Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Preferred Citation: Robertson, Jennifer. Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2m3nb148/ Native and Newcomer Making and Remaking a Japanese City Jennifer Robertson UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © 1991 The Regents of the University of California For beloved Serena Your funeral pyre is getting cold but we will keep your words to chase the serpents coiled around our histories to dream new mythologies to light our common fire. Preferred Citation: Robertson, Jennifer. Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1991 1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2m3nb148/ For beloved Serena Your funeral pyre is getting cold but we will keep your words to chase the serpents coiled around our histories to dream new mythologies to light our common fire. ― xiii ― Preface The following is a brief sketch of the historical periods and institutions referred to in this book. The Edo (or Tokugawa) period, 1603–1868, was distinguished by an agrarian-based social and political order unified under a hereditary succession of generals (shogun) from the Tokugawa clan based in the capital city of Edo, whose ruling power was valorized by a hereditary succession of reigning emperors based in Kyoto. Bakufu was the term for the military government. A Confucian social hierarchy adapted from China divided the population into four unequal classes of people: samurai, farmers, artisans, and merchants, in that order. Each class was further bifurcated by a patriarchal sex/gender hierarchy. There were several categories of "nonpeople" as well, including outcastes and itinerants. Out of the vigorous urban commoner culture that developed in the late seventeenth century emerged several fine-art and performingart genres regarded today as "traditional," such as the puppet theatre, kabuki, woodblock printing, and haiku. A policy of seclusion kept the country more or less closed to foreign contact and exchange for 250 years. Victorious antishogun forces restored the emperor to a ruling position in 1868, marking the beginning of the Meiji period (1868–1912) and social changes summed up by the slogans "civilization and enlightenment" and "rich country, strong army." Agrarianism gave way to industrialization, and the seclusion policy to one of imperialism. Japan's first constitution and elected assembly were informed by European (especially Prussian) government systems. The occupational hierarchy ― xiv ― of the Edo social system was replaced by a class system premised on economic stratification and noble lineage. Strict distinctions between female and male divisions of labor and deportment were codified in the Meiji Civil Code, operative until 1947. Generally speaking, the industrialization, militarization, and imperialism of the Meiji period escalated during the succeeding Taisho (1912–1926) and Showa (1926–1989) periods. Although universal male suffrage was inaugurated in 1925, women did not vote until 1947, when sociopolitical reforms were initiated during the American Occupation (1945–1952) following World War II. The late 1930s and 1940s in particular were marked by the military mobilization of the population and the state's appropriation of the Shinto religion as a national creed. The present constitution, which renounces war and (theoretically) the right to possess military potential, became effective in 1947. The emperor is recognized as a symbol of state; sovereignty rests with the people, and the Diet is the highest organ of the state. Throughout the book, Japanese names are presented family name first unless the person publishes in English, in which case the given name appears first. All translations from Japanese to English are mine unless otherwise indicated. ― xv ― Acknowledgments This book is dedicated to the late N. Serena Tennekoon (28 March 1957-2 January 1989), whose love, mind, elegance, and courage are now and forever a sacred memory. The last stanza of a poem written by Serena in 1987 in memory of a Sri Lankan woman, a feminist activist, appears on the dedication page. The first incarnation of this ethnography was in the form of a doctoral dissertation (1985), and my first readers were the members of my dissertation committee at Cornell University. Robert J. Smith (Chair) was especially helpful at that time. There are many persons who may not read this book but whose assistance, expertise, and goodwill greatly facilitated its production at various stages. I must thank Hishinuma M., Miura S., Miyazaki H., Oda T., Ogawa S., and Oto S., all of Kodaira; the staff of the Civic Life and Social Education Departments, Kodaira City Hall; the staff of the Kodaira welfare center; the staff of the Kodaira central and branch libraries; the director, staff, and steering committee of the Research Institute for Oriental Cultures, Gakushuin University, Tokyo; and D. Chenail, P. Bryant, S. Bushika, and L. Tolle, faculty secretarial office, Williams College. I am grateful to Keith Brown, Larry Carney, Michael Cooper, Ezoe Midori, Stephanie Jed, Vivien Ng, Otobe Junko, Helen