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Multiethnic Japan MULTIETHNIC JAPAN MULTIETHNIC JAPAN John Lie HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England • 2001 Copyright © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lie, John. Multiethnic Japan / John Lie. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-00299-7 1. Aliens—Japan. 2. Japan—Ethnic relations. 3. Japan—Civilization—1868– I. Title. DS832.7A1 L53 2000 952'.004—dc21 00-057503 for Charis Contents Preface ix A Note on Terminology xiii Introduction 1 1 The Second Opening of Japan 6 2 The Contemporary Discourse of Japaneseness 27 3 Pop Multiethnicity 53 4 Modern Japan, Multiethnic Japan 83 5 Genealogies of Japanese Identity and Monoethnic Ideology 111 6 Classify and Signify 142 Conclusion 170 Appendix: Multilingual Japan 185 References 189 Index 241 vii Preface Preface Preface Wielding my rusty Korean or rudimentary Thai, or interspersing a few Tagalog or Farsi phrases with English, I began this project by interviewing foreign workers in Japan in order to delineate their working and living conditions. Although there wasn’t an obvious moment of epiphany, my project eventually underwent what was tantamount to a Copernican Revo- lution. Perhaps the matter-of-fact narratives about the foreign workers’ trajectories to Japan bored me. The reams of documents and statistics I collected didn’t seem to lead anywhere, leaving me with answers in search of questions. Here the efflorescence of whiteness studies in the United States was inspiring. Rather than taking the majority population—whether white Americans or mainstream Japanese—for granted, the challenge was to explicate why and how the majority became the norm that escaped scru- tiny, free from historical reflection or contemporary critique. Intellectually stimulating too was the seemingly endless flow of books on the social con- struction, invention, and making of various nationalities and ethnicities. The course of research never does run smoothly, but in retrospect I seemed to have merely elaborated on some of my initial insights, articu- lated in my first published essay. In any case, the cleansed picture of social research encapsulated in textbooks—formulate a coherent hypothesis, use certified methods to collect data, and analyze rigorously and systemati- cally—hardly does justice to the life course of many projects. My experi- ence is, rather, closer to the view of Dencombe in Henry James’s masterly story, “The Middle Years”: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” Surely, social research would be better off with a dash of madness and art, rather than the hygienic view that would only sanction sanity and scientificity. ix x Preface I used multiple methods and sources. I conducted over one hundred un- structured and lengthy interviews with Japanese people of varying back- grounds. Structured and mechanical interviews, however they may offer a sense of objectivity, neutrality, and even certainty, almost inevitably gener- ate pat responses. It is often in the asides and the afterthoughts that I found insights into how people think about others and themselves. This is all the more true for sensitive questions about which most Japanese would prefer to proffer the correct answers. I made special efforts to interview people of different social and educational backgrounds. Although nearly all of them lived in the Tokyo metropolitan area, I also conducted interviews in Nagoya, Kyoto, Osaka, and Fukuoka. Tokyo is, of course, not Japan tout court, and the hold of monoethnic ideology is weaker outside of Tokyo. The significant presence of Burakumin and Koreans in Osaka, for example, renders the idea of monoethnic Japan less convincing to Osaka residents. In addition, I spent a great deal of time observing and engaging in infor- mal conversations with both Japanese and non-Japanese (i.e., nonethnic) Japanese in the Tokyo metropolitan area. As sightings of the new foreign workers became common, there were numerous occasions to overhear Jap- anese people’s spontaneous reactions to one another, as well as to observe instances of interethnic contact. I have also drawn extensively on comparative studies, particularly of Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, on race, ethnicity, nation, diaspora, and identity. Reading numerous studies replete with acute theo- retical insights and suggestive empirical findings provided useful bench- marks to think about the case of Japan. Most visible in the text are the documentary sources I collected, ranging from government publications to popular and scholarly publications. Be- cause Japan is a highly literate society with an active publishing culture, the sheer volume of printed materials is staggering. Given that not just profes- sional scribes but ordinary people publish their thoughts in pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, and books, they offer an indispensable and rich re- pository of information. My reliance