cushion with a wagging feline tail (QOOBO)—evoke different reactions among consumers that are not easy to anticipate or define. Robot makers intentionally focus on positive affect, amorphous feelings of comfort that can be produced by just being with robots. Producers imagine that this palpable but not always explainable form of comfort might expand the abilities for positive emotionality between humans and robots in so much that it is not dependent on the limits and expectations that come with human language, and can thus attend more directly to heart.

Image Credit: Yukai Engineering
Image Description: A woman photographed from the nose down, wearing a white blouse and blue jeans, is sitting on a gray sofa. In her lap she holds a black cat-like cushion robot with a tail and no head. To the right of her on the couch is another gray cat-like cushion robot with its tail sticking out to the left.
Caption: QOOBO

GROOVE X’s robot LOVOT is at the leading edge of building these companions with heart. Despite critiques that investment in robots may discount the value of certain human relationships, GROOVE X argues that the cultivation of affection for fictional and “haptic creatures” like LOVOT 2.0 is not a problem but is rather part of the promise of robot diversity. Hayashi and staff often claim that LOVOT is a “technology that cultivates humans’ power to love”; as Hayashi has qualified in conversation, such love need not be limited to humans or even to nonhuman animals. “When I look at LOVOT, I feel like we are entering an era in which we need not discriminate between humans and robots or even between robots and other living things.”

If the future of diversity in Japan is robot-inclusive, it is also one incorporating a history of people grappling over certain human exclusions. As the current biases of emerging AI and machine learning technologies are increasingly brought to light, both in Japanese and global technocultures, we might also question how optimistic visions of diverse machine-inclusive publics of the future in part trade on discounted visions of human diversity. For robot makers like Hayashi, however, the enlarged capacities of “heart” in LOVOT 2.0 have far-reaching implications for how we pursue human values such as diversity in the future, even redefining emotionality itself in and beyond Japan.

Daniel White is a research affiliate in anthropology at the University of Cambridge and author of Administering Affect. He researches emotion modeling in AI, social robots, and other affective and emotional technologies. His publications and ongoing projects can be found at modelemotion.org.

White, Daniel. 2023. “Feeling Futures of Diversity in Japan.” Anthropology News website, September 27, 2023.

Copyright [2023] American Anthropological Association

Digital Sociality in COVID-19 Japan

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Kimberly Hassel
December 7, 2021

How has the heightened digital mediation brought about by the pandemic reconfigured sociality, intimacy, ideas of “normalcy,” and even ethnographic practice itself?

In the summer of 2019, I set off to begin my yearlong dissertation fieldwork on Social Networking Services (SNS), smartphone ownership, and digital sociality in Japan. During the first half of my fieldwork, I was immersed in in-person interactions with my interlocutors—high schoolers, university students, and postgrads in their mid-twenties who were avid users of platforms such as Instagram. In our conversations on the role of SNS (the local term for social media) and smartphones in everyday life, youths told me that social media and smartphones were often a “normal,” or even “natural,” part of their lives. However, this perception has changed due to the global outbreak of COVID-19, which coincided with the second half of my fieldwork. The pandemic has reconfigured the embeddedness of digital mediation. Youth interlocutors came to question what they used to think as “normal” in pre-pandemic digital sociality, even reconsidering the idea of normalcy itself. They confessed a desire to share the same space as their friends, to be able to touch and hold them. This seemed to suggest the extent to which digital sociality is constituted by in-person sociality. This was highlighted by the pandemic, when social media and smartphones became the primary means of communication. In turn, I began to deeply consider the ethical implications of my own digital communications with interlocutors.

Although social media and smartphones are perceived to be ubiquitous, these technologies are localized within particular historical and societal contexts. In their ethnographic projects spanning across multiple countries, Daniel Miller and colleagues have highlighted how the nuances of local context impact how people use and transform these technologies in their everyday lives (Miller et al 2016; Miller et al. 2021). Japan has been at the forefront of mobile Internet technology since the 1990s. The smartphone fits within the rich genealogy of keitai (mobile phones)—what Mizuko Ito calls a “snug and intimate technosocial tethering” that translates literally to “something you carry with you” (2005, 1). Prior to the pandemic, young interlocutors spoke enthusiastically of the informative, communicative, and entertaining functions of social media and smartphones. Different iterations of the phrase “I can’t imagine life without it” emphasized the necessity of both technologies in daily life. At times, they cultivated a corporeal connection with the device itself, expressing this as smartphones being “part of my body.” For example, Haru, a postgrad in her mid-twenties, once dropped her phone on the train tracks during her morning commute. A day without her phone impacted her daily rhythm; she was unable to entertain herself with videos during her lunch break and was unable to receive work communications. Since this “traumatic” experience, Haru now wears her phone on a strap around her neck wherever she goes.

Youths also had particular characterizations for popular social media platforms. For example, LINE, a popular messaging platform, was “the norm” in communicating and arranging general logistics of everyday life because it provided “quick” (subayai) chat and call functions. Instagram was identified as the most popular social media platform in Japan throughout my fieldwork, for its role in allowing people to stay in touch with friends by letting them view each other’s daily updates, and “follow” accounts of shared interests. Without Instagram, my interlocutors told me, it would be difficult to stay “on top” of trends or happenings in acquaintances’ lives. Despite their deft use of various platforms, young interlocutors emphasized that social media and smartphones are useful tools that should supplement in-person sociality, though never replace it. According to interlocutors, digitally mediated communication could cause miscommunication because facial expressions, bodily cues, and the general atmosphere of the conversation might be hard to read. In actuality, they often misinterpreted text messages, emoji, or “stamps” sent by acquaintances on LINE. This decentering of the digital contests the often hyper-technologized imaginations of Japanese society worldwide.

Image Description: A photograph of an interlocutor’s smartphone, protected by a black cloth phone cover. The phone cover bears an image of a cat, followed with the caption: “Don’t touch my cell phone.”
Caption: A photograph of an interlocutor’s smartphone personalized with an amusing cover.

As digital sociality became the form of everyday sociality amidst the COVID-19 outbreak, young interlocutors began to reconsider the presence of digital technologies in their lives as a taken-for-granted part of the everyday, completely integrated into the rhythms of daily life through work and personal communications (see Ling 2012) for a detailed discussion of this “taken for grantedness.” Interlocutors appreciated how social media such as Instagram and LINE became crucial avenues for ensuring the safety and health of their friends and family. For many, social media was also often the only way to feel “like a part of society” due to the inability to engage in activities outdoors or physically meet with others. This counters the pervasive pre-pandemic perceptions that social media is the culprit of “shallowing” relationships. Rather, the pandemic suggested a variety of possibilities as to how one can strategically recalibrate social/digital life. Young interlocutors relied on their friends’ own social media profiles to seek information during the early stages of the pandemic, fully aware of the caveats of misinformation and disinformation. Some refrained from uploading any photos or videos on their Instagram Stories that might reveal that they had been going outdoors, in fear of being judged by their friends and followers, including critical online users nicknamed “quarantine police” (jishuku keisatsu). In this case, the portable intimacy provided by smartphones and social media transformed into a site of hostile criticism and surveillance.

In the ensuing global health crisis, my fieldwork transitioned from an online and offline mixture of in-person interviews and participant observation to purely “remote” digital methodologies. Follow-up video interviews with interlocutors bore a more somber and fatigued air, yet were reflexive and intimate. I reflected deeply on what ethical implications there may be for digital methods when they have become the new “norm” in ethnography in the wake of the pandemic, in and beyond Japan. The digital poses opportunities for forms of intimacy and sociality as well as new challenges regarding boundaries. Video interviews often meant that I would be virtually “present” in interlocutors’ homes. I had to be mindful of those with whom my interviewees were living and what topics might be “risky” to speak about out loud.

This caveat became apparent during a video interview with Riko, a university student. In a previous interview, Riko spoke extensively of the role of social media in her life, particularly her use of a “secret” Instagram account as a diary. Riko’s sister perceives social media as “her private universe,” while her mother is a flip phone user and does not use social media at all. During our follow-up interview via video call, I began to ask Riko about her sister. “She’s right here!” Riko said aloud. I froze, not knowing that her sister had been there for the entire interview. Riko was not wearing headphones. Riko offered to relay any questions that I wished to ask her sister, to which I responded that I would at a later date. I then began to ask about her mother, but was quickly cut off by Riko. “Wait a second, wait a second!” Riko suddenly exclaimed, while frantically unwrapping a pair of headphones and plugging them into her iPad. I realized at that moment that I had committed a blunder. It was permissible to ask about Riko’s sister, but discussion of her mother was off-limits without headphones. Once Riko had her headphones on, she smiled and let me ask questions. After apologizing profusely for the mishap, I asked if her mother had purchased a smartphone. Leaning into the camera, Riko then whispered: “She bought one!” We laughed in unison.

Image Description: The author, a woman with a voluminous afro, is facing the camera in mid-laughter. She is wearing a blue headband and hoop earrings. She is holding her field notebook. A bed, a hanging plant, and three stuffed animals are visible in the background.
Caption: A photo of the author during the moment of shared laughter within Riko’s video interview.

In being transparent about my blunders, I wish to continue dialogue on the ethical considerations that accompany digital methodologies, particularly the manners and practices related to video calls. At the start of interviews, ethnographers should gauge if a video call is an accessible medium for the interlocutor. When video calls do take place, respect and privacy should be at the core of virtually entering the interlocutor’s space, and should be maintained when representing the encounter unless explicit permission is granted. Ethnographers should respect the interlocutor’s decision to leave the camera on or off and be flexible with switching to other modes of communication. Finally, ethnographers should be mindful of the context of the interlocutor’s space and the figures who may be present, and formulate their questions and responses accordingly.

