Becoming One

6827_Book_V4.indd 1 12/5/18 10:11 AM 6827_Book_V4.indd 2 12/5/18 10:11 AM Becoming One Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar

Chika Watanabe

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

6827_Book_V4.indd 3 12/5/18 10:11 AM © 2019 University of Hawai‘i Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Watanabe, Chika, author. Title: Becoming one : religion, development, and environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar / Chika Watanabe. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai'i Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018037380 | ISBN 9780824875268 (cloth ; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Organization for Industrial, Spritual and Cultural Advancement-International. | Non-governmental organizations—Japan. | Agricultural development projects—Burma. | Agricultural assistance, Japanese—Burma. Classification: LCC JX4845 .W38 2019 | DDC 338.109591—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018037380

The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The open-access edition of this title was made possible with generous support from the University of Manchester. The ISBNs for the open-access editions book are 9780824886646 (PDF) and 9780824886639 (EPUB). Contents

Acknowledgments / vii Note on Transliteration / xi Glossary and Abbreviations / xiii

Introduction: The Moral Imaginations of Becoming One / 1 Chapter 1 A History of the Nonreligious / 27 Chapter 2 The Politics of “Shinto” Environmentalism / 60 Chapter 3 Making a Universal Furusato (Homeplace) / 87 Chapter 4 Muddy Labor / 119 Chapter 5 Being Like Family / 144 Chapter 6 Discipline as Care / 165

Conclusion / 186 Notes193 / Works Cited / 203 Index233 /

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WHEN I FIRST MET Saitō Yūko from OISCA’s Myanmar of­ fice in Yangon in 2008, I did not realize the profound extent to which her initial description of OISCA as a “mud-smelling” (dorokusai) organiza­ tion captured the NGO’s central ethos. I am deeply indebted to her for presenting me with this phrase as a key way to understand not only OISCA (Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement) but also Japanese approaches to development aid in general. Subsequently, numer­ ous people associated with OISCA generously welcomed me into their worlds and spent valuable time answering my questions: everyone at the Tokyo office; staffers and trainees at the training centers in Chubu, Nishini­ hon, and Shikoku; members and officials at the Ananaikyō headquarters; staffers at the Gekkō Observatory in Shizuoka; staff members and students at the OISCA Technical College; and staffers and trainees at the OISCA Myanmar training center. There are too many people to thank individu­ ally here, but in Japan, Chō Hiroyuki, Kakinuma Mizuho, Kamino Yukio, Kano Masumi, Kurono Yoshikane, Nagaishi Yasuaki, Nakano Toshihiro, and Sugawara Kōsei facilitated much of my fieldwork and understanding of OISCA. At the Myanmar training center, Fuji’i Keisuke, Khin May Thi, May Zar Myint, Htay Htay Sein, Saw Myat Htwe, and Za Min Aung are due special thanks for their help and friendship. In particular, Khin May Thi’s warmth and thoughtfulness made me feel at home at the training cen­ ter, for which I am eternally grateful. I also thank the staffers and trainees at the Asian Rural Institute (ARI, or Ajia Gakuin) in Tochigi Prefecture and the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers (JOCV) training center in Nagano Prefecture for hosting me during my visit. My life in Yangon over the years would not have been possible with­ out the generosity of Susan and Court Stewart, Ma Yi Yi, and Ko Aung Mo and the friendship and support of Fujino Yasuyuki and Yasuko, Ma Htet Htet, Ma Julia, the Shalom Foundation’s Ja Nan Lahtaw and staff members, Kubota Kazumi, Rhoda Linton, Sue Mark, Neichu Mayer, Pat McCormick,

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Joah McGee, Rose Metro, Min Ye Paing Hein, Ōtsuyama Mitsuko, Seng Pan Lasham, Uchiyama Fumika, Liz Webber, Matt Walton, and Mikami Yasushi. My thanks also go to staff members at Terra People Association (TPA) and especially Shibata Kyōko for showing me around TPA’s project sites, and to Seng Raw Lahpai and everyone at the Metta Development Foundation for letting me help at their offices and visit their project sites. At Cornell, Hiro Miyazaki, Annelise Riles, Marina Welker, and Saida Hodžić helped me turn the fieldwork material into the analyses that consti­ tute the basis for this book. My friends in the dissertation writing group— Gökçe Günel, Aftab Jassal, Melissa Rosario, Saiba Varma, and Courtney Work—were essential in nurturing the seeds of many of my ideas. Saiba and Gökçe, in particular, have read most of my work over time and know my project (and me) inside out. David Rojas has also been an important interlocutor and friend in developing my thoughts in the pages that follow. The “Cornell mafia” in the Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) taught me how to understand the region in historical perspective. Tom Patton and Chie Ikeya offered vital advice on conducting fieldwork in Myanmar, and I thank them for their patience in answering my questions. My research would not have been possible without the extraordinary skills of my Burmese- language teachers: San San Hnin Tun at Cornell, John Okell and Than Than Win at the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute in Madison, and Ma Hay Mar in Tokyo. The book went through many incarnations, and Maia Green, Gökçe Günel, Jolyon Thomas, and Saiba Varma read full drafts or substantial por­ tions of it at different stages. Their insights helped me refine and focus my arguments. Audiences at the University of Oslo gave valuable observations on chapter 3, Yamaura Chigusa and audiences at the University of Sussex offered helpful feedback on chapter 4, and Gillian Evans, Lorenzo Ferra­ rini, Connie Smith, Tony Simpson, and Marina Welker constructively com­ mented on the introduction at critical times. Lissa Caldwell shepherded one of my articles for Gastronomica, which became the basis for chapter 6, and also gave extensive suggestions on my book proposal. I cannot overstate the value of receiving advice from a senior academic on the murky process of book publishing. In this sense, I am immensely grateful to Niko Besnier for also commenting on my book proposal and to Theodore Jun Yoo for introducing me to Pamela Kelley at the University of Hawai‘i Press. Many other colleagues and friends contributed to the development of this book. My thinking benefited from several conversations with R. Michael Feener, Maura Finkelstein, Philip Fountain, Kate Goldfarb, Sarah Grant, Soyeun Kim, Kimura Shuhei, Aike Rots, and Takahashi Satsuki.

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My colleagues at the University of Manchester have offered feedback on my work over the years, and I feel extremely fortunate to be in such a collegial and productive environment. Erica Baffelli and Aya Homei have made me feel at home in Japanese studies, beyond my “home” discipline of social anthropology. Nathan Hopson, Tomomi-san, Ran Zwigenberg, and Chikako-san were my support network when I was writing the first draft of the book at Yale, and I thank them for their friendship. I also thank my hosts, participants, and audiences of various work­ shops, conferences, and talks at the Australian National University, Durham University, the London School of Economics, Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies at Oxford University, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Sogang University, Stockholm University, the University of Colo­ rado at Boulder, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Hong Kong, the University of Oslo, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Sussex, the University of Texas at Austin, Western Michigan University, and Yale University. Numerous other friends and anthropologists, Japanese studies scholars, Burma studies scholars, and development studies scholars have helped me refine my ideas further: Anne Allison, Niko Besnier, Erica Bornstein, Mary Callahan, Karin Eberhardt, Harri Englund, Judy Han, Heather Hindman, Inaba Keishin, Khin Zaw Win, Koga Yukiko, Jon Mair, Emma Mawdsley, Ramah McKay, Levi McLaughlin, Jamie Monson, Mark R. Mullins, Nemoto Kei, Nozawa Shunsuke, Okuyama Michiaki, Elayne Oliphant, Lisa Onaga, Juno Parreñas, Peter Redfield, Ryan Sayre, Juliane Schober, Amanda Snellinger, Nico Sternsdorff-Cisterna, Tosa Keiko, and Nakano Tsuyoshi. I also thank the anonymous reviewers of my published articles and book chapters, whose comments assisted me in rethinking not only those pieces but many of the arguments in this book. My gratitude also goes to the two anonymous reviewers of the book, whose comments prompted me to sharpen my discussions. The research for this book was funded by the Lee Teng-hui Fellow­ ships in World Affairs and the Robert J. Smith Fellowships in Japanese Studies (both at Cornell) and by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). The SSRC has had a long-term impact on my research, funding a dissertation fellowship and a post-fieldwork dissertation workshop (“Reli­ gion and International Affairs”) and co-funding my postdoctoral fellowship at Yale. In bringing this book to life, I thank Pamela Kelley for her expert editorial guidance and Debra Tang, Grace Wen, and Rosemary Wether­ old for their indispensable help in the process. Sections of chapter 4 ap­ peared in “Muddy Labor: A Japanese Aid Ethic of Collective Intimacy in

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Myanmar,” Cultural Anthropology 29, no. 4 (2014): 648–671; and chapter 6 is an expanded version of my short essay, “Waste, Incorporated,” Gastro- nomica 15, no. 4 (2015): 6–13. They are used here with permission from the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the University of California Press, respectively. Lastly, I thank my parents, Watanabe Akiko and Kimio, for instilling and encouraging my sense of adventure, independence, and humor. They might not have predicted that I would become an anthropologist, but they are surely unsurprised. Their support has made the journey so much easier. My aunt, Katsui Nobuko, made my first publication possible, and I learned greatly from delivering my first lecture in one of her classes. Andy Richards has filled my life with so much love, laughter, music, and spontaneous escapades in the last few years. His principled and thoughtful approach to the world continues to inspire me.

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JAPANESE TERMS are written using the Monumenta Nipponica style, as per the publisher’s guidelines. Macrons have not been used in common geographical names such as Tokyo, Kyoto, Ryukyu, and so on or in words that are used in English, such as Shinto. Japanese personal names are written in the standard Japanese order with the surname followed by the given name without a comma, except for those who have published in English. The suffix “-san” is attached to the names, following the way that I addressed them during fieldwork. Burmese terms are written using John Okell’s (1971) Guide to the Romanization of Burmese. They follow mainly the conventional system in table 5 of Okell’s recommended systems (page 66), with a few modifica­ tions using the standard transliteration system in table 4 (page 65) when certain sounds were not clarified in table 5. Personal names are written in the standard Burmese order, which does not identify a surname or a given name—for example, Aung San Suu Kyi. The bibliography also follows this order. The prefixes “Ma” for women and “Ko” for men are attached to the shortened version of each person’s name (except for names of public figures), following the way that I addressed them during fieldwork.

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Ananaikyō—A new religious organization established in 1949. Its founder, Nakano Yonosuke, drew on many ideas of Shinto to create the Ananaikyō teachings. bokashi—An organic fertilizer made from biodegradable matter, often waste or by-products of agricultural processes. It includes helpful microorganisms that break down the waste and make it beneficial to the soil for use in agriculture. DAC (Development Assistance Committee)—A committee within the Organisa­ tion for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and composed of donor governments that discuss international aid policies. Founded in 1961, it first included only Western European countries, North American countries, and Japan, which have been known as the “traditional donors.” Now other countries, such as South Korea, are also DAC members. Dapog method—A method of growing rice seedlings on a flat surface, such as a vinyl sheet, that can be rolled up and carried to the paddies when the plants are ready to be transplanted. The Dapog method requires less space, seed, water, money, and labor than ordinary methods using nurseries. EM (effective microorganisms)—Nonpathogenic microorganisms produced through fermentation using organic by-products, molasses, and water. They can help break down waste matter in drainage systems and soil. EM were first discovered and developed by Higa Teruo, former professor of horticulture at the University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa. EMRO (EM Research Organization)—An organization in Japan associated with Higa Teruo that produces and sells trademarked EM products. hitozukuri (人づくり; making persons)—A term referring to a wide range of human resource development and training activities in Japan. It is used in vari­ ous arenas, from businesses to community regeneration projects, and is one of the central pillars of Japanese development aid policy.