on documentary sources forces me, willy-nilly, to use exten- sive citations and quotations. I wish that authority flowed naturally from authorship. One yearns to transcend the cumbersome scholarly apparatus, to aufgehoben our predecessors. Worse, my aesthetic preference for sim- plicity is severely challenged by a plethora of parentheses. T. S. Eliot once Preface xi quipped: “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” However, scholars, whether mature or immature, cannot, alas, steal for that is plagiarism. The least one can hope for is that whereas bad scholars deface what they take, good scholars transfigure it into something better. In any case, acknowl- edging the authorities may very well be the best way to relieve the burden of the past and the anxiety of influence. Unforgettably, C. Wright Mills called for sociologists “to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society.” Perhaps I have read him too literally, but I have spent the past decade attempting to illuminate my life against my Korean and Korean diasporic background. Blue Dreams (Abelmann and Lie 1995) explored the Korean diaspora in the United States, and Han Unbound (Lie 1998) analyzed South Korea, the place of my birth. This book completes my sociological imagination tril- ogy, although it should have been written much earlier. Because I had spent my formative years in Tokyo, I experienced a year spent in Tokyo in 1985 as something of a homecoming. Participating in the periphery of the anti-fingerprinting movement—the struggle waged by foreigners living in Japan for civic respect—I came to realize, rather belatedly, some of the un- savory aspects of Japanese society. Intoxicated by high theory, however, I could not bring myself to focus on the issues that the struggle had raised. In the past decade I have sought to rectify my erstwhile intellectual hubris, and to begin, if unconsciously at first, to make sense of the worlds that have shaped me. The belated result is this book. Solitary as I am in my work habits, I received a lot of help in writing this book. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Keio University, and the Japan Foundation provided financial and institutional support. Watanabe Hideki generously sponsored my affiliation with Keio Univer- sity. Aya Ezawa, Eri Fujieda, Hiroshi Ishida, Machimura Takashi, Miho Matsugu, Mineshige Miyuki, Mitani Hiromi, Nakayama Keiko, Ann Saphir, Akwi Seo, Sugiura Ako, Takenoshita Hirohisa, Uemura Hideaki, David Wank, and Alan Wolfe made my time in Japan productive and pleasurable. In the course of writing, I benefited immeasurably from the friendship of Megan Greene, as well as the support of Emin Adas, Aya Ezawa, Serife Genis, Tom Hove, Miwako Kuno, Will Leggett, Monica Shoemaker, and Charis Thompson. Michael Aronson at Harvard University Press once again proved to be a kind and supportive editor. I am also grateful to Richard Audet for his sen- xii Preface sitive and scrupulous copyediting. Two reviewers for the Press gave me useful comments and criticisms. I would like to thank Andrea Dodge, who facilitated the production process, and Aya Ezawa, who fashioned the index. I completed the manuscript in September 1998. Therefore, I was unable to incorporate the ever expanding literature on multiethnic Japan pub- lished after fall 1998 in this book. Nec scire fas est omnia. A Note on Terminology By modern Japan, I mean Japan after the Meiji Restoration (1868). Postwar (sengo) refers to the post–World War II era, from the end of World War II in 1945 to the death of Emperor ShÃwa (Hirohito) in 1989. I have used pseudonyms to identify people whom I interviewed. Asian names are listed surnames first, save for two exceptions: those who write principally in a Western language and those listed in the reference section. In transliterating Japanese names and words, I have followed the guideline in Masuda (1974:xiii). Names and words familiar to Anglophone readers are in their Anglicized form: thus Tokyo, not TÃkyÃ. All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. xiii O, happy is he who can still hope To escape from this sea of error! What we don’t know, we truly need And what we do know, we cannot use. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust Multiethnic Japan Introduction Introduction If the dominant view of modern Japanese society were correct, then Multi- ethnic Japan would be either an oxymoron or an occasion for a very short essay. The received wisdom is that Japan is monoethnic. Edwin O. Reisch- auer (1988:33), the leading Japanologist of his generation, wrote: “the Jap- anese today are the most thoroughly unified and culturally homogeneous large bloc of people in the world,” with “the possible exception of the North Chinese” (see, however, Eberhard 1982; Honig 1992). Moreover: “Race looms large in the self-image of the Japanese, who pride themselves on the ‘purity’ of their blood” (Reischauer 1988:396).
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