The digital is sometimes begrudgingly framed by ethnographers as a lackluster alternative to “on-the-ground” fieldwork. This is similar to interlocutors’ pre-pandemic characterizations of digital sociality as lacking. Rather than focusing on what is lost by the digital, perhaps we can reflect on what is gained, and experiment with its potential to create new ethnographic socialities. I felt closer to my interlocutors as a result of our video check-ins throughout the pandemic. While some of our digital interactions involved formal interviews, it also involved more creative interactions: for example, jointly participating in an online yoga session. The intimacy that was afforded by video check-ins and virtual presence means that we, as ethnographers, may have to reassess the boundaries of our relationships. This can involve navigating our positionality as both friend and ethnographer, which are not mutually exclusive—as Fiona Murphy points out in her discussion of friendship and fieldwork—but still have ethical implications.

I feel deeply indebted to my interlocutors for their patience and for keeping me company throughout the pandemic. Our screens ultimately facilitated intimate moments of empathy and compassion during the solitude of the times.

Further reading on digital ethnographic methods

Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method, by Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor

Digital Anthropology, edited by Heather Horst and Daniel Miller

Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice, by Sarah Pink, Heather Horst, John Postill, Larissa Hjorth, Tania Lewis, and Jo Tacchi

The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography, edited by Larissa Hjorth, Heather Horst, Anne Galloway, and Genevieve Bell

“Notes from the Great Quarantine: Reflections on Ethnography after COVID-19,” by Tom Boellstorff

“Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic,” crowdsourced document initiated and edited by Deborah Lupton

Kimberly Hassel is a PhD candidate and digital anthropologist within the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Her dissertation, funded by a Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellowship, examines Social Networking Services (SNS), smartphone ownership, and the (re)configuration of notions of sociality and the self among youths in Japan.

Cite as: Hassel, Kimberly. 2021. “Digital Sociality in COVID-19 Japan.” Anthropology News website, December 7, 2021.

Copyright [2021] American Anthropological Association

Japan’s Disaster Artisans

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
By Aaron Delgaty
September 28, 2021

How do craft breweries in Japan and the United States weather unforeseen crises?

Summer 2012, Iwate, Japan. Among the skeletal foundations of former residences and businesses on Miyako City’s coastline was a saké (rice wine) brewery, the lone establishment left standing following the wave. A desiccated brown sakabayashi (a bundle of cedar needles) hung above the main entrance announcing the end of the brewing cycle. July marked the brewery’s first vintage since the disaster. A pyramid of professionally labeled amber bottles stood on a makeshift display fashioned from a shipping crate.

The owners, a young couple smartly dressed in business casual, accented by scuffed rubber boots, waited outside for the tour group. We were a group of tourists and mourners from farther inland on our way to a memorial service up the coast. Our stop was part promotion for the recovering business district, part uplifting brace against the somber undertaking ahead. The owners escorted us through their small brewhouse. They pointed out the gray watermark etched nearly two stories up on the brick wall, close to the vaulted ceiling, indicating the sea’s temporary apex. They showed off a new stainless steel kettle, juxtaposed with the former copper kettle, which had been crumpled nearly flat between the force of the water and the wall against which it now rested. Stepping outside, the owners donned black happi jackets (loose-fitting coats traditionally worn by laborers) emblazoned with the brewery’s seal and began handing out liberal samples in paper cups. Encouraged by alcohol, the quiet reverence of the tour steadily gave way to exaggerated compliments and conversation punctuated with hearty laughter. Soon, guests began opening their pocketbooks, buying bottles to take home as souvenirs. When it was time to part, we bowed and expressed our gratitude for the hospitality and delicious saké. Some shook hands, promising to return with family and friends. Others intoned “gambatte”—hang in there, keep at it, do your best.

Reflecting on this moment, I am impressed by the intricate weave of grief and hope, guilt and ambition that underscored that tour. To the tourists, the brewery stood as an icon of local, regional, even Japanese hardiness in the face of extreme hardship. The Japanese spirit as spirit. For the owners, the neatly arranged bottles and the money exchanging hands set against the backdrop of the ruined district served as tangible indicators of personal recovery, of possibility for the future. They were not out of the hazard—in a sense, no small business ever is—but revenue and good publicity gave means to move. To the customers, buying a bottle of saké was the least they could do, a small effort toward a crisis in which they were—and largely still were—powerless. For the brewers, whose skills could not be washed away, artisanship was empowerment, crafting a taste of hope from a landscape saturated in pain and loss.

Nearly a decade removed, the struggle of the Miyako brewery has taken on new relevance professionally and personally for me as both an anthropologist and artisan. I began researching Japan’s craft brewing scene in 2015; the United States was enjoying its third craft beer boom, the previous two having sputtered out due to a combination of technical mishandling and waning consumer patience (Grossman 2013). Craft beer, variously called jibīru or kurafuto bīru, was blossoming in Japan, due in part due to its American popularity, the growing availability of imported malted grain and hops (domestic sources of these key ingredients continue to be monopolized by macro breweries in Japan), and the increasing affordability of brewing equipment specially designed for small-scale operations.

Image Description: The image shows a stone floor walkway lined on either side by a row of stainless steel fermentation tanks. Blue hoses hang limply off a tank on the left side, and two buckets stand upturned at the photograph’s top edge. The brewhouse is dimly lit, the atmosphere calm and still.
Caption: A brewery floor. A mostly idle brewhouse. A source of overwhelming anxiety. June 2020, North Carolina. Aaron Delgaty

More critically for my collaborators, brewers and business owners hanging their shingles in metropolitan Tokyo, craft beer represented a professional haven for university-educated young Japanese disenchanted with the status quo. In a sense, the Japanese craft beer community was born of crisis: the breakdown of lifelong employment, the grinding competitiveness of coveted and increasingly scarce stable government or industry jobs, and the mounting existential dissatisfaction for traditional corporate culture have inspired a growing number of students and early-career professionals to pursue nontraditional employment in a host of cottage industries (Allison 2013). In this way, the liberating allure of Japanese craft remarkably parallels its American counterpart (Ocejo 2017).

The escape plan has not gone seamlessly. Japan’s craft industry has weathered its share of crises in its short tenure: laws and regulations that strongly favor large-scale producers, antagonism from macro breweries, the added costs of importing ingredients and specialty equipment, and customer apprehension to try untested brands. Even so, many of my collaborators claimed to take inspiration from their constraints. Some have transmuted cramped urban real estate into cozy brewpubs, the tight quarters accentuating the communal aesthetic. Others have substituted less accessible mainstream ingredients for accessible, yet unconventional adjuncts, creating brews that evoke a terroir of adaptability. (I know a place with a wonderful curry beer.) Many have compensated for what they lack in space and resources by forging deep bonds with local institutions and residents, patron communities hardened against consumer capriciousness.

Through determination and creative compromise, Tokyo brewers have carved out a comfortable niche catering to similarly adventurous souls dissatisfied with ubiquitous super-dry drafts. But even the most optimistic could not shake an anxiety common to craft communities in Japan and the United States alike. Operating within the natural uncertainty of small business and the volatile precedent set by their American forebears, Japanese brewers grapple with an underlying fear that the craft bubble will suddenly burst, that operational costs will become untenable, that customers will move on to the next fad. When, not if, that time comes, Japan’s lost generation will lose their refuge in brewing, and be left adrift once again.

These fears seemed to materialize in the spring of 2020. I was working professionally as a brewer in North Carolina while I wrapped up my PhD. The day before my defense, I was furloughed as a result of the governor’s March 14th shutdown order, along with everyone else at my brewery and so many others across the state. In the weeks that followed I saw an increasing number of breweries in Japan posting similar notices to social media: updated business hours, information about take-out and to-go options, assurances that they and their communities would hang in there and keep doing their best. Gambatte.      

This was a delicate ethnographic moment. As an anthropologist, I wanted to know how the Japanese craft scene was faring, and if it was coping differently than its American counterpart. Yet as a brewer, I knew how insensitive this line on inquiry would be to colleagues presently scrambling to develop to-go protocols, find alternate employment for their staff, and coax cans from backordered suppliers. I tested the waters, texting a brewer friend in North Carolina a couple weeks in to see how he was doing. “How do you think?” A curt reply but the circumstances warranted curtness. In time, I developed a more detailed picture of the situation facing Carolinian brewers through private guild crisis meetings and virtual happy hours. Most had furloughed staff. Some were brewing and running take-out services alone. Some weren’t brewing at all. Brewers were working for half or quarter pay, volunteering at times, trying to keep their businesses afloat so there would be a place to come back to when the vaccine finally landed. Some breweries had commissioned expansions prior to the shutdown and were now sitting in swanky taprooms or massive brewhouses with no way to pay down the loans. Government aid was slow coming and impenetrable, nonprofit grants hotly competitive. My interlocutors in Japan faced similar austerities, with trendy breweries in Tokyo and Okinawa facing the added strain of decreased domestic and international tourism. A number of Japanese and American brewers and brewery owners considered career changes: real estate, accounting, joining the military, moving back to the countryside, anything more stable than brewing.

Image Description: The image shows a close-up view of a beer mash, a combination of malted barley and wheat steeped in water in order to create the foundation of a beer. The mash is a warm light brown with black accents. Quartered donuts added to the mash stand in contrast to the grainy malt and light brown foam. Stainless-steel elements of the brewing vessel frame the top border.
Caption: Brew in progress. The brewery in motion. Creativity begets hope. December 2020, North Carolina. Aaron Delgaty

At the outset, a brewery manager in North Carolina had bullishly claimed, “A two-week vacation and we’ll be back in business by April.” COVID-19 proved to be a slower-burning crisis. But time’s passage inured my American and Japanese collaborators to the precariousness. They more readily swapped stories of hardships, strategies for tackling new anxieties, and wry jokes poking fun at their and others’ misfortunes. A Japanese friend, the brewer of the aforementioned curry beer, reached out. He noted that small businesses were still struggling well into September, and likely would continue. His brewery had closed its second location before it even opened. He had truncated his tap lineup to four of their best sellers. “It’s difficult,” he wrote, “but I’m still somehow doing what I can.” Then, taking an optimistic tack, he signed off with, “When I can travel from Japan, I definitely want to come and play!”