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hōshi (奉仕; to serve)—A term used by Ananaikyō members in OISCA to explain their commitment to the organization as an extension of their devotion to the vision of their religion’s founder. JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency)—A governmental development aid agency established in 1962. Traditionally responsible for hitozukuri-type projects (e.g., training programs, knowledge exchange projects), it was merged with the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) in 2008 to centralize the three areas of Japanese governmental aid—technical cooperation, loan aid, and grant aid. JOCV (Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers)—The Japanese version of the US Peace Corps, established in 1965 and operated by JICA. Volunteers are Japanese citizens between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine who have a skill they can offer, such as nursing or sports education. They spend two years in a developing country, providing their skills to a local organization. junkangata shakai (循環型社会; circulatory sociality, material-cycle society)— A phrase used in Japanese environmental policies that refers to a vision of a sus­ tainable society based on waste management and the “three Rs”: reduce, reuse, and recycle. The Japanese government translates it in English as “material-cycle society.” In OISCA, however, the term was used in reference to a more thorough circulation of waste matter through the environment of the training center with the help of EM that breaks down waste. MAS (Myanmar Agriculture Service)—Myanmar’s government agency in charge of agricultural research and extension activities. It is part of the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation (MOAI) and is now known as the Department of Agriculture. ODA (Official Development Assistance)—A term coined by OECD in 1969 to measure governmental aid flows from donor countries to developing countries. OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)—An inter­ governmental organization founded in 1960 to advance economic progress and trade around the world. Member governments are from Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, and other “developed” countries. OISCA (Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement)—One of the oldest Japanese NGOs (established in 1961), specializing in develop­ ment aid in the Asia-Pacific region through training programs in sustainable agriculture and environmental education. Its founder was also the founder of Ananaikyō. WFP (World Food Programme)—A branch of the United Nations that delivers food-based assistance to address hunger and food insecurity around the world.

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6827_Book_V4.indd 15 12/5/18 10:11 AM 6827_Book_V4.indd 16 12/5/18 10:11 AM Introduction The Moral Imaginations of Becoming One

“ ttention!” (Thet tha!), a young man shouts in Burmese.1 The first rays of morning light flood the sandy courtyard Aat a sharp angle, carving silhouettes of the rows of people in navy jersey uniforms. I can feel the cold air begin to warm. Birds are chirping wildly. We have been up since half an hour before dawn, cleaning the living quarters, communal bathrooms, and around the buildings at this Japanese nongovernmental organization’s training center. By this time I am used to the communal tasks that organize lives at the Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement (OISCA), but I still struggle with the early mornings and the routines that follow. We stand in silence for a couple of minutes. The only thing moving is a cat licking itself in the middle of it all, oblivious to what is going on. “Fix your clothing!” (Mịmị koko pyan sit!). At this general command, I pull down the edges of my white shirt and quickly adjust my matching white cap. I glance up toward the twenty young Burmese trainees and the dozen staff-in-training who are standing in three rows perpendicular to the row of Burmese staff members and the Japanese director. I stand with the staffers. The boys make up the first row of the trainees, then the girls, and then the aspiring aid workers. The young Burmese trainee in charge of leading everyone that week stands at the front and commands that the roll call begin. The thirty Burmese staff members and the Japanese direc­ tor look ahead with blank stares. The yelling voices grow as each group performs its check. One by one, the representatives of each group report to the trainee- leader, who marches over to them in turn. They mirror each other as they raise their right arms in quick salutes. “Eleven trainees, missing one person due to sickness! Please give permission for the remaining people to con­ tinue their work in orderly fashion!” (Thintān thā shịyin 11, pyet kwet 1, ne ma kaūng! Kyanlumyā tānsi pyī amẹin nahkanyan athịn hset lout hkwịn pyụba!).

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“Continue!” (Hset lout!), the leader orders, swiftly bringing her salute down. She walks to the next group. The format is the same for everyone. When the roll call is finished, the trainee-leader swings her arms in big motions and marches over to the Japanese director to give him the status. She lists the numbers of people present and of those absent, this time in Japanese. She stumbles several times over words that she has not yet fully memorized, and the director asks her to do it again, and again. I worry that she might start to cry, but despite her cracking voice, she suc­ ceeds in the end. She marches back to the front of the groups. The raising of the Bur­ mese flag is next, and two young men walk up to the flagpole and prepare to pull the ropes. We sing the Burmese national anthem as we watch the flag slowly go up. Two salutes to the flag follow, timed according to the trainee-leader’s prompts. Once everyone is in their rows again, we begin the “radio exercises” (rajio taisō), the Japanese calisthenics exercises that are practiced in schools and many businesses as a way to encourage physical exercise and, probably more importantly, to wake up the senses for the day of work ahead and to foster a sense of collectivity (Kuroda I. 1999).2 I never went to Japa­ nese school, but I remember these exercises from neighborhood activities during my childhood in the outskirts of Tokyo. The difference at OISCA is that the exercises are framed within routines that seem more militaristic than the ordinary exercises in Japanese schools and companies. Salutes, for example, do not exist in most morning routines in classrooms and of­ fices. As we do the movements, we count loudly in Burmese from one to eight, and then back down to one, and repeat. Bring both arms straight above our heads—one, two, three, four; then gracefully bring them down to our sides—five, six, seven, eight. Cross our arms in front of our chests, then open them out to shoulder height while we bend our knees, springing lightly up and down. Circle our arms outside in and then inside out, like windmills, a few times. With two swings of our arms for momentum, we open our chests and bend slightly backward as if taking in the sky. We continue the rhythmic exercises for ten more minutes until we finish the sequence. Our deep voices vibrate throughout the courtyard as we keep track of our movements in unison. The end of the routine is marked by a collective call and response. The rows of trainees and staff-in-training uniformly turn to the left to face us. With their hands at salute, they shout in Japanese: “Good morning!” (Ohayō gozaimasu!).

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“Good morning!” (Ohayō gozaimasu!), we boom back. A moment of silence. Then we all relax. After a swift change of clothing, we head toward the canteen to get ready for the long day ahead, working in the fields.

***

When I first planned to do research about Japanese development aid in Myanmar, this scene was not what I had envisioned.3 Most analyses of development aid have derived from Euro-American case studies, whether they are about European and American organizations or multinational agen­ cies that are primarily shaped by the interests of “Western” states (Edelman and Haugerud 2005; Escobar 1995; Goldman 2005). The evolution of these Euro-American paradigms of aid is not uniform, but in the anthropology of development, the general interpretation has been that development or­ ganizations and projects since the 1990s have been increasingly neoliberal and bureaucratic, making development a market-driven, technical, and depoliticized process (Ferguson 1994; Gardner and Lewis 2015). In this framing, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are managerial machines and purveyors of neoliberalization that privatize state services such as wel­ fare provision, exacerbate class differences in the places where they oper­ ate, and promote entrepreneurial and individualistic subjects (Kamat 2003; Leve and Karim 2001; Schuller 2009). Some analyses, however, attend to the knowledge practices of NGOs and other development organizations in an effort to understand the inner workings of institutional systems and the moral-social worlds of aid workers (Green 2003; Mosse 2011; Yarrow 2011; Yarrow and Venkatesan 2012). Nevertheless, despite differences in approach, the underlying assumption of contemporary development and NGO projects remains the same: neoliberal, bureaucratic, and managerial. My own experience working with Japanese and other NGOs con­ firmed the above analyses. It also shaped my expectations that I would meet aid workers who were cosmopolitan, liberal, and highly educated. But instead, in OISCA, I found an emphasis on things such as discipline and “Japaneseness,” and a profile of “the aid worker” that was rural, non- English-speaking, and sometimes blurred with that of “the aid recipient.” This discovery was surprising and also uncomfortable for me—a “re­ turnee” (kikokushijo), a Japanese citizen who lived overseas as a child (in my case, Spain) and was often seen by other “regular” Japanese people as “not quite Japanese.” I expected to find aid workers who shared a similar cosmopolitan outlook on the world, if not identified as such. But this was

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not the case. The morning routines at the training centers encapsulated what I found most confusing in OISCA. During one of my earliest visits to OISCA’s training centers in Ja­ pan, a staff member, Tsuruta-san, saw my hesitation toward the morning routines. She understood my perplexity about the emphasis on militarized movements and offered her explanation (in Japanese):

For these trainees, who will go back and work for their communities, it is important to live in a collective setting such as this and learn how to cooperate with others, how to fuse together into one harmony, accepting each other’s differences. When we do these disciplinary exercises, if the first person doing “dress right, dress” is even slightly off, the last person in that line will be completely off. If everyone can move in harmony, everything will fall into place and work can be completed quickly. . . . If someone is slow or late, the whole group is pushed back and everyone will be affected. The “spirit” [seishin] that OISCA teaches is that basic thing that you need for collective living. The point is not just to be strict. . . . The point is to motivate people first thing in the morning to cultivate a feeling of becoming one [hitotsu ni naru], disciplining oneself and work­ ing toward harmony.

The importance of the collectivity—or, to be more precise, of imagining ways to “become one”—was not just this staff member’s interpretation. In all of the training centers, staffers and trainees lived together in a collective lifestyle, sharing meals, communal baths, and collective duties such as cleaning. There were some lectures in classrooms, but most of the training happened in the fields. From the moment they woke up to the moment they went to sleep, the staffers’ and trainees’ days were marked by continuous labor alongside each other. The ultimate goal of this program was to en­ courage trainees to return to their home villages and become community leaders of sustainable development and environmental efforts—leaders who would know how to live in and for the collective. Many of the Japa­ nese staff members in OISCA explained this collectivist ethos and the value of discipline in terms of “Japanese values.” Ultimately, the emphasis on communal living and labor, which revolved around organic agricultural activities, rested also on an imagination of a planetary ecological unity, for OISCA aid actors were meant to orient their lives toward the protection of “Mother Earth” (haha naru chikyū). In the pages that follow, I examine the discourses and enactments of solidarity that Japanese as well as non-Japanese staff members and other

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aid actors involved with OISCA repeated over the course of my fieldwork. The aim of this book is to excavate what I call the moral imaginations of “becoming one” that motivate OISCA actors’ work across national and cultural borders, to show how the historical, political, and regional speci­ ficities of hopes for a better world shape the outcomes of aid interventions (see Livingston 2005; Wendland 2012). Aid projects do not simply address issues of poverty and suffering; they also produce political effects and particular kinds of people based on an aspirational vision. In the case of OISCA, the hoped-for future was one where humans and nature coexisted in harmony according to supposedly Shinto and Japanese cultural values, and where people came together as a collectivity across various kinds of borders through shared labor. Both of these imaginaries mobilized cultural nationalist ideologies, expansionist ambitions, and particular kinds of per­ sonhood moored in histories of Japan and its relationship to Myanmar and the rest of Asia. These imaginations of what is to come were not static, however, and Japanese, Burmese, and other aid actors constantly negoti­ ated the various moral, political, and social vectors to orient themselves toward a better world. Thus, to show how moral imaginations were actual­ ized in practice, I focus on aid work as a form of labor and, specifically, as aid actors’ struggles to decipher and engage with moments of confusion, resistance, and discomfort to realign their visions of the future. These were struggles that happened in transnational interactions—namely, between Japan and Myanmar, the latter having been a colony of the former during World War II. This perspective on aid work as struggles on a transnational terrain offers a way to understand how development and humanitarian projects become vessels for multiple aspirations for a better world, at once historically determined and transformative. In tracing the moral imaginations of “becoming one” in OISCA, I ask: how can efforts to become one be made accessible as objects of an­ thropological analysis without reducing them to a facade? Nearly three decades ago, Katherine Ewing (1990) proposed that in the postmodern move to foreground fragmentary and “dividual” selves, anthropologists have overlooked the ways that the people we study construct imaginaries and experiences of wholeness, despite their actual fleeting, multiple, and contingent selves. Taking Ewing’s cue, I explore how Japanese, Burmese, and other aid actors created, implemented, and experienced the imaginar­ ies of becoming one as an ecological and relational endeavor, which had political consequences but also moral value. In particular, I trace how these imaginaries informed the making of particular kinds of people, both aid workers and aid recipients. How do we take seriously these imaginaries

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of “becoming one” across borders with all their historical and political implications as well as their transformative appeal to aid actors? This is the key question that drives the book.