Robertson, Sugiura Noriyuki, and Sunada Toshiko for their assistance and support at various stages of this project. Many thanks to Sheila Levine, Amy Klatzkin, and Dorothy Conway for their editorial expertise, and special thanks to Maria Teresa Koreck for critical feedback. ― xvi ― The fieldwork and archival research making possible this book were facilitated by the following awards: the U.S. Department of Education, Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad award (no. G008300855); the International Doctoral Research Fellowship Program for Japan of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies with funds provided by the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Wenner- Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research award (no. 4492); the Japanese Ministry of Education, Monbusho Scholarship; and Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society. ― xvii ― Abbreviations HKSS Higashikurume-shi shi (A history of Higashikurume City) HMSS Higashimurayama-shi shi (A history of Higashimurayama City) KBH Kodaira bohan nyuzu (Kodaira crime report) KC Kodaira choshi (Local history of Kodaira) KCH Kodaira choho (town newspaper) KGR Kodaira-shi gikai kaigiroku (Proceedings of the Kodaira City Assembly) KK Kyodo Kodaira (Local Kodaira) KSH Kodaira shiho (city newspaper) TKSS Tachikawa-shi shi (A history of Tachikawa City) TSK Kurashi to tokei (Livelihood and statistics) C Kodaira shisei ni tsuite yoron chosa (Public opinion survey on the administration of Kodaira City) ― 1 ― Introduction Ethnography and Making History The original title of my book was The Making of Kodaira; Being an Ethnography of a Japanese City's Progress. Its source was Gertrude Stein's ethnographic The Making of Americans; Being a History of a Family's Progress (1925). Stein was a consummate ethnographer; she succeeded in illuminating the "bottom nature" of her subjects and their worlds through the process of "condensation." That is, she scrutinized her subjects until, over time, there emerged for her a repeating pattern to their words and actions. Her literary portraits (e.g., Stein 1959) were condensations of her subjects' repeatings, an ethnographic technique quite the opposite of the "social scientific" process of ideal typing. Nisbet has likened ideal typing to sculpting. Like sculptors, social scientists, figuratively speaking, chip away at a block of marble in order to expose the Michelangelesque sculpture within. This method involves a priori knowledge of both the presence and the exact form of the idealtype figure trapped inside: "the object, whether structure or personage, [is] stripped, so to speak, of all that is merely superficial and ephemeral, with only what is central and unifying left" (Nisbet 1977, 71). Contrarily, the wholeness of Stein's subjects bespeaks the acquisitive—as opposed to reductive—nature of her mode of portraiture. She did not presume to know beforehand what was superficial and what was cen- ― 2 ― tral. These are arbitrary criteria not isolable in any one individual or group. Those features labeled either "superficial" or "central" exist in a flux of words and actions differently repeated over time and space by individuals or groups. As Stein recounts in "The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans ": When I was up against the difficulty of putting down the complete conception that I had of an individual, the complete rhythm of a personality that I had gradually acquired by listening seeing feeling and experience, I was faced by the trouble that I had acquired all this knowledge gradually but when I had it I had it completely at one time…. And a great deal of The Making of Americans [sic ] was a struggle…to make a whole present of something that it had taken a great deal of time to find out, but it was a whole there then within me and as such it had to be said (Stein, in Dubrick 1984, 13) Stein in this passage identifies what I perceive as the salient features of the ethnographic process: it is personal; it requires time and patience, for knowledge and understanding are acquired gradually; and it involves a struggle to convey critically that knowledge and understanding about a pluralistic world in flux through the relatively static medium of (English) words (Dubrick 1984, 93). In a similar vein, Agar has noted that the dominant rhetoric for the discussion of social research as a general process fits poorly with ethnographic work. The traditional linear model of hypothesis-operationalization-sampling design-data collection-analysis is a powerful one, relevant to many questions that might be asked by one human group of another, but at most it plays only a partial role in ethnographic work. Yet the norm is to translate ethnographic work into this rhetoric when discussions move to a general level. The results are a bit like talking about a computer in cubic yards—you can do it, but somehow it misses the point. (1986, x) Knowledge of the sociohistorical constructedness of cultural practices does not preclude either understanding and appreciating them or working within their parameters (cf.