My friend’s resolve to somehow do what he could suggests a slowly swelling undercurrent of hope beneath the present precariousness. This hope is not baseless. Japanese and American brewers alike have endured over a year of operating in crisis. With restrictions lifting, multiple vaccines rolling out, and more customers walking through the doors, it feels like the worst is behind them even as they struggle to stay afloat. This hope manifests in the moments where a battered artisan looks back and realizes they’ve come through the storm, a little bent, a little broken, but still brewing.

Working with brewers in a pandemic recalls the Miyako brewery on that hot July afternoon. I ask a question now that I asked then: What does it mean to be resilient? What does it mean to roll with a crisis, take it into you, and come out a functioning system on the other side? The Miyako brewers stood on that other side, the scars of the wave etched into their brewery and their hearts, disaster artisans crafting a taste of hope in amber bottles. I do not know what tastes American and Japanese brewers will create when the current crisis recedes, but I would offer that maybe the taste of resilience is simply to continue creating a taste at all.

Aaron Delgaty is a teaching assistant professor in anthropology at UNC Chapel Hill. He received his PhD in anthropology from UNC Chapel Hill in 2020. His research explores craft brewing, distilling, and drinking culture as a means to navigate crisis. He is currently examining the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on breweries in Japan and the United States Outside of teaching and research, Aaron also works as a professional brewer.

Cite as: Delgaty, Aaron. 2021. “Japan’s Disaster Artisans.” Anthropology News website, September 28, 2021.

Copyright [2021] American Anthropological Association

Changing Mortuary Practices in Japan

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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Yohko Tsuji
August 13, 2020

The typical inscription on most Japanese tombstones does not show the names of the deceased. It says instead “Ancestral grave of the X family,” reflecting a lingering political heritage of the Meiji oligarchy (1868–1912). The imperial government established the ie (家), or the patrilineal family to which every citizen must belong, and mandated ancestor worship with the family grave as its locus to ensure the ie continuity (Tsuji 2002, 177-199). Hence, generations of family members in the direct line of descent—the family head, his wife, their heir, the heir’s wife, and so on—are buried together. Their descendants are responsible for looking after the family grave and worshipping their ancestors. A tale of two cemeteries in northern Osaka shows us much about recent changes in Japanese mortuary traditions.

The first is a municipal cemetery established in 1969. It had 4,000 graves by 1987 and was expanded to 6,364 in 2000. On the large terraced hillside overlooking the skyscrapers of Osaka City, one can see countless rows of traditional three-tier graves in which the cremains of several generations of family members are interred. Most inscriptions on them say “X family’s ancestral grave.” A few newer gravestones are carved with Chinese characters, such as serenity (寂), dream (夢), and appreciation (感謝).

Photograph of a cemetery.
Image description: Numerous stone grave markers line different levels of a cemetery. They all have wide, broad bases with smaller tiers stacked atop each other. The stone on the top tier of each grave is taller and narrower than those underneath and has a vertical inscription on it.
Caption: Traditional three-tier graves at the Municipal Cemetery. Yohko Tsuji

Yet this cemetery is not quintessentially traditional, because graves were not inherited but newly purchased; it is affiliated with neither Buddhist temples nor neighborhood communities; and it is an individual, not a family, who contracts a cemetery plot, though after the individual’s death the contract is transferable to another individual. This cemetery, like numerous public and commercial cemeteries, sprang up during Japan’s economic growth that began in the 1960s. The mass migration to urban areas at that time caused an acute shortage of graves because newcomers, whose family graves were located far away and hard to visit, tried to find alternative graves near their new homes. In 1971, the shortage and high cost of urban graves resulted in the construction of a columbarium with 552 locker-style repositories, adding another nonconventional feature to this cemetery.

More notable modifications of burial traditions occurred in 2019. The municipal government built a large monument to collectively entomb the cremains of 14,000 unrelated people in order to economize the burial space and to memorialize those entombed, thereby relieving each family from maintaining their own grave and worshipping their ancestors there. This monument helps to solve two major death-related problems in contemporary Japan: an increasing number of deaths as the baby boomer generation ages, and a growing number of people who have no grave or no family members to take care of their grave and afterlife.

Photograph of flowers placed on a monument.
Image description: A black sphere sits atop a raised circular platform that rests on a tiled circular pattern of dark grey stone. On the edge of the largest circle are four bouquets of flowers with colorful blossoms of yellow, pink, orange,and white.
Caption: Monument for Collective Burials at the Municipal Cemetery. Yohko Tsuji

The second cemetery,  established in 2012 and known as sakurasō (桜葬) or a cherry blossom cemetery, offers a different approach to resolve the same problems. Adopting the principle of jumokusō, or tree burials (Boret 2014), no tomb stones or monuments exist at the park-like site of this cemetery. Instead, cherry trees are planted to signify six burial areas, where unrelated people’s cremains are buried without markers. Each burial area has a few stones with small metal plates on them bearing varying inscriptions: some show the deceased’s names and dates of birth and death, and others include words of thanks or personal messages, such as “Good-bye. It was an interesting life.” A service to commemorate all of the dead is held annually.

Though the land of sakurasōcemetery belongs to a Buddhist temple, it is managed by a nonprofit organization (NPO) and is available to anyone regardless of religious belief. Like the monument at the municipal cemetery, these graves require neither maintenance nor descendants. The NPO offers support both before and after death by performing tasks that have traditionally been undertaken by next of kin but have become harder to do: checking on older people living alone, assisting with hospitalization, serving as the stand-in chief mourner for a funeral, and so on. The NPO also organizes regular meetings of those who will be buried together, creating a community of hakatomo which literally means “grave friends.”

This tale of two cemeteries illustrates the unmistakable transformations in Japanese mortuary tradition (Tsuji 2018, 17-30). They reflect and adapt to the changes in Japanese families, neighborhoods, workplaces, economy, ecology, and demographics that have occurred in the last half a century. Particularly, the family’s central role has diminished. Instead individual choices and decisions have become more important. Despite myriad societal changes however, death continues to be significant in people’s lives. Indeed, over 33 million websites are available to check the cost of a cemetery lot. Choosing a nontraditional grave and entrusting the care of the afterlife to extrafamilial entities, such as the municipal government and the sakurasōcemetery management, provides a tenable means of securing care of death and the afterlife. It does not necessarily mean that people have stopped practicing mortuary rituals. Rather, their nonconventional choices of graves and conformity to mortuary tradition coexist. During biannual religious weeks in the spring and the fall, extra buses are operated to the municipal cemetery for people who worship their ancestors. Some family members regularly visit the sakurasō cemetery, including on death anniversaries of their loved ones.

As Japanese society is rapidly aging, death and dying are becoming even more visible with the mass media constantly featuring pertinent information and people’s concerns about shūkatsu (終活), or preparation for death and the afterlife, escalating. Furthermore, as these cemeteries demonstrate, mortuary tradition is evolving and generating new types of practices.

Another such example is the practice of burial with one’s pet. Traditionally, pets are not allowed to be entombed with humans. Behind this ban is the Buddhist worldview, which places animals and humans in separate stages of the reincarnation cycle. However, in the last few decades, this clear demarcation has been blurred as pets have become increasingly regarded as indispensable family members. Called uchi-no-ko, or “our child,” just like human progeny, the pet shares daily life with many Japanese inside their residences rather than in a kennel outside. Uchi-no-ko is fed pet and human food rather than the leftovers given in the old days. People also clothe their pets with sweaters, caps, and socks and have them groomed regularly. They buy pet medical insurance and take them to veterinarians for illness and injury, not to mention check-ups and shots.

When uchi-no-ko dies, many Japanese have a funeral, hiring a pet funeral operator or asking a Buddhist priest to chant a sutra. They bury their fur child in a pet cemetery and visit it frequently, dismissing a more customary method of calling the health department to have the pets’ remains incinerated or, if the family has a yard, burying them in a hidden corner.

These pet parents suffer the loss of their children and are concerned about their pets’ afterlives as much as their own. Because the burial of pets in human graves is not permitted at most cemeteries, the everlasting separation from their pet and the uncertainty of the pet’s afterlife aggravate their grief. Buddhist priests frequently receive questions, such as: “Can uchi-no-ko rest in peace or go to heaven?” and “Can I and uchi-no-ko meet again after my death?” These pet owners strongly wish to be reunited with their pet in the same grave after their death. To address such sentiments, some cemeteries, including the aforementioned sakurasō cemetery, allow humans and pets to be buried together.

The tale of two cemeteries and the burial with one’s pet attest to the malleability of tradition. For its persistence, tradition must change, adapting to social transformations and accommodating people’s altered needs. Japanese mortuary tradition continues to evolve to handle death, “the supreme and final crisis of life” (Malinowski 1948, 47), in a contemporary world awash with immense changes.

Yohko Tsuji is an adjunct associate professor of anthropology at Cornell University and the author of the forthcoming book, Through Japanese Eyes: Thirty Years of Studying Aging in America. She has conducted fieldwork in America, Japan, and Thailand, and published articles on aging, death, conception of time, and social change.

The SEAA column is currently accepting submissions. Please contact Shuang Frost (shuanglu@fas.harvard.edu) and Hanna Pickwell (hpickwell@uchicago.edu) with your essay ideas and comments.

Cite as: Tsuji, Yohko. 2020. “Changing Mortuary Practices in Japan.” Anthropology News website, August 13, 2020. DOI: 10.14506/AN.1471

Copyright [2020] American Anthropological Association

Family in the Ruins of Nuclear Risk

by

Society for East Asian Anthropology
Jieun Cho
April 29, 2020

This piece is part of the SEAA series “An Anthropology of Ethics in East Asia.” The articles highlight different aspects of moral values and ethical practices in a range of Asian regions. They examine how individuals cope with societal changes such as environmental crises, nationalism, economic development, and mobility through lens of everyday ethics.