Rethinking Japanese Aid From 2009 to 2011, I followed the activities of OISCA, one of the oldest and most prominent Japanese NGOs. I conducted fieldwork at its headquarters in Tokyo, at three of the four training centers in Japan, and at the Myanmar training center in order to understand the history of the orga­ nization, its operations at various sites, and how the approaches developed in Japan translated to the Burmese staff members and trainees.4 Although the book focuses on OISCA as a Japanese example of aid, the context of its activities in Myanmar is significant. When I was in Myanmar between 2010 and 2011, the country was undergoing unprecedented changes and there was a heightened sense of a new future in the making. In November 2010, a couple of weeks before I left OISCA’s project site in Myanmar, a general election was held for the first time in twenty years. Soon after, the Burmese military junta released pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi from twenty-one years of house arrest. Despite the problems raised regarding the general elections, the continuing power of the military in parliament, and Aung San Suu Kyi’s inaction in recent years regarding the killing and persecution of Rohingya Muslims, the international community reacted in joy to the events of November 2010. In the following months, heads of state swarmed the capital of Nay Pyi Taw, corporations jumped at the opportunity to invest in this relatively untapped economic frontier, and international aid organizations and aspiring aid workers arrived with high hopes of “doing good” in this long-neglected country. Academics also ar­ rived in troves. It seemed as if Myanmar had finally found a new beginning. But in fact Myanmar had already been undergoing changes before 2010. Domestic and international aid efforts were few and far between but not absent in pre-reform Myanmar. The presence of Japanese aid, in particular, was notable; Japan, for many years, had been the largest donor since Myanmar’s independence in 1948. For example, Japan’s foreign aid accounted for 66.7 percent of the total bilateral aid that Myanmar received between 1976 and 1990 (Kudo 2007, 5). There was a period of retrac­ tion after the 1988 protests that led to Aung San Suu Kyi’s imprisonment, and another after 2003 as a reaction to an armed attack on her, but since then the Japanese government had been pushing for increased relevance of Japan’s role in Myanmar. In 2012 the Japanese government canceled and

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rescheduled Myanmar’s debt repayment, and it has continued to increase its support of official aid channels and to encourage Japanese corporate incursions.5 OISCA established a presence in Yesagyo Township in central Myan­ mar in 1996, when few other international agencies existed in the country. OISCA’s agricultural training center is operated in cooperation with the Myanmar Agriculture Service (MAS) of the Ministry of Agriculture and Ir­ rigation, and the center is officially named the MAS-OISCAAgro-Forestry Training Center. OISCA has continued to maintain good relations with the Myanmar government. In 2017 a second training center opened in Py­ awbwe Township, about 130 miles southeast of the Yesagyo training center. The Japanese government’s recent moves to strengthen its relation­ ship with Myanmar are partly a geopolitical response to growing Chinese and Korean influence in Myanmar and partly a continuation of Japanese aid in Asia as a diplomatic strategy. Observers have pointed out how Japa­ nese aid in Myanmar, as in other Southeast Asian countries, was a form of war reparations after World War II and a way to secure resources and markets during the Cold War. But Japan’s interest in Myanmar has also been described as having a strong “emotional and sentimental dimension” (Rieffel and Fox 2013, 47). Japanese politicians often describe a “special relationship” between Japan and Myanmar, especially referencing the fact that Burmese national hero and Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, Aung San, and his Thirty Comrades, underwent military training in Japan before it took Burma from the British in 1942 and declared it an “independent” country (Nemoto 1995, 2007b; Steinberg 2001). Although Burma became a Japanese colony at this point and Aung San eventually turned against the Japanese occupiers to establish true independence for the country, Japanese political figures and citizens alike have tended to use sentimental reasons to explain the policy of engagement with Myanmar. Few studies take this discourse of a “special relationship” seriously, but the claim struck a chord with what I was observing in OISCA. What do the claims of having a special relationship tell us about the historical, political, and sociocultural imaginaries and practices through which Japanese aid actors implement their work in Myanmar? How do Burmese aid workers and recipients react to this imagination? Although Japan has been a major player in the international aid com­ munity for many decades, few studies examine the micro-practices of Japa­ nese aid. Japan is considered to be part of what are called traditional do- nors—states belonging to the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD),

6827_Book_V4.indd 7 12/5/18 10:11 AM 8 Introduction

an international forum for donor governments to discuss aid policies. The early members of the DAC, which was founded in 1961, were Western European and North American countries and Japan. Japan disbursed its first package of development aid as a form of war reparations to Burma in 1954, while it was also a recipient of aid from the United States and the World Bank throughout the 1950s and 1960s. From the 1970s to the 1980s, as the country’s economy grew exponentially, it ceased to be an aid recipi­ ent and in 1989 became the world’s largest foreign aid donor, with an aid expenditure of US$8.97 billion that year (MOFA 2014). Japan retained this position from 1991 to 2001, after which its foreign aid spending shrunk as deflation and recession hit the domestic economy. The analyses of these first decades of Japanese aid have largely fol­ lowed Chalmers Johnson’s (1982) thesis of the “developmental state”: that Japan’s development aid system was a form of diplomacy and strategy for economic growth, focused on state-led development in other countries that emphasized infrastructural projects, bilateral aid, and loans that would benefit Japan as much as the recipient government (Arase 1995, 2005; Lee 2008; Orr 1990). These characteristics differed from Euro-American development policies that were more multilateral and targeted poverty is­ sues outside the framework of national economic growth. Japanese aid across the Asia-Pacific region, in particular, became a diplomatic strategy to improve relations between Japan and its former colonies (Arase 2005, 13). In recent years, scholars have complicated this narrative and begun to point out that Japanese aid policies have also responded to changing international and domestic factors, incorporating more “soft” aid projects and increasing state support for NGOs (Leheny and Warren 2010).6 The role of the private sector, such as businesses, has also been highlighted in the context of market liberalization in the 1980s, as can be seen in the tendering of aid loans (Hirata 2002). Despite the diverse analyses of Japanese aid that are beginning to emerge, studies of Japanese development and humanitarianism have tended to focus on macro-scale perspectives of diplomacy and international rela­ tions, and little is known about the everyday processes of Japanese aid ac­ tivities. Understanding the mundane construction and enactment of moral imaginations behind specific forms of Japanese aid practice would improve our grasp of how visions and actions of doing good emerge from particular regional, historical, political, and transnational relations. In this sense, fo­ cusing on an NGO rather than a governmental aid agency is productive be­ cause nongovernmental actors need to negotiate, if not completely discard, various political and state interests as they strive to change the world for

6827_Book_V4.indd 8 12/5/18 10:11 AM Introduction 9

the better. They cannot be understood merely as vehicles of state-led dip­ lomatic strategies. The case of OISCA helps us understand how factors as wide-ranging as religion and questions of secularism in a domestic context, cultural nationalism, and the mythologization of Japan’s rural landscapes shaped the development of Japanese aid imaginaries and systems.

OISCA OISCA was established in 1961 by a man named Nakano Yonosuke, who was also the founder of a new religion called Ananaikyō. This history shaped the kinds of people who worked for the NGO, especially in its early years. The first groups who joined Yonosuke’s activities and OISCA in the 1950s and 1960s were mostly volunteers from poor farming communities in rural Japan with little formal education past primary school. Their initial motivations to join OISCA were to follow Yonosuke’s religious movement. In this sense, the demographic makeup of early staffers is unsurprising, given that marginalized people in society have tended to join popular new religious movements in Japan (Yasumaru [1977] 2013). This composition of the organization has remained fundamentally the same, with Ananaikyō followers in their sixties and older serving as senior staff. This is an im­ portant aspect of OISCA to keep in mind, because it shows how the NGO, as an extension of a religious organization, offered a way for poor, rural citizens in postwar Japan to find a meaningful vocation in a rapidly urban­ izing and industrializing society. Even some of the younger staff members in their twenties and thirties, who tended to be more educated than the older generations, told me about their struggles to find employment or a place of belonging until they dis­ covered OISCA. Although there were generational differences (discussed in chapter 1), the backgrounds of staff members and their motivations for joining OISCA illustrate that staffers’ engagement with OISCA often went beyond that of employer and employee. Working in OISCA was profoundly meaningful for many of them in decades when they felt marginalized, as well as in the current era of increasing precariousness for large sections of Japanese society (Allison 2013). Throughout OISCA’s half-century of existence, the core of the organi­ zation’s activities has been the year-long training programs in sustainable, organic agriculture and environmental education. OISCA has headquarters in Tokyo with about forty Japanese staff members, four training centers in Japan, and sixteen training centers across eleven Asia-Pacific countries (as of the end of my fieldwork in 2011): Bangladesh, China, Timor-Leste,

6827_Book_V4.indd 9 12/5/18 10:11 AM 10 Introduction

Fiji, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Myanmar is one of the more recent countries in which OISCA began activities (in 1996). Each training center in Japan invites about fifteen trainees from around the world, mainly from the Asia-Pacific region but also from other countries such as Paraguay and Kenya. Some of these training centers have had trainees who are elites in government agencies in their home countries via a program funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA)—those from outside Asia such as Paraguay and Kenya have tended to be JICA trainees—but most of the trainees are rural youths in their early twenties who come through the recommendation and recruit­ ment of the directors of the overseas training centers. In each of these training centers in Japan, there are about five to ten Japanese staff members, in addition to two or more Japanese volunteers who help primarily with the agricultural work. The directors in charge of these training centers are mostly men in their sixties or older, except for one training center that, during my fieldwork, had the first female director. While the focus of the training centers is the teaching of sustainable agricultural skills to trainees, they all have acres of vegetable fields, greenhouses, rice paddies, and, in one center, chicken coops. They all use organic methods—that is, they do not use chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Much of the “teaching” involves laboring in the fields to maintain them and harvest produce that they can eat or sell in nearby markets, although the aim is not to make profit but to educate trainees. The training centers outside Japan recruit local youths and can range in scale from twenty trainees (as in Myanmar) to several dozen (as in Fiji). The directors have been in charge of OISCA training centers in different countries for decades. Some of these Japanese men have married former local staff members or trainees and have raised children in the training centers, in which case they have stayed at one center. The training centers around the Asia-Pacific are similar to those in Japan in that they function both as a training center and a farm, and much of the training also involves agricultural labor. The numbers of staff members vary depending on the center, but there are usually dozens in order to help with the backbreaking work of maintaining an organic farm. Most of the local staffers in these centers are former trainees. The distinction of “aid worker” from “aid re­ cipient” was not always clear in OISCA. In addition to the training programs, OISCA conducts environmental activities in Japan and other countries. One of these is called the Chil­ dren’s Forest Program (CFP), in which rural primary school children plant

6827_Book_V4.indd 10 12/5/18 10:11 AM Introduction 11

trees in or around the school property as an educational activity to learn the importance of reforestation. In conjunction, other environmental and reforestation activities take place with nearby villagers. OISCA also con­ ducts a number of mangrove reforestation projects, short courses to teach agricultural skills to vulnerable populations in various countries, and a large sericulture (silk farming) program in the Philippines. OISCA also has fourteen affiliates (shibu) around Japan that help pri­ marily with collecting donations, recruiting volunteers for OISCA’s envi­ ronmental activities in Japan, and organizing trips for the general public to visit OISCA’s project sites around the Asia-Pacific. To complicate matters even further, OISCA is composed of OISCA the NGO, which conducts the training activities and environmental projects, and OISCA International, which is a coalition of “chapters” (sōkyoku) around the world. The chap­ ters do sometimes conduct activities that involve OISCA-the-NGO, Tokyo staff, or members of other chapters around the world, but in general they form a loose consortium of like-minded people who share ideas and report informally on their activities through a Listserv managed by a Japanese staffer in Tokyo. As of 2011, the twenty-nine chapters were in the following countries: Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Ethiopia, Fiji, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Palau, Palestine, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, the Philip­ pines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Timor-Leste, Thailand, the United States, and Uruguay. In 2012 a thirtieth chapter was created in the United Arab Emirates. The scale of operations and the number of staff members in OISCA are large in comparison with those of other NGOs in Japan, where most do not have overseas offices and have only nine staffers or fewer (JANIC 2016, 21, 101). OISCA has a membership (kai’in) system that is composed of indi­ vidual members (kojin kai’in) and corporate members (hōjin kai’in). The former pay 20,000 Japanese yen (JPY) (US$180) and the latter pay JPY 40,000 (US$360) for the benefit of receiving OISCA’s monthly magazine and the opportunity to participate in the organization’s activities in Japan and tours to project sites in other countries. Older staff members told me that the membership system was very important in the organization’s early years, when having face-to-face interactions with members was a crucial part of the mission to transform people’s worldviews. Staffers travelled around Japan to meet with members and explain the significance of OIS­ CA’s activities. At the time of my fieldwork, the number of members had fallen in recent years and staff members in the Tokyo headquarters held several meetings to discuss this problem. Nevertheless, among NGOs in

6827_Book_V4.indd 11 12/5/18 10:11 AM 12 Introduction

Japan, OISCA still has the largest number of corporate members, which include major regional and national businesses (JANIC 2016, 84). Revenue was not largely affected either, as remaining members and other occasional contributors continued to donate to OISCA, making it tenth on the list of NGOs in Japan that received the largest amount of donation-based revenue in 2016, at JPY 412 million (US$3.8 million) (JANIC 2016, 64). OISCA also receives growing income from corporate social responsibility schemes and project-based government grants.