“I chose to not worry about radiation anymore, for as long as I stay living here; to live normally again for my children and my family,” said Kazumi, a mother of two children, who had decided to stop trying to move out of her neighborhood for the time being. Nine years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, I was listening to her confession of choosing to “live normally again” at a tea party for parents who were managing their anxieties in the face of long-term exposure to low-dose radiation in nuclear-affected areas. Employing the term “choice”, which has become all too familiar for people living in conflict-ridden areas that have not been evacuated (cf. Little 2019), Kazumi chose to give up “endless worries” as her own child-raising strategy. But what does this choice do for her in such an extraordinary environment? And what is this new normal life Kazumi is trying to make if it needs to be constantly chosen and confessed as such? Based on my ongoing fieldwork with families living with lingering post-Fukushima radiation, I take such choice as indexing an ethics of what I call balancing. Familial norms fail to provide actionable options when clearly the most effective way to protect children is to relocate to a risk-free elsewhere.

Kazumi lives in Koriyama City, one of the regions slightly outside the officially demarcated evacuation zone in Fukushima. In such a shadow zone, a life amidst unrecognized forms of nuclear risks has been effectively normalized with a newly introduced level of permissible radiation exposure—20 times the pre-disaster level for Fukushima. Although public debates over the long-term effects of low-dose radiation have escalated over time, amounting to what one may call science wars among ministries, academia, and citizens (Kimura 2016; Polleri 2019; Sternsdorff-Cisterna 2018), children’s health from the perspective of radiological protection has come to hold a central place in the imaginaries of biological vulnerability. However, those who have chosen to remain or return are left largely on their own with only limited help from central and local government (Lies 2017; McCurry 2017). Resources available for mitigating nuclear risks are differentially distributed along pre-existing lines of social, political, and economic inequalities; some could afford to leave while others were forced to make do by purchasing food from cleaner areas. Still others could scarcely afford anything. In a prolonged nuclear disaster, the matter at hand is not only the radioactive material itself, but also its construction as social facts, knowledge, and public feelings (see for example, Morris-Suzuki 2014; Hecht 2012; Masco 2008), all bearing on the actual lives of ordinary people.

Without doubt, living in the ruins of nuclear risk is a demoralizing situation for all the parents involved. Operating within the discursive domain of “family’s choice,” familial norms—specifically the injunction that parents should protect children until adulthood (Allison 2013; Borovoy 2005; cf. Doi 1973)—fail to provide actionable options when clearly the most effective way to protect children is to relocate to a risk-free elsewhere. Because they could not do this, the parents I encountered felt stuck and immobilized in the face of unavoidable risk, both physically and socially, and were struggling to raise children with limited resources outside the officially designated evacuation zone. In such moral struggles, “striking a balance” (baransu o toru, or oriai o tsukeru), to keep living, was a phrase I heard time and again in interviews and conversations, as a practical way to live through unwanted nuclear risks.

Photograph of a child trying to catch an ant.
Image description: A photograph showing a small child’s arm extended, reaching down to the paved ground with finger and thumb extended in an attempt to capture an ant crawling on the ground.
Caption: A three-year-old girl trying to catch an ant when allowed to play on the ground during a retreat for families from nuclear-affected areas. Jieun Cho

Like hundreds of thousands of others, Kazumi fled to the home of a relative in another city in Fukushima Prefecture after the disaster. As revealed by data that had been published over the following months, both her home and that of her relatives were exposed to the fallouts of radioactive iodine, which was recognized as the cause of childhood thyroid cancers after the Chernobyl disaster by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1996 (for more on knowledge production surrounding Chernobyl, see Brown 2017). After returning home under a new standard of permissible airborne radiation (note here that other material forms of radioactivity like soil are discounted), she found with the help of an NGO that parts of her living environment measured 100 times the radiation of a pre-disaster estimate. Because she did not know what this would mean for her children’s health, Kazumi searched for information about the effects of long-term exposure to radiation on children of her son’s age, only to become more frustrated. Although experts diverge on how or even if prolonged exposure in shadow zones leads to ill health constituting the need for relocation (Normile 2011), all agree that distancing from the source of exposure is the best way to remain safe—an option unavailable to her due to her husband’s local business. After years of failed attempts to move out, she was left with “nothing but stress” and a deep sense of guilt towards her children. Her sons, then entering puberty, had started retreating into their own worlds. According to her, she was “infectious,” spreading “depression” in her family.

Kazumi decided to break off from this state by no longer worrying about how to live somewhere else, and instead, “to actually live.” As a parent, this meant accepting the premise that insulating her children entirely from any kind of radiation exposure, let alone removing the exposure that had already happened, was impossible. A risk-free body is out of reach, but a reasonably healthy body may be realizable, depending on how this is defined and pursued. What she could do was to “strike a balance” by, for example, not stopping her children from volunteering to help struggling farmers in more contaminated areas. Kazumi evaluated the change in her own children as “learning to be proud as children of Fukushima (by helping farmers)”—something that made them “healthier.” The mind (kokoro) here was less an individual psyche, but more a state of well-being gained from ongoing interactions with others. I heard many other parents echo this emphasis on balance “between the mind and the body” as they struggled to find a livable definition of health while staying in or returning to Fukushima for work, aging parents, children’s education, etc. The mind and the body are interconnected, and the connection is facilitated through engagement with the outside world (which entails risks for further exposure). Might one call this a form of “life lived as itself”? That is, life as “actualities” in which the means (action) and ends (health) are “one and the same?” (Lambek 2010). From Kazumi’s determination that her children can live well and even “healthier,” I see less the prospect of ill health, but more a striving for actively inhabiting a place of one’s own.

What strikes me is the vitality Kazumi gained from her choice to “actually live.” If she was static in her previous, demoralized view about her own situation, her new normal life is forged by her own acts of balancing like giving permission to her children to do various things—what she calls “compromise” (dakyō) in a somewhat self-deprecating manner. These gestures in the everyday bring forth a worldview that in turn orients her to the everyday amidst nuclear risks. Forging a way forward like this has gotten Kazumi out of her house after a period of dormancy, both physically and socially, experienced by so many parents after the disaster who “caged” their own children (Bird 2013; Hanai and Lies 2014).

Such a form of life may be helpful in considering alternative approaches to the two extremes of reproducing the assumptions of false consciousness and placing relentless faith in scientific truth claims, as is often observed in political debates surrounding environmental uncertainty (see for example, Ahmann 2019; Hochschild 2016; Taussig 2019). In the bipolarized discourses of human rights, state failure, or scientific causality in post-Fukushima Japan, people like Kazumi appear to embody a position that is overdetermined by multiple trajectories of injustice. However, this emphasis on her victimhood says little about how Kazumi’s own choice leads her to new points of struggle in her daily efforts to live through the very conditions of overdetermination. From Kazumi’s determination that her children can live well and even “healthier,” I see less the prospect of ill health, but more a striving for actively inhabiting a place of one’s own (see for example, Allison 2013; Mahmood 2005), despite all in the life of Kazumi and her children that cannot be lived properly. At least this form of life she has chosen is livable; a child can have a future within this life, albeit outside the prospect of a pure body.

Jieun Cho is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at Duke University. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council, her dissertation research concerns middle-class families who are trying to raise healthy children while living amidst low-dose radiation in post-nuclear Japan.

Cite as: Cho, Jieun. 2020. “Family in the Ruins of Nuclear Risk.” Anthropology News website, April 29, 2020. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1397

Copyright [2020] American Anthropological Association

Stories of Kimchi and Zainichi Koreans in Japan

by

Society for East Asian Anthropology
Yoko Demelius
December 20, 2019

This piece is part of a SEAA column series on “Cultural Consumption and Performance in Asia.” They examine issues such as cultural curation, the uses of the past, material culture, power and market, as well as the enactment of lived experience.

Kimchi—fermented vegetables considered to be Korea’s national dish—is now highly popular in Japan. As the consumption of traditional Japanese pickles declined during the 1990s, the sale of kimchi increased until it became, from the 2000s, the most popular preserved vegetables on the Japanese market (Sankei Shimbun 2017). Still, many Zainichi Koreans—the multigenerational Korean minority in Japan—recall that such a commodification of “Koreanness” was once impossible to imagine. 

How do Zainichi Koreans understand Japanese consumers’ open embrace of kimchi in light of Japan’s reluctant social acceptance of its Korean minority population? Despite market-driven consumption’s shortcomings, the commercialization of ethnically symbolic artifacts can raise the general public’s awareness of and reduce skepticism toward a minority population. Analyzing kimchi’s gradual penetration of Japanese mainstream society within the juncture of “materiality” and “symbolism” (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007), this article explores the influence of material consumption on a commodity’s meanings over time. This discussion emerges from ethnographic data on Zainichi Koreans’s conceptualization of their identity, which I gathered in Japan’s Osaka and Hyogo Prefectures from 2017 to 2018. 

For her, sharing food, recipes, and especially kimchi, brings the abstract idea of “the Korean minority” into real flesh, taste, and mutual exchange between Korean and Japanese residents in their communities.

Kimchi used to symbolize marginalization for Zainichi Koreans in Japan. Originally known as “Korean pickles” (chōsenzuke), it was almost exclusively consumed in Japan among Korean migrants until the 1980s and was perceived by the Japanese as a taboo food (Lee 2002). Koreans who grew up in ghettos, which gradually developed from communal kitchens near factories and construction sites, remember their omonis (mothers) making and selling kimchi to neighbors who operated Korean barbecue pubs from their shacks. Japanese customers secretly consumed kimchi there well before it appeared on the mainstream market. 

Pre-Pacific War Korean migrants who arrived in Japan from the 1910s to the 1930s, as well as their offspring, strongly identified kimchi as the food of their homeland. In contrast, up until the 1990s, Japanese people saw kimchi as a food belonging to the “incomprehensible,” “unsanitary,” and “vulgar” world of migrants (Mizuno and Mun 2015). “Odoriferous” kimchi (Ku 2014) defined Japanese people’s stereotypical impression of ethnic Koreans. Mr. B., a novelist and a second-generation Korean in his 60s, recalled, “…throughout my childhood I was careful to leave last from school when going home. You know why? So the other guys wouldn’t see where I lived. The ghetto, the simple shed… and the smell of kimchi, they would have figured out who we were…” Until he came to terms with his insecurity about his ethnicity, Mr. B. used a Japanese alias to “pass” as Japanese. Still today, many Zainichi Koreans feel more comfortable using Japanese aliases in their daily lives to avoid discrimination and awkward social situations (Kwon and Kojima 2015). 

Zainichi Koreans’ cultural identification with kimchi has been closely associated with preserving their Koreanness. During Japanese colonial rule in Korea from 1910 to 1945, many Koreans arrived in Japan as forced laborers and others as voluntary immigrants who had lost property under the Japanese occupation. Consuming their homeland’s cuisine, including kimchi, provided a hint of normalcy for those who lived in dreadful conditions as colonial subjects and laborers. Communal kitchens, where women continuously produced kimchi, offered gathering spots for migrant workers. 

The image of kimchi as Korea’s comfort food, its accessibility, and a taste that many find enjoyable have created a “shared zone” of savory cuisine that brings together consumers of different backgrounds in Japan.

Segregated living quarters, communal kitchens in ghettos, and poor living conditions continued in most areas until the 1970s and 1980s when municipal public housing projects commenced to dissolve the ghettos. Some ghettos remained untouched until well into the 2000s, when kimchi and segregated neighborhoods continued to mark ethnic boundaries between Korean communities and the Japanese mainstream population. To Zainichi Koreans, omonis’ surviving kimchi recipes now symbolize Korean dignity, the perseverance of older generations, and the prosperity of future generations during the adversarial environment of pre- and postwar Japan (Wender 2000).

With an eye on kimchi’s recent rise in popularity in contemporary Japan, Zainichi Koreans often contemplate their marginalized status in a society with an overwhelmingly monoethnic national ideology (Oguma 2002). They speak of derogatory expressions associated with odoriferous kimchi that they used to hear from Japanese people. Despite multigenerational residence in Japan, many Zainichi Koreans have chosen not to obtain Japanese citizenship. They continue to face discrimination in employment, education, housing, social welfare, elderly care, pension funds, and political representation (Chapman 2008). They also feel torn between the Koreanness and Japaneseness that reside within them. 

A photo of people gathering at food stands where Korean women sell Korean food at an intercultural event.
On a sunny day, people gather at food stands where Korean women sell Korean rice cakes (topokki) and pancakes (chijimi) at a local intercultural event. Yoko Demelius

Yet intercultural events, in which kimchi plays an iconic role, are now helping to change this long-term discrimination. Kimchi has stimulated the Japanese public’s curiosity about other Korean dishes and more recently, for South Korean media products. Mr. B. is the committee head for an annual intercultural event that his municipality began to sponsor in the spirit of mutual support among foreign and Japanese residents following the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995. He commented, “As usual, the food stands are one of our main exhibitions… Food, dance and music are the base of our cultural exchange.” He believes that appreciating other cultures’ artifacts and food fosters new perspectives in the minds of event-goers and is convinced that the intercultural event is a small step toward bringing people of different backgrounds closer. A steady stream of Japanese volunteers has also supported the intercultural event, which some Zainichi Koreans have interpreted as a sign of their social acceptance by the Japanese mainstream population. Mr. B. feels that, thanks to the event and its fans, ordinary Japanese citizens have become more aware of Japan’s minority populations, and xenophobic sentiments toward foreign residents have declined.

Mrs. C., a Zainichi Korean political activist in her 50s, also believes that kimchi and the stories behind it can help ease deep-rooted discrimination against her people by the Japanese. She reflected,

I used to bring little nibbles to my children’s school’s PTA [parent-teacher association] gatherings. I was upfront. I always said, “I am a Korean.” It always worked for me. Who knows, there might have been people who disliked me. But food did wonders. “Wow, it’s so tasty, Mrs. C! How did you make it?” they would say… People started to ask me about the recipes, and I told them stories about my mother… It’s not just about kimchi… there are stories behind it. There are real people behind what I make. 

She now provides Korean cuisine cooking classes to Japanese people at public community centers. For her, sharing food, recipes, and especially kimchi, brings the abstract idea of “the Korean minority” into real flesh, taste, and mutual exchange between Korean and Japanese residents in their communities.

A photo of two Korean schoolgirls in traditional Korean costumes singing on an open-air stage at an intercultural event.
Two Korean schoolgirls in traditional Korean costumes (chima jeogori), sing on an open-air stage at a local intercultural event. Yoko Demelius

Kimchi’s status as a staple food in contemporary Japan has eased the public’s hesitance and skepticism toward Koreanness and the Korean minority. Some of my informants commented that if no kimchi were available to average consumers in Japan, the level of tolerance toward Zainichi Koreans would be much lower. The image of kimchi as Korea’s comfort food, its accessibility, and a taste that many find enjoyable have created a “shared zone” of savory cuisine that brings together consumers of different backgrounds in Japan. Although kimchi does not evoke the perseverance of Korean ethnic pride in Japanese consumers’ minds, Zainichi Koreans believe that kimchi is no longer a symbol of sociopolitical demarcation and recognize this shift as a sign of Japanese society’s gradual acceptance of Koreanness. 

Contemporary kimchi consumption in Japan does not challenge the public stance on Japan’s occupation of Korea, the distinction between North and South Korea, and, most of all, why and how Koreans are living in Japan. However, such consumption can serve as an entry point into these historical and political questions. Novels and films by Zainichi Koreans (e.g. Chong 2008; Fukazawa 2019) that raise historical and sociopolitical questions are also gaining increasing attention from the Japanese public. The grievances of history are a fraction of the reality that Zainichi Koreans would like the world to remember. They hope that the Japanese public will reflect nationally on its postwar situation in the near future (for example, on the traumatic effects inflicted by  Japan’s colonization of Korea) and will fully accept the Korean minority into Japanese society—as more than the originators of kimchi.

Yoko Demelius is a social anthropologist and a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. She examines the tension between minorities’ ethnicity claims and the homogeneous national ideology in contemporary Japanese rhetoric, by exploring various forms of social platforms and cultural consumption. 

Please contact SEAA section news contributing editors Shuang Frost (shuanglu@fas.harvard.edu), Heidi Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu), and Hanna Pickwell (hpickwell@uchicago.edu) with your essay ideas and comments.

Cite as: Demelius, Yoko. 2019. “Stories of Kimchi and Zainichi Koreans in Japan.” Anthropology News website, December 20, 2019. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1331

Copyright [2019] American Anthropological Association

Indigenous Survival Politics in the Promotion of a National Discourse

by

Society for East Asian Anthropology
Roslynn Ang
September 13, 2019

In January 2018, 10 members from an Ainu traditional performance group, Sapporo Upopo Hozonkai (Sapporo Upopo Preservation Society, hereafter SUH), traveled from Sapporo, the capital city of Hokkaido prefecture, to Honolulu in Hawai’i for a one-day performance at the Ala Moana Centerstage. This performance promoted Upopoy, a state-funded National Ainu Museum and Park (also known as Symbolic Space for Ethnic Harmony) due to open on April 24, 2020 in Hokkaido to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics. This performance in Hawai’i is an instance of the global tendencies of settler states occupying indigenous lands to appropriate native bodies and culture for its national discourse. It is also one among many utilized by SUH as a means for survival through a sustained platform for cultural praxis and for creating trans-indigenous ties with indigenous peoples experiencing similar forms of settler colonialism.

The Ainu lived in Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands, and Sakhalin before they were gradually colonized by the expanding Japanese empire from the nineteenth century onward. Post-1945 Japan had represented itself as a homogeneous nation with no ethnic minorities until 2008, when grassroots organizing with trans-indigenous movements compelled Japan to recognize the Ainu as indigenous. This was followed by a New Ainu Bill in 2019, which includes the planning and promotion of Upopoy. It seems that the Ainu are to play a large role in Japan’s shift to a multiethnic and global nation speaking the language of harmonious national coexistence as represented in the construction of Upopoy for global tourists.

Six women dressed in summer wear on a beach with trees, surfboards and other tourists in the background. Some are gazing at the sea while some are in various stages of taking photographs with their mobile phones. The setting sun lights up their faces.
SUH members enjoying a quick visit to Waikiki Beach on the day of their arrival. Roslynn Ang

During their two performances at the Ala Moana Centerstage, I noticed several moments of dissonance. During one such moment, Hatsumi, a member of SUH, tried to ask the audience how they felt about a particular performance, but the emcee paid her no heed. I learned that while he understood Japanese, he stuck to the script because he was only paid to promote Upopoy and not to translate for the performers.

The first session ended with aPoro Rimse (a round dance). I was surprised to find familiar faces among the audience members who volunteered to join in the dance. They belong to a separate Ainu contingent who are employed at Upopoy and were on a four-day tour to learn about Polynesian cultural performances and history at the Polynesian Cultural Center and the Bishop Museum. This participation with SUH was included as part of their itinerary. The second session’s Poro Rimse finale ended with a different set of volunteers: a group of Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) men from a Hula dance company. After the finale, they started an informal round of gift exchange and photo taking on the stage with SUH members, amid the gaze of lingering spectators. Finally, the SUH members and the Kānaka Maoli company concluded the day with dinner together at a nearby restaurant.