Moral Imaginations of Aid Work This book focuses on OISCA to investigate how moral imaginations to create a better world in one of the oldest and most prominent NGOs in Japan mobilized various political actors and ideologies. Why is the consid­ eration of moral imaginations in development aid important at this point in time? Anthropologists such as Didier Fassin (2012) and Liisa Malkki (2015) have proposed that social life and governments today are orga­ nized significantly around moral sentiments of care for suffering others. Humanitarian reason, they argue, shapes contemporary social imaginaries beyond spaces of emergency aid (cf. C. Taylor 2004). Ordinary citizens in various countries, not only aid workers, are being produced as humanitar­ ian subjects, their right to citizenship and belonging defined around abilities and commitments to care for suffering others (Muehlebach 2012). This involves the balancing act of considering utopian and dystopian futures, making efforts to bring about the former despite looming possibilities of the latter. The humanitarian impetus, broadly conceived, involves moral imaginations: “the way we envision possibilities for a morally better or worse world than the one in which we live” for both ourselves and others (Livingston 2005, 19). In this imagination of the future, people reference various moral orders and historical trajectories in the context of their spe­ cific social relations, using these moralities and histories as compasses with which to make sense of the promises and the dilemmas of what is to come (Scherz 2014; Wendland 2012).7 Given the growing humanitarianization of the public sphere, how people imagine that they can and should care for others, themselves, and the world shapes contemporary subjectivities. At the same time, imaginaries are entangled with histories of imperi­ alism, “othering,” and the politics of cultural encounters, traditions all too well known in anthropology itself (Fabian 1983; Pratt 2008; Rosaldo 1989; see also Leite 2014; Salazar and Graburn 2014; Skinner and Theodosso­ poulos 2011).8 People struggle within the possibilities of open and closed

6827_Book_V4.indd 12 12/5/18 10:11 AM Introduction 13

futures, inclusive and exclusionary pathways amid unshakable legacies and social structures beyond their control. Borrowing such insights, an ethno­ graphic study of moral imaginations in development work can show how aid actors—both workers and recipients—chart their hopes and struggles toward a better future, for themselves and for global others, vis-à-vis vari­ ous spatiotemporal vectors and experiences of failure. Ultimately, then, this book is about the social life of the moral imaginations that underpin and inspire, as well as constrain, the work of a major Japanese NGO as its staff members, aid recipients, and supporters navigate specific historical processes and politics to enact the future. To study the moral imaginations in OISCA as they unfold between Japan and Myanmar demands a particular conceptualization of cultural encounters. Scholars have tended to examine Euro-American forms of humanitarian sentiments as efforts to respond to the suffering of distant strangers and forge proximate relations in solidarity as the final ideal (Black 2009; Boltanski 1999; Fassin 2012). In contrast, to understand Japanese approaches in Asia, as is the case with OISCA, we need to flip this logic and begin with solidarity as the problematic. The starting point for Japanese aid actors in Asia is not difference and distance but similarity and oneness. Japanese discourses of a shared Asianness and, more specifically, a cul­ tural similarity (and special relationship) between Japanese and Burmese people informed Japanese aid actors’ understandings of their work (see especially chapter 4). The driving force of OISCA’s activities is not the attempt to bridge differences and distances to arrive at solidarity but to actualize an imagined originary similarity and oneness—an imagination reminiscent of pre-1945 Pan-Asianist and imperialist Japan. Against this background, solidarity appears not as an expression of a shared humanity that is hindered by politics but a form of engagement that has political and historical consequences. In OISCA, there were two ways of imagining and enacting “becom­ ing one.” First, there was the moral imagination of realizing a planetary unity of ecological harmony based on claims of what I call a nonreligious “Shinto” environmentalism (see chapters 1–3). This moral imagination stems from OISCA’s being the sister organization to Nakano Yonosuke’s new religion, Ananaikyō.9 In the 1920s and 1930s, Yonosuke had been a follower of the major new religion of the twentieth century, Ōmoto, which drew on ideas of Shinto, and he created Ananaikyō in 1949 based on a prophetic pronouncement (see chapter 1).10 Subsequently, he founded OISCA as the “nonreligious” branch of his activities, through which he aimed to bring about world peace and a sustainable future based on ideas

6827_Book_V4.indd 13 12/5/18 10:11 AM 14 Introduction

of ecological harmony and what he called the Great Spirit of the Universe (uchū daiseishin). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s until his death in 1974, Yonosuke talked extensively about the global environmental crisis and the fact that OISCA’s work aimed to transform people and cultivate attitudes of co­ operation and ecological harmony that would bring about a sustainable future. The emphasis on agricultural training programs and training centers derived from this mission. It is evident that, in focusing on transforming people, Yonosuke and his work with OISCA have been shaped by religious traditions of world renewal and personal transformation. For instance, they resonate with the goals of other new religions to instigate a world renewal (yonaoshi) across not only Japanese society but also the world through practices of self-cultivation (Dorman 2012; Mullins et al. 1993; Reader 1991; Stalker 2008). World renewal and the healing of the heart (kokoro) were key aspects of Ōmoto, through which Yonosuke developed his think­ ing. These ideas of self-cultivation for world renewal are based on the sense that people are living in a time of crisis, in need of divinely led efforts to reform the world and create a utopian future. OISCA’s organizational charter states that its mission is “to cultivate a consciousness” based on a recognition “that all life is closely intercon­ nected and that their source is in the universe,” pointing to Yonosuke’s vision that was not simply about agricultural training or development as­ sistance but about transforming the world.11 The resonances with doctrines of world renewal are visible here. Yonosuke’s project as it was channeled into OISCA was nothing short of a global spiritual revolution. Furthermore, the senior Japanese staff members in OISCA were all Ananaikyō members, which meant generally that they came from families that had been follow­ ing Yonosuke since around the 1950s. They attended special Ananaikyō events and other gatherings, although they did not talk about them openly in the OISCA offices and training centers. Yonosuke and OISCA staff members did not aim to proselytize and convert people to Ananaikyō. Instead, OISCA’s senior Japanese staffers emphasized to me that, unlike the mission of members in their sister organi­ zation, their work in OISCA was “not religion” (shūkyō ja nai). “Religion” is a contentious issue in Japan, most people associating the term with cult­ ish and dangerous groups. OISCA’s senior staff members often told me that what they did adhere to were Shinto values and, therefore, Japanese cultural values. This argument that “Shinto is not religion but Japanese culture” is prevalent in Japan (discussed further in chapters 1 and 2). On a basic level, Japanese people do not usually consider Shinto to be an organized

6827_Book_V4.indd 14 12/5/18 10:11 AM Introduction 15

religion, although they do recognize the existence of authoritative bodies such as the national Association of Shinto Shrines (Jinja Honchō). Rather, they view Shinto as a set of customs associated with occasions such as the birth of a child or New Year’s Day, both special times when people visit shrines. Even then, these practices would often be described as Japanese rather than Shinto. Despite this prevalent sense that “Shinto” and “Japanese” are inter­ changeable, religion scholars of Japan have shown that Shinto as a unified category did not exist before the eighteenth century. Only then did nationalist thinkers consolidate various regional traditions as Japan’s supposedly indig­ enous moral tradition, Shinto (Hardacre 1989; Josephson 2012; Yasumaru and Miyachi 1988). Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as European ideas of secularism and religion came to Japan, intellectuals and state actors constructed their own interpretations of these categories and ultimately defined Shinto as a national moral tradition, beyond religion, with the emperor at its center (T. Kuroda 1981; Rots and Teeuwen 2017). When OISCA’s senior staffers stated that what they did was not reli­ gion but Shinto and that their work was ultimately about Japanese cultural values, they were drawing on a historical precedent and thus such statements appeared unremarkable to them as an idea (C. Watanabe 2015b). Further­ more, they equated Shinto values with the values of living in harmony with nature and the supposed collectivism of traditional farming families in rural Japan. By stating that their work in sustainable agriculture and environmen­ tal education followed supposedly Shinto values that were ultimately about commonsense (atarimae) Japanese values, these staff members retained a connection to Ananaikyō but through a nationalistic and unremarkable ideology of Japaneseness rather than the more divisive category of religion. People outside OISCA could then, presumably, accept the organization and its mission as commonsensically Japanese—after all, the explanation went, OISCA was a Japanese NGO and it was not surprising to find Japa­ nese cultural characteristics there. Hence, a dominant moral imagination underlying OISCA’s activities derived from visions of becoming one as a planetary collectivity following what I call “Shinto” environmentalism and therefore, allegedly, an essentially Japanese worldview. I leave “Shinto” in quotation marks in labeling this worldview and phenomenon because the activities in OISCA were shaped by Japanese senior staff members’ particular interpretation of “Shinto values,” but practices in OISCA cannot be seen as Shinto in some categorical way. The second imagination of “becoming one” in OISCA rested on the emphasis on communal living and collective labor in the training

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centers—an ethic that I call “muddy labor” (see chapter 4). I take the term from a phrase that I heard OISCA’s Japanese aid workers and a number of other Japanese aid actors use repeatedly, describing their work as “smelling like mud” (dorokusai). Dorokusai in Japanese generally refers to someone with a commitment to physical labor, a simple and unsophisticated charac­ ter, and a hands-on approach to the world. It points to hard work and con­ tinuous effort rather than sophisticated skill or theoretical understanding. In translating dorokusai as “muddy labor,” I retain the word “mud” (doro) in the phrase and foreground the value of labor in the concept because both are important characteristics of the ethical meaning of aid work for OISCA’s actors. The quality of being dorokusai in OISCA pointed to the virtue of being covered in the literal muddiness of the agricultural fields through collective labor and a figurative muddiness in the messiness of intimate human relations. The sensation of being immersed in manual labor, sweaty and knee-deep in the rice paddies, was replicated in metaphorical ways in the entanglements of relationships that preoccupied staffers and trainees living in a communal setting. As one Japanese staff member explained, life at the training centers was about “eating rice from the same bowl, sweating together” (onaji kama no meshi wo kutte, issho ni ase wo nagashite). Shar­ ing in everyday life and labor defined the work at the training centers. Aid workers and trainees in their own ways valued the commitment to physical and relational “muddiness” as a way to learn to become one. Becoming one may be the core thrust of the moral imaginations in OISCA, but this notion was not stable or unquestioned. What I find most generative about the analytic of moral imaginations is the attention to how people struggle amid an entanglement of different spatial and temporal trajectories, and in the context of moral ambiguities. There is always an “ongoing moral balancing,” as Julie Livingston (2005) explains, as “people debate their life situations and those of others” (20). As an imagination that orients but does not specify a path, the moral here is not a predetermined principle or accepted social order; rather, moral imaginaries posit the moral as a vision that is sometimes unclear and always under construction. The grids that determine what is good and bad are constantly shifting, depend­ ing on historical, political, relational, and other conditions. In this way, the moral imaginations of becoming one were contingent and uncertain in OISCA—that is, the vision of becoming one was there, but it was always in the making and even sometimes contested. Anthro­ pologists have explored the relationship between the moral conditions that people aspire toward and the ethical labor of adhering to, reconciling, or reconstituting a virtuous self (Feldman 2007; Mahmood 2005; Pandian