About thirteen men and women dressed in traditional embroidered dark blue robes form a circle on a wooden stage with the words "Ala Moana Centerstage" on the second floor overhang. The words are cut off and only "centerstage" can be seen. Some audience members are looking at the performance from the second floor of the mall.
SUH’s Poro Rimse dance with the volunteers from Upopoy. Roslynn Ang

Settler state appropriation and consumption

Settler states appropriate the indigenous into their national framework in order to extend a lack of precolonial history on indigenous territories, thus justifying its occupation. This appropriation sustains a consumption of harmony into the present and future without addressing historical violence and contemporary inequalities. In an analysis of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Janice Forsyth calls the settler nation’s appropriation of indigenous culture for such global events an “illusion of inclusion”—a performative marketing move that does not redress unequal relations (2016).

Jennifer Adese (2016) connects this phenomenon to Jack D. Forbes’s “Wétiko psychosis” (2008), a psychological infection with symptoms that include the settler compulsion to consume all things indigenous. This cannibalistic compulsion seeks to absorb indigenous natives into settler nations in multifarious ways. For this specific ethnographic snippet, it eliminates the Ainu’s cultural sovereignty to communicate their performance. Their performance, in turn, was mediated by and incorporated into a settler-national narrative devoid of historical violence. Recall that Hatsumi had no control over her communications with the audience as the performance was mediated by an emcee who was not on SUH payroll. State institutions funded the performance to represent Japan’s multiethnic harmony for global consumption. This same performance of harmony and consumption of native culture is also discussed in Claudia Huang’s piece from this series.

Scholars’ and Ainu activists’ critique of the state-funded Upopoy echoes Forsyth’s critique— this is a settler nation’s marketing move that evades the issue of inequality (see Morris-Suzuki 2018). This was evident even in the project planning stage. Concentrated in the hands of state actors and a few powerful Ainu, there was limited feedback from the broader Ainu community.

Survival politics in/against the settler-national narrative

The histories of the Japanese settler state and the Ainu are complex. The Ainu survived more than a century of forced assimilation and discrimination. Foreign contagions, frontier violence, forced labor, and forced relocation decreased the indigenous population (Walker 2001). Consequently, a discourse of the Ainu as “dying natives” arose to align with the legitimacy of settler occupation on native lands and resonated with the manifest destiny so often used to validate the mantra of “Kill the Indian (or Ainu in this case) and save the man” across settler states. SUH’s performance, among others, is a statement of their refusal to disappear in spite of this history of settler colonial elimination.

In general, urban Ainu are occupied with primary professions such as office workers, laborers, homemakers, and school-goers. SUH members live in urban Sapporo and most of them do not perform full time as professionals. They are mostly middle-aged women freed from work and childcare, retired men, and school-aged children. Their performances are largely supported by state-funded institutions (for example, the Foundation for Ainu Culture), that create a space for them to practice their culture and sustain community relations.

The Japanese state had tried and is still trying to depoliticize the Ainu community’s movements with a perfunctory recognition of a valorized Ainu culture to pacify them (see Povinelli 2002 for parallels in Australia’s case). While SUH depends on state funding for performances, they simultaneously utilize the trans-indigenous spaces provided by the settler state for their own ends. I am not discounting the fact that Ainu performance groups remain severely hampered by the problematic concepts of authenticity, settler nationalism, and everyday racism. However, their continued survival, encapsulated in SUH’s performance at the Ala Moana Centerstage and in the recognition of their indigenous status in Japan, marks an ongoing process in undermining the boundaries of settler race and nationhood. Their survival politics depends on settler state benevolence, even as they create trans-indigenous ties beyond the narrative of the settler state. As such, with the Ainu gaining more global visibility, there is an increasing need to rethink the meaning of “Japan.”

The ten women from the performance group poses on the stage, in front of a poster with the words "Hokkaido Ainu Culture Fest." Words in smaller fonts, with parts blocked by the standing performers, read "Opening of Symbolic Space for Ethnic Harmony, Shiraoi Town, Hokkaido, April 24, 2020." The back row has four women standing and two kneeling on the right, and the front row has four women kneeling. They are dressed in dark blue robes embroidered in colorful threads and cloths.
SUH performers on the Ala Moana Centerstage, with the banner for Upopoy. Roslynn Ang

Trans-indigenous ties beyond the limits of national discourse

Settler colonialism may infect settlers with Forbes’s Wétiko psychosis to consume all things native, but it also connects indigenous peoples in a common experience of loss, including the loss of territorial sovereignty, cultural sovereignty, history, family, and life. The Ainu were involved in numerous trans-indigenous exchanges well before their visit to Hawai’i. During the 2008 G8 summit in Hokkaido, Ainu activists and their allies invited indigenous peoples from the G8 settler nations to draft a declaration pressuring Japan to recognize the Ainu as indigenous (Lewallen 2008). Kapi‘olani Community College in Honolulu hosted the 2014 World Indigenous Peoples’ Conference on Education (WIPCE), which was attended by Ainu from Hokkaido and Tokyo. This was followed by a WIPCE report in 2015, delivered by several Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) guests in Sapporo. Despite a settler nation discourse of harmonious multiethnicity and SUH’s dependence on state funding, SUH’s performance in Ala Moana Centerstage sustains a non-settler, trans-indigenous space for exchange with the Kānaka Maoli. This trans-indigenous network is also a potential space for future activism and critical discourse on settler states.

The co-option of an indigenous minority for a national project may be problematic. However, the process sometimes aligns with the aims of the Ainu performance groups to reinforce their existence in contemporary Japan while strengthening trans-indigenous ties with other indigenous peoples, including the Kānaka Maoli in this case. The objectives of the Japanese settler state and the Ainu may not be entirely antagonistic, with the former desiring a performance of national harmony and the latter emphasizing cultural survival, communal relations, and trans-indigenous ties. As part of the larger process of cultural survival and communal continuity, SUH’s performances nevertheless exhibit the potential to reconfigure settler legitimacy as the Ainu gain more global traction in trans-indigenous networks.

Roslynn Ang works with the Sapporo Upopo Hozonkai, an Ainu performance group registered under UNESCO Intangible Heritage of Japan. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in global perspectives in society at New York University Shanghai. Her research interests include performance, decolonization, settler colonial studies, representations of race and nation, and Japan’s colonial history with East Asia and the West.

Please contact Shuang Frost (shuanglu@fas.harvard.edu) and Heidi Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu) with your essay ideas and comments for the SEAA section news column.

Cite as: Ang, Roslynn. 2019. “Indigenous Survival Politics in the Promotion of a National Discourse.” Anthropology News website, September 13, 2019. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1260

Copyright [2019] American Anthropological Association

Curating and Performing the Japan Cultural Experience

by

Society of East Asian Anthropology
Heidi K. Lam
July 8, 2019

Editors’ Note: This piece is part of a SEAA column themed series on “Cultural Consumption and Performance in Asia.”The articles highlight different aspects of consumption and performance in a range of Asian regions. They examine issues such as cultural curation, the uses of the past, material culture, power and market, as well as the enactment of lived experience.

A group of foreign tourists in colorful rented kimonos walked down a street with preserved wooden buildings on each side, within a neighborhood marketed for its traditional Japanese atmosphere. As they chatted with one another in their home country’s language, one person in the group held out a selfie stick attached to a cell phone in order to record their activities in Japan. This series of photos or videos may be uploaded and shared later on a social media site. The surrounding environment and their clothing—perhaps the back of their obi (the kimono’s sash), their bodies in kimono, the street scene, or a rickshaw driver in costume waiting for tourists like them—would become props.

Lamenated poster with bilingual text. The English reads: 'Clothing for rent': We rend out traditional Japanese clothing. You can wear our kimonos, samurai armor or ninja outfits. Choose from our large collection [text illegible]/ House Number12 [text illegible]"
A poster advertises rental services for traditional Japanese clothing. Heidi Lam

I frequently encountered scenes similar to this within many touristic districts in Japan, when conducting fieldwork on the Japanese culture industry from 2013 to 2017. They could have taken place in Kyoto, Tokyo’s Asakusa district, Kamakura, Nikko, or elsewhere. Tourism industries and cultural institutions are increasingly offering commercial experiences in which consumers embody a performative “tourist gaze” that “orders and regulates the relationships between various sensuous experiences while away, identifying what is visually-out-of-ordinary, what are relevant differences, and what is ‘other’” (Urry and Larsen 2011). A kimono rental is not only a brief transaction involving a piece of clothing, but a potentially standardizing and highly visible consumer experience that temporarily allows tourists to role-play Japanese cultural characters and perform their view of Japanese culture through their activities. The role of visually curating culture used to be performed by organizations, but is now increasingly assumed by consumers, given the rise of digital platforms based on user-generated online content such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

Such socially embedded and embodied experiences are referred to in Japanese as taiken (literally meaning a “body test”). Consumersare invited to try curated spaces, services, and activities in a wide variety of contexts such as museums, touristic attractions, educational entertainment, and clothing retail stores. In a growing inbound tourism industry (with a record number of 31 million overseas visitors to Japan in 2018), taiken has become a cross-cultural means of communicating Japanese culture. In the form of interactive cultural experiences, it is believed to offer for instance exclusive access to the authentic and unique aspects of Japan.

Businesses and organizations are seeking commercial opportunities in encouraging tourists to experience Japanese culture through their bodies and actions (see Pine and Gilmore 1999), alongside tourism associations that link historical and cultural narratives to geographical sites. Kimono shops, which used to sell made-to-order kimonos for life occasions, are now expanding their services to include tourist rentals that accommodate different budgets. These shops currently advertise in English, Chinese, Korean, and other foreign languages to meet overseas tourists’ growing demand to experience Japanese culture by wearing kimono. A Kyoto-based company that holds traditional tea ceremonies in English even offers a Kimono Plan in collaboration with a nearby kimono rental company.

Tourists can also engage with cultural character types such as the Ninja and the Samurai through NPOs, theme parks, performing arts-based business enterprises, and even a store. They can undergo Iga-ryū School ninja training sessions in English and take samurai sword training lessons with professional actors. They can also participate in Zen meditation experiences that were reportedly practiced by samurai in the past and create a short samurai sword-fighting film at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport.

A sword-fighting lesson and demonstration with samurai at a theme park. Heidi Lam

The foregrounding of experience-based tourism is believed to be able to guide tourist behavior. In 2017, Japan’s Prime Minister Abe Shinzō asserted the necessity to alter the focus of overseas visitors’ trips from the “explosive buying” (bakugai) of merchandise (an overt reference to the Japanese media’s depictions of Chinese tourists’ shopping activities) to experience, especially to develop the economy of Japan’s rural regions. Mentioning the buzzwords insta-bae and SNS-bae, he suggested that touristic localities increase the kind of scenery that tourists can transform into aesthetically pleasing images suitable for social media platforms such as Instagram. Cities and businesses have launched Instagram campaigns promoting touristic activities in Japan, in conjunction with cultural experiences. They solicit, for example, images of people wearing yukata and kimono in local settings or engaging with objects evoking a particular Japanese cultural theme.

Many of the touristic experiences revolve around cultural characters and objects that overseas tourists had likely encountered in in their home countries and that may have inspired them to visit Japan (Seaton et al. 2017). The 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics presentation, which took place at the Rio Olympics’ closing ceremony in 2016, featured not only Tokyo’s iconic landmarks and Japanese athletes but also Pac-man, Doraemon, Hello Kitty, and Super Mario, among other characters. In the presentation, Prime Minster Abe transforms first into the animated version of Super Mario in a video before emerging on stage in a costume. Commercial cultural experiences targeted at overseas tourists similarly allow individuals to encounter Japan directly by inhabiting characters and using objects with their bodies. Characters and objects could travel between media platforms, appear in the material world as merchandise (Allison 2006), and even be layered onto the body.

In this manner, cultural branding and curation are now outsourced to tourists, who become the most visible performers through their on-site embodied performances and their social media usage. A manager of a cultural theme park mused on the communication solutions offered by the conveyance of Japanese culture through the bodily senses: He had been worried about the language barrier faced by his staff with the influx of foreign customers. The body memory and sociality involved in such touristic experiences, in his opinion, could potentially provide an accessible introduction to foreign cultures and opportunities for cultural exchanges. However, several overseas visitors who participated in cultural experiences or visited cultural attractions told me that while they knew the actions they were doing and the name of the objects they were using, they did not fully understand why these actions and things were important.

There exists the risk of creating monocultures that negate the plurality of both the locals’ everyday experiences and consumer identities. We must acknowledge the multiple understandings of cultural meaning and media used in the digital documentation of consumer experiences. The focus of a commercialized cultural experience can easily pivot exclusively to consumer actions and appearances, ignoring the social and historical meanings underlying local practices, traditions, and interactions with material objects.

If businesses and other organizations offer the same kinds of cultural experiences for touristic consumption, they may well codify a predictable repertoire of characters, objects, and activities used to brand Japanese culture to the world and undermine the uniqueness promised by such experiences. In turn, this may also reinforce the travelers who wish to experience the stereotypical elements of a certain culture. When organizations and consumers shape cultural consumption in a feedback loop, it is necessary to think about whether an embodied but truly collaborative participation is possible in order to avoid an over-saturated and generically curated version of Japanese culture.

Heidi K. Lam is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Yale University. Her research interests include cultural performance/animation, the affective labor of service workers and consumers, and the cultural branding of Japan in Asia and the world.

Please contact Shuang Frost (shuanglu@fas.harvard.edu) and Heidi Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu) with your essay ideas and comments.

Cite as: Lam, Heidi K. 2019. “Curating and Performing the Japan Cultural Experience.” Anthropology News website, July 8, 2019. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1199

Copyright [2019] American Anthropological Association

Performance, Sign Language, and Deaf Identity in Japan

by

Society of East Asian Anthropology
Steven C. Fedorowicz
June 5, 2019


Editors’ Note: This piece is part of a SEAA column themed series “Cultural Consumption and Performance in Asia.” The articles highlight different aspects of consumption and performance in a range of Asian regions. They examine issues such as cultural curation, the uses of the past, material culture, power and market, as well as the enactment of lived experience.

Early in my research, Deaf people told me repeatedly that Japanese Sign Language (JSL) is the most valued aspect of Deaf culture and the most reliable means of communication and information-sharing. Performance genres using JSL, such as film, theater, comedy, dance, pantomime and puppet shows, are important components of Deaf culture that illustrate Deaf social issues and provide enjoyable and understandable entertainment. Through 20 years of research experience in Japan, I realized that JSL itself can also be viewed as a performance genre found in the everyday lives of Deaf people, considering the relationship between their presentations of JSL and shared Deaf identity through the consumption of information and values. Elaborating on the ideas discussed in Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Bohannan (1992) writes of how people accept, create, renew and reject culture through performance. I discuss in this essay these performances involving JSL, based on fieldwork conducted at workshops held by the Japanese Sign Language Atelier in Hirakata city, Osaka prefecture—a sign language circle (or club) that use storytelling techniques to teach JSL and ultimately Deaf identity. I show how culturally Deaf people are consumed with rejecting the “small-d deaf” orientations placed on them by society and striving to adapt their social roles to match their ideal “capital-D Deaf” identity.

Not all deaf people are Deaf

The deaf/Deaf terms and differentiation have been used within deaf and sign language studies in the United States since the 1980s, if not earlier. Deaf activists in Japan recently began using these English terms to describe their situation. “Small-d deaf” refers to hearing loss; deafness is seen as a disability requiring medical assistance and social welfare support to aid and/or rehabilitate the individual. In this context, oral teaching methods are stressed to help deaf individuals better communicate within the hegemonic hearing society. Such methods originated from the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf in Milan, Italy in 1880, where a resolution was passed banning the use of sign language in deaf schools. These policies were quickly adopted by the United States and many European countries, and later by Japan in 1920. The ban on sign language in the classroom, mandated by the Japanese Ministry of Education, remained in effect until 1993.


Members of Japanese Sign Language Atelier practice to improve their performance of JSL and create greater Deaf identity. Steven C. Fedorowicz

“Capital-D Deaf,” in contrast, refers to a certain cultural belonging rather than hearing loss or absence. The term Deaf was created in defiance of the deficit laden “deaf and dumb” expression, with the capital “D” serving as an empowering device that emphasizes the group identity. Culturally Deaf people view themselves as a linguistic minority that uses a visually based language. Often working together in social movements (Honna and Kato 1995), Deaf people fight against discrimination and prejudice, spread awareness of JSL, and empower themselves to make their own decisions about education, language and economic issues. Such movements can be seen as promoting an ideology of cultural independence from hearing society, an example of Benedict Anderson’s (1983) “imagined community” based on a shared identity.

Sign language in Japan

Two forms of sign language are currently used in Japan: JSL and Signed Japanese. Deaf people describe JSL as their mother tongue and the language they use among themselves. Recently codified by Japanese Deaf linguists, it is different from spoken Japanese with regard to modality, grammar, word order, and worldview. Facial expressions and classifiers are used as key grammatical elements. JSL classifiers, akin to counters in spoken Japanese that are used to quantify nouns depending on size and shape, become handshapes that substitute for standardized signs. Within this form of visual communication, signers can move and manipulate a classifier like the object it represents.

As Signed Japanese lacks the all-important facial expressions and classifiers found in JSL, Deaf people often find it confusing. For them, the meaning, nuances and the relationships between imagery and reality are absent in Signed Japanese.

Deaf people describe Signed Japanese as an artificial sign language that was created, used and promulgated by hearing educators, social welfare workers, and most sign language interpreters. While Signed Japanese borrows some handshapes from JSL, it forces them into the same grammatical order as spoken Japanese. As Signed Japanese lacks the all-important facial expressions and classifiers found in JSL, Deaf people often find it confusing. For them, the meaning, nuances and the relationships between imagery and reality are absent in Signed Japanese. Furthermore, Deaf people resent that hearing people enforce the use of Signed Japanese rather than the more natural JSL.

Schools for the deaf worldwide, especially in Japan, primarily endeavor to teach students to speak. Instructions in pronunciation and lip reading take up so much time that deaf children are often three years behind their hearing counterparts in academic subjects. Also, not all deaf children can acquire adequate and understandable speech. Those who can pick up some speech are considered brighter than their classmates and are often mainstreamed into hearing schools. If any sign language is used in deaf schools, it is Signed Japanese, a by-product of oral education. These conditions lead to small-d “deaf” orientations, as well as “hearing disabled” and/or “hard of hearing” identities. Culturally Deaf people are critical of these conditions and outcomes; they often lament the limitations of oral education and Signed Japanese in regular academic classes and the lack of effective communication which ultimately block the realization of any shared Deaf identity.

Activism and workshops to create Deaf identity

While the national organization Japanese Federation of the Deaf has been instrumental in the recent legal recognition of JSL in some municipalities and prefectures, the most dynamic efforts in promoting JSL and resolving everyday deaf-related issues for the benefit of deaf people have been made by local grassroots groups. Although hundreds of sign language circles exist in Japan, most teach Signed Japanese to hearing people. The Japanese Sign Language Atelier in Hirakata city, however, was founded in 1997 by Deaf people as a sign language circle for the benefit of Deaf people. Atelier’s early goals were to promote JSL and Deaf culture by spreading awareness, to fight discrimination in communication and education, and to create Deaf identity in local communities.

Atelier hosts and conducts regular workshops with Deaf teachers, researchers and entertainers, with the aim of benefiting Deaf people who use JSL. A few years ago, the group started a series of workshops called the Atelier Project that was intended to be a “clinic” for teaching participants a “pure JSL” unpolluted by Signed Japanese. Except for a few hearing people, most participants in these clinics were deaf. Their previous deaf identity was based upon being raised in a hearing world, being subjected to oral methods of language acquisition at deaf schools, or being mainstreamed into hearing schools.