6827_Book_V4.indd 16 12/5/18 10:11 AM Introduction 17

2009; Robbins 2007; Trundle 2014; Zigon 2011). Although the attention to moments of torment (Robbins 2004) and breakdown (Zigon 2007) in these ethnographies resonate with how aid actors in OISCA strived to “become one,” there is a difference in that, in OISCA, the aspirational imaginaries were themselves shifting, not entirely accepted as stable principles. Moral imaginations in OISCA were more about horizons rather than codes, a compass rather than a map. Morality here was not a set of reference points that existed outside of people’s labor, whether as a predetermined path to follow or a norm to recover. The moral imaginations to become one were not external to aid actors’ daily struggles to define, understand, and implement their various visions in their work (see Kondo 1990 on the value of struggles and disbelief in ethi­ cal subject-making practices in Japan). That is, the efforts to make sense of and at times reshape the visions of becoming one—across generational conflicts, for instance, or through the disconnect between the imaginary of a universal homeplace (furusato) and the means to realize it—constituted the very understandings of becoming one. The unending and at times frus­ trating labor of figuring out the purposes and methods of their profession was itself what aid actors saw as evidence of the moral imaginations of becoming one at work. These were “ordinary ethics”—that is, modes of social practice that involved a constant discernment of what makes a better life, a better person, better work, and a better world within the uncertain­ ties of specific but ordinary circumstances (Lambek 2010). The efforts to discern the path to a better world held ethical value and were themselves the social and the ordinary. Moral imaginations of becoming one, whether in the form of a “Shinto” environmentalism or the muddy labor of collec­ tive living and agricultural work, existed as end points to aspire toward, but more important were the struggles to discern these imaginaries as desirable in the first place and how to realize them despite constant failures to do so. The favored method of enacting the moral imagination of becoming one in OISCA was through the training programs. These activities were meant to nurture leaders of community development who could usher in a sustainable future. OISCA’s staff members and observers tended to de­ scribe this work as hitozukuri, or “making persons,” as I translate the term. Hitozukuri, generally defined in vague ways as the cultivation of people’s holistic character as well as skills, has existed in a variety of sectors, from business management theories to school policies (e.g., Harada 2013). The approach to hitozukuri in OISCA was unique. Yet the training programs in OISCA encapsulated important ways that powerful aid and political actors in Japan imagined certain kinds of personhood and sociality as the

6827_Book_V4.indd 17 12/5/18 10:11 AM 18 Introduction

conditions for bringing about a better world, and how local actors have engaged with that imagination. OISCA’s approach was exceptional but influential, and by exploring that approach, this book aims to change how people understand Japanese aid and the politics of development organiza­ tions generally. In examining the work of “making persons” in OISCA, I focus on the fact that aid work is first and foremost a form of labor. As a number of anthropologists of development, humanitarianism, charity, and NGOs have demonstrated, aid work involves tedious tasks, physical labor, and daily negotiations of difficult relationships that affect conceptions of an ethical self and other (Bornstein 2005; Fechter 2016; Feldman 2007; Redfield 2013; Trundle 2014). Important to note is that, in OISCA, local staffers had been trainees themselves, and therefore the distinction between aid worker and aid recipient became blurred. “Aid work” as a framework allows us to consider both trainees and staff members, Japanese and non-Japanese actors, as variously engaged in the construction and practical realization of particular moral imaginations of a better future, a peaceful and sustainable world. Aid work, in this sense, is not only about technical projects and bu­ reaucratic processes but also about a domain of relational subject-making, and the construction and enactment of the moral imaginations that guide this.

Discomfort as Method Aid work in OISCA, as in many other efforts to actualize moral imaginations, involved struggles to balance multiple competing orienta­ tions. Becoming one could be meaningful to participants but also troubling in its potential political implications. Many times, moreover, there was a disconnect or failure between the imaginaries of becoming one and their actualization in practice. For instance, the emphasis on discipline made many Japanese observers and non-Japanese trainees uncomfortable. Staff­ ers in Japan told me that JICA officials repeatedly asked OISCA to change the style of the training programs for the sake of the elite trainees that the agency funded to participate in OISCA’s trainings. Officials were horrified to see representatives of foreign governments and prominent institutions subjected to such disciplinary and communal lifestyles, which seemed anachronistic in Japan today. Requiring ministry officials of partner coun­ tries to get down on their knees to scrub floors and take communal baths with others struck JICA officials as inappropriate.

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These concerns were not unfounded. In the first few months of a train­ ing program, I saw how trainees were first stunned, and then confused, and sometimes even outraged. I heard stories of trainees who ran away in the middle of the night. During one of my visits to a training center in Japan, I met a woman from Sri Lanka, Thilini. She was an official in the Ministry of Agriculture and had come to OISCA through a JICA scheme. I arrived in the first month of the year-long program and immediately saw that she was having a hard time. On many mornings, she could not get out of bed for the morning routines. I often found her crying under her blanket in our communal sleeping quarters. “This is not what I expected, but I guess that this is what all train­ ees around Japan are experiencing in other training programs outside of OISCA,” she said to me during one of her most upbeat moments. I did not have the heart to disagree with her. Tsuruta-san, who was in charge of the training programs at this site, kept an eye out for her and took breakfast to her every morning when Thilini could not get out of bed. Thilini had apparently begged staffers that they send her back to Sri Lanka, but Tsuruta-san somehow persuaded her to stay. She had given Thilini per­ mission to skip some of the Japanese language classes, but Thilini rejected the offer and continued to attend classes. Tsuruta-san saw hope in this. “If Thilini can get past this stage,” Tsuruta-san said to me, “it will be a great feeling of accomplishment for her.” Unfortunately, I do not know what happened to Thilini in the end. I imagine that she finished the course, since the majority of trainees do, even if they have difficulties at the beginning. Despite the complaints from trainees and government officials, the lifestyle and routines in the train­ ing centers had not changed much in the last fifty years.12 Tsuruta-san explained: “One of the purposes of the training is to encourage trainees to figure out how to tackle difficulties. We want them to come away with a feeling of achievement, a feeling that they completed something to the end without giving up.” Perseverance was an important quality that staffers like Tsuruta-san wanted to impart to trainees. In some ways, her message to Thilini resembled the message that staffers directed at me from time to time. Just as Tsuruta-san had done, one of the senior staff members at another training center in Japan, Hirokawa­ san, commented to me that the morning routines in the training centers must seem strange to me. I could not disagree. More than anything, the routines seemed militaristic and reminiscent of imperial Japan, especially as they were forced upon trainees from Asia and the Pacific islands. He explained:

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You must feel uncomfortable [iwakan] [when seeing these exercises]; I felt it too at first. The thing is that trainees come from many different countries, with their own ideas, and at first this causes a lot of fights. But the fact that everyone has to wake up at the same time, follow the same rules, and do the same morning routines eventually brings them together.

His argument echoed Tsuruta-san’s point about becoming one, and I could see what he meant after participating in a number of the training programs. But what Hirokawa-san said next surprised me:

Japanese people nowadays think in terms of our defeat in the war, and we have developed a habit of belittling our own country. There is probably a need to revise our history textbooks and tell young people that Japan has not done only bad things, as we have been told since we lost the war. Japanese people have also done good things in the world. These disciplin­ ary practices like roll call are not something one can grasp in a few days. You need to experience it with your body for a long time, repeatedly, in order to understand.

Over the course of my fieldwork, I heard other Japanese staff members offer similar explanations of the morning routines in light of a kind of his­ torical revisionism, a stance associated with right-wing nationalist politics that reject Japan’s atrocities in Asia during World War II, such as the views we saw, in 2017, from Prime Minister Abe Shinzō (Morris-Suzuki 2015). The rhetoric was specifically aimed at people like me or at the demo­ graphic I represented: young Japanese who have been educated to remem­ ber Japan’s wartime history with shame. From the late nineteenth century to 1945, Japan colonized Taiwan, Korea, various regions of China, the Philippines, and other Southeast Asian countries. Colonial rule was harsh, and furthermore, Japan’s military regime invaded and committed atroci­ ties and injustices in these countries during World War II. The history of postwar Japan has wavered between forgetting and remembering, a society yearning for an organic unity in the past while knowing that it was marked by violence and brutality (Gluck 1993; Harootunian 2000; Igarashi 2000; Ivy 2000; Yoneyama 1999). Scholars have observed that, through the lens of the atomic bombs, the US Occupation (1945–1952), the Cold War, and rapid modernization, the Japanese public has been unable to recognize the violence of the imperial regime. Many Asian countries today continue to demand an apology and compensation for Japan’s wartime victims, such as the women in China, Korea, and other countries who were forced into

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sexual slavery (“comfort women”) for the Japanese imperial military (Koga 2013). OISCA staff members who explained the morning routines in the way above sought to counter the dominant discourse, which condemns at the same time that it silences Japan’s wartime militarism. The staffer here pleaded that I remember Japan’s past differently. My initial instinct was to criticize these views that overlooked Japa­ nese wartime atrocities and contributed to a right-wing politics made salient in recent years. The term “right wing” (uyoku) in Japan is characterized by a staunch cultural nationalism, historical revisionism, ethnic exclusionary politics, and expansionist ambitions and is associated with the support of politicians visiting the Yasukuni Shrine—where the spirits of the war dead, including those categorized as war criminals, are enshrined—and with ven­ eration of the emperor. These were stances that OISCA’s Japanese staff members, especially the senior ones, expressed. But staffers often nudged me to try to understand their approach differently. After explaining his in­ terpretation of the importance of the morning routines, Hirokawa-san said:

Whenever we have visitors to the training centers, we ask them to par­ ticipate in the activities and the morning routines with the trainees and, if possible, to spend at least one night here. You cannot understand these things just by attending lectures in a warm and cozy classroom.

I could not easily dismiss such appeals because staffers in OISCA clearly found meaning in their work. It was also true that non-Japanese staff members and trainees found their experiences in OISCA valuable. For example, when I talk to Bur­ mese staffers—all of them former trainees—and see their interactions on Facebook, even among those who have left the organization, it is evident that life and work at the training center are and were some of the most meaningful experiences of their lives. In this light, staffers’ explanations about the morning routines were invitations for me to figure out why and how OISCA’s form of aid work could be disturbing and yet meaningful for its participants—and how it could have been so profoundly unnerving and yet also moving for me. Over the course of my various visits to OISCA training centers, of­ fices,and project sites in Japan and Myanmar, I struggled to come to terms with the multiple faces of the organization: nationalist and culturalist in the explanations many Japanese staffers gave of their work but also global in its visions, the life trajectories of its staffers, and the extent of its activi­ ties. I expected to see the global aspects, and as a Japanese citizen who

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grew up and has lived overseas for most of her life, I thought that I would find a kind of affinity with OISCA’s Japanese aid workers. But that did not happen. The general organizational emphasis on discipline and “Japa­ nese values” made me feel inadequate for never having attended Japanese school and for having progressive American sensibilities and politics. “Oh, she is a returnee [kikokushijo],” is a common brush-off that I hear Japanese people say to citizens like me who grew up overseas and might not be quite “Japanese,” according to a homogenizing nationalism. Japanese staff members’ assumptions that I would know certain things, such as how to clean bathrooms properly, or be ignorant of others, such as the importance of discipline, made me deeply anxious and judgmental. But throughout my time at OISCA, I found kindred skeptics. Many of the people I met—young Japanese staff members, non-Japanese trainees, Burmese participants, but also some of the older senior staffers who felt that they were being left behind by the times—also questioned and strug­ gled to make sense of what they were experiencing and working toward. Young Japanese staffers were often bewildered by the need to adhere to a disciplinary lifestyle in the training centers, a lifestyle they did not see as necessary to achieving sustainable development or to “making persons” who will become leaders of community development efforts. Others, both Japanese and non-Japanese actors, struggled to make connections between their everyday activities and the organizational goals of ecological har­ mony. And some could not prioritize the ethos of becoming one with others at the training center above their own individual interests and needs. The failure to actualize the moral imaginaries of becoming one was everywhere. By and large, OISCA’s aid actors did not interpret their confusions and failures as opportunities for criticism against the organization. Instead, things that did not quite sit well with them often became opportunities to engage further with the work, at the same time that these moments could potentially also lead to disillusionment and exit. The validation of confu­ sion and even resistance as a critical process of the transformation of the self is present in other practices of ethical subject-making in Japan (Kondo 1990, 111). Even more widely, the sense of discomfort could be indicative of the presence of ethical work in other development activities (Scherz 2014, 119). Perplexity and failures in OISCA were themselves part of the ethical value of aid work—in this case, the ethical value of the efforts to realize the moral imaginations of becoming one. In watching aid actors use their sense of discomfort as an occasion to reassess and possibly renew their commitments to OISCA and to the moral imaginations of a better world, I found myself moved. Moved because,

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rather than accepting their profession wholesale or outright criticizing the organization, they did something that was more difficult: they embraced their discomfort as a form of engagement—that is, as a method to under­ stand the logics, effects, and possibilities of their work. My approach in this book takes inspiration from these aid workers’ efforts to regard discomfort as a method. I understand my discomfort as historically, socially, and politically situated. So was theirs. I use these paralleled discomforts as avenues through which to trace the implications and logics of the claims and practices among OISCA’s aid actors, as well as my own assumptions. There is much to be uncomfortable about in OISCA’s history and activities. The unease that OISCA provoked in me and others proved to be an opportunity to explore the limits of what makes particular types of labor appear as “aid work” and, through its limits, to understand how aid work comes to be a meaningful endeavor for people.