One Atelier Project workshop I attended used storytelling to practice image training and interpretation from Japanese (in written form with some emoji) to JSL. Storytelling is an important tool in JSL training. Components that appear to be pantomime, theatrics or embellishments are important for the effective performance of JSL and should be viewed, respectively, as classifiers, intonation, and description. Good Deaf storytellers are admired for their communication skills and their ability to transmit Deaf cultural traits and values of the Deaf.

During the workshop, participants were given a Japanese text—a script with a simple story. They were asked to memorize it and interpret it into JSL. Performances were videotaped so they could be re-watched and carefully scrutinized. The few hearing participants were asked to go first. Most of them treated the exercise as a literal translation from a written form of Japanese to a signed form; in other words, their performances were heavily influenced by Signed Japanese. The Deaf teacher told them that their signing was incorrect. Next, deaf and Deaf people were asked to show their versions of the text. Many deaf participants were chided for signing in a “hearing” manner and encouraged to become “more Deaf,” to change their performance so as to become culturally Deaf.

Finally, the Deaf teacher demonstrated his version in JSL. He often uses classifiers rather than standard signs. He also stressed the use of imagery and everyday experience, for example the actual experience of walking a dog that both hearing and deaf participants did not consider. Most importantly, his rich facial expression served as a crucial grammatical component for conveying thoughts and feelings.

The Atelier Project workshops’ goals are to eradicate Signed Japanese,  replace it with JSL, and transform deaf orientations into Deaf identity. Most times, such transformations are achieved. Small-d deaf people often discover their deafness as adults and resent the fact that they were denied effective communication, the use of JSL, and group identity, because the mainstream society emphasized their so-called disability and enforced oral education policies. They now have the chance to associate with Deaf people and groups to improve JSL competence and gain a greater understanding of Deaf culture. Through such endeavors, deaf people can become Deaf.

Steven C. Fedorowicz is a cultural anthropologist, visual anthropologist, and associate professor of anthropology in the Asian Studies Program at Kansai Gaidai University. His interests include deaf communities, sign language, performance, globalization and ethnographic photography.  See more of his work athttp://visualanthropologyofjapan.blogspot.com/.

Please contact Shuang Frost (shuanglu@fas.harvard.edu) and Heidi Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu) with your essay ideas and comments.

Cite as: Fedorowicz, Steven C. 2019.  “Performance, Sign Language, and Deaf Identity in Japan.” Anthropology Newswebsite, June 5, 2019. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1182

Copyright [2019] American Anthropological Association

Stuff Matters, Especially When You Risk “Everything” for It

by

Society for East Asian Anthropology
Anna Vainio
March 11, 2019

Editor’s note: This piece is part of a SEAA column themed series “Cultural Consumption and Performance in Asia.” The articles highlight different aspects of consumption and performance in a range of Asian regions. They examine issues such as cultural curation, the uses of the past, material culture, power and market, as well as the enactment of lived experience.

Mrs. M. realized she had made a miscalculation by staying in her property on the afternoon of March 11, 2011, when water started bulging in through her floor. She had heard the official warning of the oncoming tsunami and knew that the evacuation order was serious. She had every intention of running to higher ground once she collected some belongings—and more importantly, once she found her cat.

She was ultimately caught in the tsunami. Unable to run anymore, her only option was to climb onto the roof and hope for the best. Her house was eventually lifted up by the tsunami and crashed into the roof of the neighboring concrete building. There, she spent the night listening to the waves coming and going. She never found her cat, but she managed to salvage some items, including her wedding dress, from the wreckage of her house the next day.

The more I listened to people’s experiences, the more I became aware of the underlying multilayered relationship they had with the things they tried to salvage despite the oncoming danger.

Mrs. M.’s story was only one of many I heard in the Northeast (Tōhoku) region of Japan in 2015 and 2016, several years after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. I conducted fieldwork in the coastal towns of Miyagi Prefecture, the region hardest hit by the disasters in terms of human and material losses (Kazama and Noda 2012). I met local residents with first-hand experience of the disaster, new arrivals who had moved into these towns after the disaster, civil society leaders, and local government workers. My aim was to understand how these local communities perceived recovery in the Tōhoku region and how their experiences can help elucidate the gap between theory and practice in decentralized community-based approaches to recovery (Sou 2018, Davidson et. al. 2006).

My purpose was not to focus on what exactly happened on March 11, 2011, but I soon realized that hearing stories about survival was inevitable. At the beginning, the actions of those who ran towards danger seemed irrational and even crazy to me. But the more I listened to people’s experiences, the more I became aware of the underlying multilayered relationship they had with the things they tried to salvage despite the oncoming danger. Though anecdotal in character, these stories revealed how people’s relationship to their material possessions had informed, and to a degree controlled, their actions in the face of danger.

Personal belongings found in the foundations of houses that were washed into the sea, Ishinomaki 2016. Anna Vainio

The rationality of emergency preparedness often pits material life as irrelevant and replaceable in comparison to biological life. Consider any fire or emergency training you may have taken part in the past. The most common instruction is to leave the building without collecting your belongings. Yet how many of us fully heed this advice?  Although we are told to discard stuff in emergencies, Mrs. M.’s experience shows that material life presents complications to the protection of biological life. The survivors’ actions went against the narrow understanding of risk that is presented to us on the premise for rational behavior: protect your biological life above everything else.

In post-disaster recovery, the material world gains intensified importance. Our attention is drawn almost exclusively to the physical rebuilding of habitats. Despite the Japanese government’s commitment to community-based recovery and social revitalization, their expenditure and progress reports focus on material recovery. This was also apparent on the local level, where public displays in community meetings and reconstruction documents (e.g., Minamisanriku Reconstruction Plan) heavily emphasize material reconstruction. While rebuilding homes and livelihoods is vital, people’s dissatisfaction toward its speed, direction, and the motivations of reconstruction are consistently present in most post-disaster contexts. The Tōhoku region was no exception. This was also apparent in my own research, where I witnessed the majority of conflicts and debates between the authorities and the locals to revolve around physical rebuilding.

Overlooking Minamisanriku in 2015, image of the town from the same location taken in 2007 in the foreground. Anna Vainio

As a post-disaster ethnographer, it is easy to point to the excessive attention paid to physical rebuilding by planners, politicians, NGOs, and other experts in post-disaster contexts, and criticize their lack of consideration toward social relationships and the lived experience of victims as the foundation for recovery. Anthropologists tend to regard objects through human motivations and the meanings we apply to them (Appadurai 1986), but we often forget that people and their identities are constructed as much by the material world as the material world reflects the identities we hold (Miller 2010).

While the functionality and safety of parks, buildings, and roads in a recovering space are important issues, we need to accept that social relationships between people are born and transformed through interactions with and attachments to space and things. Just like one’s life is more than the physical body in an emergency, a home is not merely a roof over one’s head but also the feeling of being at home underneath it. Spaces, buildings, and personal belongings (ranging from mundane everyday objects to cherished mementos) gain and shape meanings through the interactions we have with them on multiple levels. Attention to either the biological or the material world is therefore irrelevant unless we understand the meaning of such interactions.

Disasters can provide unique opportunities for re-examining this connection between material and biological life that appears to be underestimated by the modern disaster preparedness and post-disaster recovery processes. The neoliberalization of disaster recovery has given rise to a reductive understanding of the relationship between the material and biological worlds (Klein 2007; Barrios 2017), in which the aesthetics, styles, functions, and sociality of a space is often designed to facilitate the circulation of capital (Barrios 2017). But the connection between the material and biological worlds is much broader. When I spoke with the residents of the Tōhoku region, it became clear that they felt suspended in the recovery period, neither being in the past nor in the expected future. In this state of waiting, their salvaged personal belongings, natural landscapes, survived buildings, and neighborhoods provided contact points for articulating hope, anticipation, memories, belonging, and identities within an environment of uncertainty.

They were looking for a sense of ochitsuku—“to settle into place”—in an environment that was constantly changing.

They were looking for a sense of ochitsuku—“to settle into place”—in an environment that was constantly changing. For Mrs. M., the wedding dress that “continues to survive with her” gave her a sense of place, belonging, and connection with a past is now lost. Another local resident, when reflecting on the need to persevere (gaman) in temporary housing for another year or two, dreamed of the moment when he can finally stretch his legs in a full-sized bathtub (furō) in his new house. Yet another resident looked forward to the day when she could return to her small fishing community, nestled between the cliffs and feel the wind from the sea on her skin again. In this context, interactions with the material world, whether real or imagined, provided people with contact points that helped them weave their past, present, and future together. The disaster would become a more fluid part of their personal and communal history, rather than an abrupt traumatic moment that wiped away everything they knew and put their lives on hold.

Yet, many residents saw the reconstruction process as removed from their daily existence and something that was “done to them.” They felt that the authorities could not “understand how we feel.” Official recovery measures did not offer them a chance to connect with their new material environments and the habitats that were emerging from the wreckage, leaving them unable to “settle into place” within the new townscape.

Despite today’s “best practice” of post-disaster recovery that uses the language of empowerment, localism, and agency for affected populations, this largely ignores the fundamental ways in which people develop meaning in their lives and for the future of their communities. Tim Ingold (2000) has critiqued the separation of cultural and natural lives in our understanding of how human societies relate to their material surroundings. In recovery practice too, understanding the interaction between the biological and material is paramount. Only then can a process for recovery be developed, one that responds to the social, cultural, and economic meanings fostering specific lifestyles through interactions between people and their material surroundings.

Anna Vainio is an anthropologist and doctoral researcher at the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield. She explores the gap between theory and practice in community-based approaches to disaster recovery, by focusing on the affective, social, and political experiences of recovery in the aftermath of 3/11.

Please contact Shuang Frost (shuanglu@fas.harvard.edu) and Heidi Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu) with your essay ideas and comments.

Cite as: Vainio, Anna. 2019. “Stuff Matters, Especially When You Risk ‘Everything’ for It.” Anthropology News website, March 11, 2019. DOI: 10.1111/AN.1114

Copyright [2019] American Anthropological Association