Outline of the Book This book traces the two types of moral imaginations of becoming one that I outlined above: nonreligion and “Shinto” environmentalism (chapters 1 and 2) and the muddy labor of making persons in the com­ munal lifestyle of the training centers (chapters 3–6). The two could not be neatly separated in practice. Yet they were not always visible at the same time either. The book does not contain any images, but readers can find photographs that accompany the book at this Internet address:https:// becomingoneimages.wordpress.com. In chapter 1, I lay out how Yonosuke’s role as a religious actor first in Ōmoto and then as the founder of Ananaikyō shaped the growth of OISCA. His position as a religious leader, in particular, led to the NGO’s support from prominent conservative and even right-wing political figures in postwar Japan. To convey this historical trajectory, I examine the gen­ erational conflict between Japanese senior staffers in their sixties, seven­ ties, and eighties who were mostly Ananaikyō members—that is, came from Ananaikyō families or had gone through Ananaikyō initiations—and younger staff members in their late twenties and early thirties who were largely non-Ananaikyō or did not adhere to any religion. I use this intergen­ erational dynamic among the Japanese staffers as a lens into how struggles to reconcile the NGO’s religious legacies with aid work constituted a de­ finitive aspect of working in OISCA and, more significantly, of the history of development aid in Japan in broader terms. The chapter shows how the moral imagination to become one was fraught, as Japanese staffers did

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not agree or sometimes did not even know about the foundations of the organization’s mission in ideas of “Shinto” environmentalism. Chapter 2 continues the discussion of Ananaikyō legacies and par­ ticularly the staffers’ and OISCA supporters’ expressions of being nonre­ ligious. Specifically, I examine the senior staff members’ arguments that the influences of Ananaikyō on OISCA were Shinto values that could be summed up as Japanese cultural philosophies of living in harmony with nature. I call this “Shinto” environmentalism to show how it resonates with other groups’ efforts to demonstrate Shinto’s relevance in contemporary issues by engaging with environmentalist discourses and, furthermore, to advance an ecocentric worldview. This chapter also elucidates an important aspect of the moral imaginations behind OISCA’s activities: how cultural nationalist arguments of Japaneseness (the particular) become the vehicle for global visions of a better and sustainable world (the universal). Another point to remember from this chapter is that this “Shinto” environmentalism seemed to be central for OISCA’s leaders and senior staff members, and yet the everyday activities in the NGO did not reflect this ideology. Most staffers were not Ananaikyō members and, for the most part, did not speak of Shinto; instead they talked about Japaneseness. Chapter 3 shifts gears and explores how Japanese and Burmese staff members struggled to understand and enact the latest organizational mis­ sion of making a universal furusato (homeplace or native place). This particularist-universal vision aimed to create landscapes of human-nature coexistence in the image of a Japanese rural furusato around the world, as well as to instill in people everywhere the awareness that Mother Earth is our ultimate universal furusato. The cultivation of rice played an impor­ tant role in this construction, and links to Japan’s imperialist past cannot be avoided here. Yet staffers in Japan struggled to understand how they could translate this vision into practice, while staff members in Myanmar generally saw the training centers as their furusato but were not necessarily aware of the global mission. The chapter shows how the making of persons among staffers as well as trainees under the vision of becoming one—in this case, as members of a universal furusato—involved engagements with contingent processes of deciphering visions into action, of finding the links between the means and ends of their work. The chapter argues that it was the labor spurred on by the gap between the means and ends of creating a universal furusato that made the work utopian for participants. With the historical bases of OISCA’s activities laid out in the first two chapters and the relationship with the training centers introduced in the third chapter, I explore in chapters 4 and 5 how “becoming one” and

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relations of difference and inequality could coexist. In chapter 4, I examine what I call the ethics of muddy labor as they appeared in the collective physical labor and communal lifestyle at the training centers in Myanmar and Japan. The emphasis on the literal muddiness of agricultural work and the value of being entangled in intimate relationships was not unique to OISCA. Other Japanese aid actors also stressed the importance of shared labor and close relationships with aid recipients in “the field” (gemba) of aid, while maintaining a hierarchical view of Japanese superiority. I de­ scribe how the coexistence of arguments of collectivity and intimacy with a hierarchical worldview echoes Japanese imperialist ideologies. Thus, “soli­ darity” should be, not the end point of our analyses of development or hu­ manitarian endeavors, but the starting point for delving into the politics of aid. The chapter also makes comparisons with Euro-American approaches to humanitarian sentiments, faith-based development and charity activities, and other examples of “doing good” across Asia to highlight what becomes apparent when analyses take historical specificities into account. In chapter 5, I discuss how hierarchies and oneness could coexist through constructions of relatedness. First, I refer to the expressions of “being like family” that Japanese, Burmese, and other staffers and trainees used for describing OISCA to illustrate how ideas of becoming one could coexist with the acknowledgment of inequalities. Second, I explore how life and work in OISCA merged for Japanese as well as non-Japanese par­ ticipants. Immersed in the communal lifestyle of the training centers or spending decades if not one’s entire adult life in OISCA, staffers in Japan, Myanmar, and elsewhere found their profession as meaningful as life itself. Just as in a family, hierarchical relations did not nullify the sense of oneness in the organization. In chapter 6, I consider the literal muddiness of the moral imagina­ tions of muddy labor and how these material entanglements also made sense within the claims of “Shinto” environmentalism. Specifically, I de­ scribe how waste matter was reincorporated into the environment of the Myanmar training center and one of the training centers in Japan, and I show that making persons through a disciplined lifestyle might be neces­ sary to become one not only with other people but also with nonhuman life-forms in realizing a sustainable world. I focus on the use of effective microorganisms (EM) in organic bokashi fertilizer and in the sewage sys­ tem at the training center, in order to understand how this human-microbe interaction in the service of creating a sustainable environment required discipline, such as that required in the cleaning chores and the precision of agricultural tasks. Proponents of the use of waste matter as a solution

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to environmental problems have described their efforts as a way to create a “closed loop system,” and Japanese ideas of a “material-cycle society” (junkangata shakai) echo this. Considering these frameworks, I resituate the emphasis on discipline in OISCA in the context of these environmental imaginations of a “circulatory sociality” in a sustainable enclosed society. The work of becoming one mobilizes moral imaginations of an eco­ logical unity around “Mother Earth” and daily activities of shared labor and communal living, neither of which are problematic at first glance. But each of these aspirations and efforts has historical precedents and political implications. The landscape of aid work that OISCA shows can alert us to both the possibilities and dangers of solidarity in the context of specific historical moments. This is an analytical perspective that can be applied to other aid paradigms beyond those in Japan and Myanmar. Where we go from this ambiguous position is a question that I hope the book will help us explore, if not resolve.

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s one of the oldest Japanese NGOs, OISCA is an ideal diagnostic lens through which to examine the historical Aconfigurations behind aid work in Japan. In particular, a surprising history emerges around questions of religion and secularism in postwar Japan, a dynamic that is not often considered in discussions of Japanese development aid and NGOs. In many ways, the case of OISCA seems like an unusual phenomenon. Given that the approaches to aid work in OISCA do not seem to suit any existing categories—the emphasis on a disciplined collective lifestyle, for example—we might view the organiza­ tion as a misfit, always in the wrong place and at the wrong time. But OISCA is a historically, politically, and culturally specific phenomenon that seems to be exceptional only because it diverges from the standard accounts of aid work, in both Euro-American and Japanese contexts. This is not just a story of how much or how little Japanese approaches differ from preconceived notions. What we find in OISCA exists on the limits of dominant understandings, and this is an opportunity to look at aid work from the specificities of historical, regional, and ethnographic analyses—a perspective that ultimately is not confined to Japanese cases and can be applied to other forms of aid work around the world. The Japan NGO Center for International Cooperation (JANIC), a major networking and information center for NGOs in Japan, identifies the first international NGOs in Japan—NGOs working outside Japan—as Christian medical groups that traveled to China in 1938 to provide care to refugees who were forced to flee by the Japanese military invasion (2007). Two decades of inactivity followed due to World War II and its aftermath, but in the late 1950s new aid activities began to emerge. By the 1960s the first NGO-type organizations were established, such as OISCA in 1961, the Japanese Organization for International Cooperation in Family Planning (JOICFP) in 1968, and the beginnings of the Asian Rural Institute (ARI, or Ajia Gakuin) in 1960. The precursor to the government aid agency JICA

27

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was also established in 1962 (under the name of Overseas Technical Co­ operation Agency, or OTCA). In the 1970s the growth of NGOs continued, particularly those with leftist and advocacy orientations. A number of them such as the Association to Aid Refugees (AAR) appeared in response to the large number of refugees from Indochina and Cambodia who arrived in Japan during this period. Throughout the 1980s, development NGOs grew in number, as well as those addressing environmental, human rights, and other issues. The 1990s saw the greatest increase of NGOs, partly due to the impact of wars in the former Yugoslavia and of the Rwandan genocide; these events raised public consciousness of the need for international aid interventions, especially in humanitarian emergencies. The majority of NGOs in Japan today were established during this time (JANIC 2016, 15). Civil society actors in Japan have ranged from groups of activists to labor unions and institutionalized NGOs. Civic groups overall tended to take an antigovernmental stance in the 1960s, but by the 1990s they saw benefit in cooperating with the state and, conversely, state actors regarded civic actors, including NGOs, as helpful collaborators in the provision of welfare services, international aid, and other activities (Avenell 2010; see also Hirata 2004). In 1989 the government set up a Small-Scale Grant Assistance scheme (now called Grant Assistance of Grassroots Projects), which supported grassroots development and humanitarian projects by local groups and NGOs overseas, and the NGO Subsidy System, which provided grants to Japanese NGOs working overseas. The dominant under­ standing of Japanese aid systems throughout these eras has been that they are ultimately constrained by the state, whether that is developmental or neoliberal. NGOs have also been seen to exist in a hierarchical structure at the mercy of the government (Reimann 2010; Schwartz and Pharr 2003). Until the 1990s, civic groups had only two ways to register as public in­ terest organizations: as an incorporated association (shadan hōjin) or an incorporated foundation (zaidan hōjin), as defined by the Japanese Civil Code of 1896.1 OISCA registered as an incorporated foundation in 1969. This process required the permission of a governmental agency such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which would oversee the organization, and an endowment of at least 3 million yen (about US$300,000) for associations and 300 million yen (about US$3 million) for foundations (Reimann 2010, 36–37).2 These were difficult requirements to meet for most civic groups in Japan that did not have the capital or political connections. In 1998 the situation changed. The Law to Promote Specified Non­ profit Activities (NPO Law) was passed, the first legal framework for

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nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations in Japan. Civic groups, in­ cluding those that conduct development projects overseas, were now able to register as formal nonprofit entities with tax-exempt status, making it easier for them to collect donations and for government agencies to work with them as legally recognized organizations (Osborne 2003). Neverthe­ less, nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations have remained rela­ tively small in terms of numbers and finance. As of 2015, there were 50,867 registered nonprofit organizations, 9,581 of which conducted “international cooperation” (kokusai kyōryoku) activities ranging from poverty reduction to cultural exchange. Of the registered nonprofits, 955 were “authorized NPOs” (nintei NPO) that received tax benefits on donations and averaged seventeen workers per organization, six of whom were permanent paid em­ ployees. Of the authorized NPOs, 42.8 percent had revenues between JPY 10 million and 50 million (US$83,333–$416,667), while 13 percent had revenues between JPY 50 million and 100 million (US$416,667–$833,333) (Cabinet Office 2016, 2017).3 In comparison, the United States had 1.41 million registered nonprofit organizations in 2013, with a total revenue of US$2.26 trillion (McKeever 2015). Most of the major NGOs in Japan are registered in JANIC’s direc­ tory, totaling approximately 430 organizations as of 2016. According to JANIC’s most recent 2016 survey of the NGOs in its directory (2016, 64), among organizations that work internationally, six of the top ten with the largest donation revenues were Euro-American or United Nations agencies, such as Médecins Sans Frontières with JPY 7 billion (US$58.3 million) of donation income. Only 53 NGOs had an annual total revenue of more than JPY 100 million (US$833,333) (JANIC 2016, 58). In comparison, in 2016 in the United States, 100 nonprofits received donations totaling more than US$45 billion, and of those that work internationally, the Task Force for Global Health had the largest donation revenue, US$3.2 billion (Barrett 2016). Some other types of organizations could fit into the category of NGOs in Japan, such as nonprofit organizations registered under the NPO Law or under a different legal category, organizations that work domestically or internationally (or both), and organizations established in other decades. In this book, I follow JANIC’s definition of NGOs in Japan as “organizations that do not seek profit and [that] tackle global problems such as poverty, famine, and the environment from a private citizen’s position that differs from that of governments and international agencies and transcends na­ tional, ethnic, and religious borders” (2016, 11). Thus, “NGO” in this view

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includes not only organizations registered under the NPO Law but also those registered as incorporated associations and incorporated foundations that do not seek profit, and it is limited to groups that address global prob­ lems and have projects overseas. This understanding reflects wider uses of the term “NGO” in Japan, which refers to organizations with international projects, while “NPO” tends to refer to organizations that work only inside Japan. I consider OISCA, registered as an incorporated foundation and working internationally on environmental and agricultural development issues, to be an NGO in this sense. According to JANIC, most representatives or directors of NGOs are male, but staff members tend to be female (2016, 95, 99). Staffers also tend to be educated, the majority being university graduates and many of the ones from prominent humanitarian and development NGOs having obtained master’s degrees in the UK or the United States (109). Salaries are relatively low. According to JANIC’s 2009 survey, 90 percent of annual salaries in Japanese NGOs were below JPY 5 million (US$64,000), and most were between JPY 2 million and 3 million (US$25,974–$38,961) (2011, 122). In contrast, the median salary in Japan that year was JPY 4.27 million (US$55,454) (MHLW 2009). Fifty-eight percent of NGO staffers surveyed tended to be mostly in their twenties, thirties, or forties, with only a few over fifty years old (JANIC 2011, 120). From my own experience working in a Japanese humanitarian NGO, staffers are also generally urban and middle class or upper middle class; at the very least, they do not usually come from poor backgrounds. Although I label OISCA an NGO, it differs from the general trend captured in JANIC’s surveys. Its nongovernmental-ness, historical devel­ opment, staff members’ backgrounds, and approach to development aid diverge from the characteristics of most NGOs in Japan. For instance, as I mentioned in the introduction, senior Japanese staff members in OISCA typically came from poor, rural backgrounds, with little formal education. At the same time, OISCA captured the attention and support of powerful politicians and state actors, shaping in many ways some of the dominant ideologies of Japanese aid. OISCA is therefore at the limits of both Euro- American understandings of development aid as well as standard accounts of Japanese NGOs, but, as a limit case, it is a productive example through which to understand important currents that pushed forward certain imagi­ nations of development intervention. Understanding OISCA means revis­ ing conventional accounts of development aid and NGOs, in the context of both Japan and elsewhere.

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A Conference Foretold My first field experience with OISCA was at the Tokyo headquarters in January 2009. The offices are located in an affluent suburb of the capital and occupy a two-story concrete building that could be seen from the over­ ground train. The building was noticeable because of the cute logo at the top of it: a blue swirl with two dots in the middle that looked like a smiley face, supposedly representing a worm that symbolized permaculture and the principles of sustainable agriculture. OISCA owns two headquarters buildings, one with the offices and the other with the canteen where every­ one had lunch together and the dormitories where a couple of the young Japanese staff members, the one or two non-Japanese staff, and a couple of the elderly unmarried staffers without families lived at the time of my research. Both buildings resembled Japanese schools where people had to take off their shoes at the entrance and change into slippers. And it was always too cold or too hot. The departments for the overseas projects, training programs in Japan, and administration were on the ground floor of the office building, and public relations and other administrative personnel occupied the basement. Desks were lined up next to each other, with noth­ ing but staff’s binders as de facto walls, not an uncommon layout in a Japanese office environment. The secretary-general sat against the window at the front of the office space on the ground floor, from where he could see everyone’s activities. Not that he was always there, since he seemed to be constantly running from meeting to meeting. Approximately forty staff members occupied the Tokyo headquarters, half of them senior staffers who were older and from Ananaikyō families, and half junior staff members who were younger and, except for one man and one woman, not Ananaikyō members. There was also one woman from the Philippines who had been a trainee years earlier and had been working in the headquarters for about a year when I met her. A few times a week, one or two Japanese volunteers came to help with various minor jobs such as stuffing envelopes. January 2009 was a very cold month. As I sat shivering in front of a computer, tackling a translation job that some staffers had given me in my temporary role as a “volunteer,” one of the older Japanese staff members rolled his chair over to my desk and tapped me on the shoulder. He asked me, “Do you know about OISCA’s founder?” I shook my head. Shimada-san, a man in his late fifties, knew that I was there as a researcher hoping to study OISCA’s training activities in Japan and Myan­ mar. In the following months, he became one of my most interesting

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interlocutors, mainly because he was a talkative man who existed on the peripheries of the organization. He had received a doctoral degree in a so­ cial science from a university in the United States and joined OISCA at the suggestion of his father, who was himself involved in OISCA’s activities as a supporter and donor. During my time at OISCA, Shimada-san was tasked with managing and sending messages through the OISCA International Listserv, which connected the Tokyo office with the OISCA chapters around the world. He sent daily e-mails to this vast consortium, quoting scholarly texts about environmental crises or statements that OISCA’s founder had made decades ago. Nobody seemed to know what his role entailed beyond managing the Listserv, and over time I came to see that he was, in effect, a marginal character in the Tokyo office. But in his marginality, he often offered intriguing perspectives on the organization. On this wintry day, he took it upon himself to initiate me into OISCA’s fraught history. “The founder, Nakano Yonosuke,” he told me, “suffered from a se­ vere illness in his forties and wandered for a few days in that space between life and death. During this time, he had a vision and saw OISCA. He was actually an entrepreneur, but after he recovered from his sickness, he quit and founded the new religious group Ananaikyō.” The OISCA website did not mention Ananaikyō or religion, so I was surprised. “Do all the staff members know this?” I asked. “Yes, they do. It’s just that they don’t talk about it.” “Why not?” Shimada-san looked at me and motioned with his hand so that I would move closer. I shuffled my chair next to him. He bent toward me and I leaned into him, and we found ourselves hidden behind a pile of books. He continued in a whisper. “I’m not part of Ananaikyō, but there are some people here who are members, like the secretary-general and the deputy. But people tell us that saying religious things sounds too usankusai [fishy], so we’re told not to mention things like that. For example, in the 1970s, Nakano Yonosuke had a vision that there would be a conference about garbage in the Amazon and told OISCA staff to go there. No one knew what he was talking about then. But it turns out that he was referring to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro!” A prophetic vision of an international conference. The revelation caught me off guard. But the conversation stayed with me, and I soon realized that it was a window into the organization’s complex history of re­ ligious beginnings and subsequent claims of being “nonreligious” that have

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constituted the foundation of OISCA activities. In this chapter and the next one, I ask: How do we understand the fact that people such as Shimada-san could speak about OISCA’s religious legacies only in a whisper? What does it mean that staff members and supporters stressed that OISCA was not religious, and what were the consequences of such assertions? What new interpretations does this specific history give us about the development of Japanese aid systems and organizations? While anthropologists and other scholars have described how religious principles such as charity (Bornstein 2005) or secular framings in medical imperatives (Redfield 2013) inform practices of aid, I am interested in looking at the ambivalence among aid workers about their organization’s religious roots as a productive line of inquiry. This perspective requires that we examine the historical and politi­ cal contexts of saying that one is neither religious nor secular—that is, of asserting that one is what I call nonreligious.

Not Religion (Shūkyō ja nai) Aid actors in OISCA were mostly uncertain and uneasy about the organization’s religious background.4 Their assertion that OISCA was not religious was linked to the claims of being ultimately about Shinto. One senior staff member explained the legacies of Ananaikyō in OISCA in this manner: “In the case of Shinto, it’s part of culture [bunka], a part of a spiri­ tual structure, and so it’s hard to capture this as ‘religion.’ ” Most people in Japan would accept this explanation, for the notion that Shinto is “Japa­ nese culture” has an established history in Japan. Shinto has no doctrines or regular practices to follow, and the only exposure to so-called Shinto practices for most Japanese citizens are during New Year’s visits to shrines, summer festivals, and rites of passage for children at ages three, five, and seven. Some people do not even go to these events. The majority of people would describe these practices as cultural customs and not religion. Fur­ thermore, most citizens do not identify as being religious, and religious institutions (Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines) and individual practices such as pilgrimages are declining on the whole. According to a 1952 survey conducted by a national newspaper, 64.7 percent of respondents claimed to have a religious belief; in 2005 the figure was at 22.9 percent (Reader 2012, 12). A similarly low percentage of respondents thought that religion was important for society. Avoiding religion is not uncommon in Japan. Instead of evaluating the statement that OISCA is not religious as hiding some “true” religious orientation, I am interested in how these argu­ ments of being not religious facilitated certain politics, relationships, and

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imaginaries of a better future. In order to understand why OISCA staff members and supporters might have opted to translate the organization’s religious legacies into something else, the controversial history of new religions in Japan becomes relevant. For readers knowledgeable about Japan, this story will be familiar. For others, this is an important backdrop for understanding why people in Japan might often speak of something as being “not religion.” Scholars have examined how “religion” (shūkyō) appeared as a sociologically and politically significant category in late nineteenth-century Japan in relation to questions of modernity, secularity, and superstition, for example, as Japan opened its gates to Europe and the United States (e.g., Isomae 2006; Josephson 2012; Shimazono and Tsuruoka 2004). While “religion” appeared in conjunction with secularity as a modern and rational category, “new religions” founded around the turn of the twentieth century came to be vilified by state authorities and the media as irrational and subversive, in need of control in the name of a modern Japan. Groups such as Ōmoto, founded in 1892, promoted mystical spiritual practices and messages of societal and world reform that were inspired by ideas of Shinto and proved widely popular. The movement was particularly threatening to a Japanese government that was attempting to centralize citizens’ loyalty to the nation-state through orthodox forms of state-organized Shinto (Garon 1997; Stalker 2008). Ōmoto became the target of violent government suppression in the 1920s and 1930s, during a turbulent time when Yonosuke was a member. Laws between the 1920s and 1940s also aimed to control religious groups that were deemed to diverge from state-sanctioned teachings. The media also played a significant role in vilifying new religions as irrational or superstitious, in contrast to “genuine religions” such as orthodox Buddhist sects that have existed since before the eighteenth century, a tendency that did not wane after World War II (Dorman 2012). In fact, the negative portrayal of new religions picked up renewed momentum after the war. The US occupying forces ensured the separation of religion and the state in Japan’s postwar constitution in an effort to abolish the wartime government’s use of Shinto as the basis for its moral authority. This policy defined State Shinto as a religion that needed to be eradicated from the state (Hardacre 1989; Shimazono 2010). Much of the discussion of Shinto today carries the shadows of this idea of associating State Shinto with imperialist Japan. Chapter 2 deals more closely with the question of Shinto, religion, and the secular. For the purposes of this chapter, what is relevant is that the conflicts and anxieties over the role of

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religion in the public sphere became a major topic of debate in the wake of World War II in Japan. In particular, one of the largest Buddhist-based new religions, Sōka Gakkai, and its expansion into formal electoral politics caused the media, orthodox religions, politicians, and other public voices to raise alarm at the irrational forces of new religions that threatened a democratic and secular postwar Japan (McLaughlin 2012). Orthodox Shinto groups such as those that formed the Association of Shinto Shrines (Jinja Honchō) in 1946 were especially keen to recover the image of Shinto out of the specter of State Shinto. They attacked new religions in order to distance themselves from any religions that the media and public might deem superstitious and mali­ cious and that had advanced into public and political realms in ways that seemed to contradict the tenets of secularism (Dorman 2012, 206).5 But no other event has had as great a negative impact on new religions as the Aum sarin gas attacks of 1995 (Baffelli and Reader 2012; Hardacre 2003). Followers of Aum Shinrikyō released deadly gas in the Tokyo subways, killing thirteen people and injuring nearly six thousand more. Since then, new religions have been the subject of intense public suspicion, state sup­ pression, and legal surveillance. In light of this context, it is no surprise that OISCA staffers tried to distance themselves from the organization’s roots in a new religion. After all, Ananaikyō, and OISCA by association, had been the target of media attacks as well. In addition to OISCA, Yonosuke established a school in 1968 that later became the OISCA high school and the OISCA vocational college (senmon gakkō). In July 1990 the weekly tabloid magazine Shūkan bunshun, published an exposé that claimed to reveal the neoimperialist and right-wing orientations of Ananaikyō and the OISCA high school (Shūkan bunshun 1990). The article described how teachers in the high school taught militaristic forms of physical and spiritual discipline to the students, as well as allegiance to the emperor. The walls of the school were adorned with slogans from wartime Japan such as hakkō ichiu—a slogan meaning “the eight corners of the world under the one heaven of benevolent imperial rule,” which was used to support Japanese imperialism in World War II (see also Hayashi M. 1987). In some ways, these media portrayals are not wrong, since Yonosuke and his followers have had right-wing affiliations and political positions. Yet we also need to place these public outcries in the context of a widespread vilification of new religions in Japan. Given this background, OISCA staffers’ resistance to being affiliated with a new religion makes sense.

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Staffers’ claims that OISCA is not a religious organization might seem to suggest a secular view. Since Max Weber’s pronouncement of the “disenchantment of the world,” scholars on the whole adhered to secular­ ization theories, in which they saw modernity to necessitate the decline and privatization of religion (e.g., Berger [1967] 1990). Most studies of new religions and State Shinto in Japan mentioned above have been based on this framework. But in the 1990s, influential thinkers—some of whom had previously espoused secularization theories—began to question this assumption, pointing to the (re)emergence of religions in modern public realms (Berger 1999; Casanova 1994; Habermas 2008). No longer certain that the secular in modern life included the erasure of religion from the public sphere, people began to rethink the relationship between the two categories. Talal Asad’s seminal work of 2003 argued that the secular did not appear after and in opposition to religion and that, rather, the two have always coexisted in the making of modern (Western) society (see also Cal­ houn et al. 2011; Dressler and Mandair 2011; C. Taylor 2007).6 In short, the disenchantment of the modern world did not erase religion; instead, it shaped religion as a distinct category and transformed it as part of the epistemological and political project of modernity. Thus, religion and the secular are mutually constitutive elements of the modern. It is important to note that when OISCA’s staffers and supporters distanced themselves from Ananaikyō, they did not then embrace a secu­ lar position of science and rationality. Religion and secularism are not in opposition, and the rejection of one does not lead to an acceptance of the other. OISCA’s senior staffers spoke of miraculous happenings around the weather and of supernatural relationships between human and nonhuman worlds. The nonreligious claims that I identify sought to sidestep the cat­ egory of the secular as well as religion (see chapter 2). The argument about the nonreligious that I describe in the following pages has three steps, which are the topics of this chapter. First, I explain how Yonosuke’s role as the leader of a new religion shaped the vision and activities in the development of OISCA. Second, I examine how, despite this history, Japanese staff members today diverged in their views regard­ ing OISCA’s religious legacies, largely along generational lines. But this generational schism meant that younger staff members were largely un­ aware of the deep political ties through Yonosuke that had led to OISCA’s success. In the third section, then, I give a detailed history of Yonosuke’s relationships with politicians as a lens that brings into focus why the rise of international aid systems in Japan cannot be divorced from the history of new religions and politics. Ultimately, I suggest that generational tensions

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are productive foci of analysis because they offer a window into the un­ examined history of religion and politics in Japanese aid, and they show how the struggles to contend with the past and chart the future constitute important dynamics in the moral imagination of aid work. In chapter 2, I concentrate on the main part of the argument, which shows how OISCA staff members and supporters framed the nonreligious in terms of what I call “Shinto” environmentalism. The logic of the nonreligious in this analysis demonstrates how aid actors used ideas of “Japaneseness” to make universal environmentalist claims. This conceptual move forms the founda­ tion of the analyses in subsequent chapters.

The International Spiritual Congresses In order to grasp the arguments of the nonreligious, an understand­ ing of Yonosuke’s activities before his establishment of OISCA is neces­ sary. Yonosuke was born in 1887 in Shizuoka Prefecture. In the 1920s he joined Ōmoto, one of the largest new religions at the time. He had been impressed with Deguchi Onisaburō, the effective leader of Ōmoto, and with Onisaburō’s fight against government suppression when he read about events in the news. For whatever reason, Yonosuke found the Ōmoto movement appealing. According to an Ananaikyō representative’s recount­ ing of events to me, at the age of forty, Yonosuke had his first significant prophetic vision, in which he saw a godly presence tell him: “You have been successful for forty years in the human world; for the latter half of your life, you should commit yourself to serving the world.” Leaving his profession and wealth as a businessman in the construction business, Yono­ suke became a full-time Ōmoto follower. Yonosuke’s time in Ōmoto had a significant influence in how he envisioned OISCA’s mission in later years. The Ananaikyō representative told me that Yonosuke became the target of state suppression alongside other Ōmoto followers, spending some time in jail in the 1930s. In 1949 he established Ananaikyō as a registered religious organization (shūkyō hōjin).7 I heard this official Ananaikyō history from a representative who was tasked with introducing me to the religious group during my visit to its headquarters in Shizuoka in the early spring of 2010. When I expressed interest in learning more about Ananaikyō, the secretary-general of OISCA had suggested that I participate in a two-day induction course in Shizuoka. I had to pay a fee of JPY 20,000 (US$220), but for the price I was able to stay overnight at the headquarters and receive a one-on-one seminar about the history and teachings behind Ananaikyō. The representative, Nagano-san,

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spent hours talking to me about Yonosuke and his philosophy. He told me that after Yonosuke established Ananaikyō as an official religious organiza­ tion, people came from all over Japan to join the movement. In subsequent years, regional temples and branches were set up across the country. But as of the mid-1990s, Ananaikyō had only twenty-four thousand members, making it substantially smaller than the major new religions of the time (Inoue et al. 1996, 9). Nagano-san told me that the number of active mem­ bers today is probably about three thousand. Yonosuke’s vision went beyond purely religious activities, however. Throughout the 1950s he and his followers constructed astronomical obser­ vatories with the advice and support of prominent astronomer Yamamoto Issei from Kyoto University. According to Nagano-san, Yonosuke visited Yamamoto without warning to offer his views on religion as “the teaching that points people toward the universe.” He illustrated this point by unpack­ ing the kanji (Chinese-based) characters for religion (shūkyō 宗教): shū 宗 being deconstructed to “universe” (uchū 宇宙, from the radical u-kanmuri at the top) and “to point” (shimesu 示), and kyō 教, meaning “teaching.” Despite the unsolicited visit, Yamamoto was apparently taken by Yono­ suke’s words. They shared the view that the universe has a kokoro (heart or mind) that cannot be explained by science. Subsequently, with the help of Yamamoto, Yonosuke and Ananaikyō members constructed observatories at various places in Japan until they were widespread, to the point that this accomplishment even became the subject of a novel by a well-known author (Satō A. 1975). Today only one is left, the Gekkō Observatory in Shizuoka Prefecture. In 1968, Yonosuke established the Astronomy and Geology Technical School (Tenmon Chigaku Senmon Gakkō) and he later restructured it into two schools: the OISCA high school and the OISCA College for Global Cooperation, the latter of which features a two-year vocational program for high school graduates interested in working in international aid, especially with OISCA. Approximately a quarter of the Japanese staff members that I met, mainly from Ananaikyō families but not exclusively, were graduates of either the high school or the college, or both. The seeds for the establishment of OISCA were sown in the 1950s, when Yonosuke organized international conferences with religious leaders from other countries in an effort to create a new religious coalition for world peace. These events brought together hundreds of religious leaders from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the United States. Yonosuke was not the only one who envisioned a global peace movement around religions at this time. A comparison with other religious peace events might illustrate how Yonosuke, Ananaikyō, and subsequently OISCA have been politically

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positioned in Japan. Like Yonosuke, a number of other Japanese religious leaders held international religious peace conferences in the first decade after World War II. These efforts culminated in the World Conference on Religions for Peace, organized in Kyoto in 1961 and attended by 47 reli­ gious leaders from around the world and 226 religious leaders from Japan. Sharing a vision of personal and global peace, the participants called for an international movement against nuclear and hydrogen bombs and, in Japan, against the mobilization of religious groups behind the 1960 revision of the Japan-US Security Treaty.8 As a result of the conference, in 1962 the Japan Religions Peace Committee (Nihon Shūkyōsha Heiwa Kyōgikai) was established around issues such as the separation of religion and state and, hence, opposition to politicians’ visits to the Yasukuni Shrine;9 the removal of US military bases from Okinawa; and the promotion of human rights and democracy. Most notably, the committee’s declaration of its establishment began with a regret and an apology for having colluded with Japan’s military aggression into Asia during World War II. Its principles of world peace came to be based on this political stance (Nihon Shūkyōsha Heiwa Kyōgikai 1968, 194). In contrast, Yonosuke’s conferences did not mention Japan’s military past, much less an apology to other nations, nor did they advocate for a separation of religion and state. It is evident that Yonosuke’s position differed from that of many other religious groups at­ tempting to create a global peace movement at the time. Instead, Yonosuke’s conferences quickly moved away from the framework of “religion” and shifted to include actors other than religious leaders. At these events, Yonosuke proposed the concept of the Great Spirit of the Universe. Yonosuke saw the world united through a connection to this Great Spirit, an energy that runs through nature and the universe and thereby through all life-forms, including humans. This Great Spirit is what enables our existence and is the key to an environmentally sustainable and peaceful future. In 1961, Yonosuke invited more than four hundred people from around the world to participate in the first Congress for Cultivating Universal Human Spirit, organized by himself and cosponsored by the leading religious journal in Kyoto, Chūgai nippō. I never found out how Yonosuke was able to assemble this many people, but the goals of this event were clear: to realize a utopian vision wherein humans “return to nature,” living by the laws of the Great Spirit of the Universe and moving away from the destructive future of science and modernization (OISCA 1961, 13). A second congress was held in the same year, and the attendees formed the precursor to OISCA, the International Organization for Culti­ vating Human Spirit (IOCHS).

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In subsequent meetings, Yonosuke, having received requests for aid from Asian leaders who were battling food scarcity in their countries, pro­ posed that the organization should focus on agricultural aid in Asia, spe­ cifically through agricultural training programs. The focus on agriculture reflected Yonosuke’s views that agriculture, fisheries, and forestry were the industries most faithful to the Great Spirit of the Universe (Nakano Yonosuke 1967, 2). Moreover, it connected to his belief in astronomy. As he explained, “Agriculture has always been closely associated with the activities of the Heavenly bodies. . . . By taking full advantage of the knowledge of the heavenly movements and the meteorological conditions, agriculture can produce the richest dividends” (9; orig. English). Although OISCA staffers’ approach to agriculture did not completely adhere to or­ ganic methods from the beginning, Yonosuke preached against the use of chemicals. As early as 1967, he stated:

While it is possible for chemical fertilizers to enrich the soil, it has also been pointed out that rice which relies excessively on chemical fertilizers is not without some harmful effects to health. It is for these reasons that agriculture which relies on natural growth and is not dependent on chemi­ cal insecticides follows the great teachings of the Universe and Nature. . . . Thus, agricultural work should be undertaken in observance of the natural laws of heaven and earth which no human knowledge can ever faithfully fathom (11; orig. English).

Yonosuke’s belief was that agricultural aid had to be not simply about the transmission of technical skills but also, and more importantly, about cultivating an attunement with the natural world. For Yonosuke, agricul­ tural labor was a spiritual and transformative endeavor as much as it was a method of food production.

A Movement or Project-based Activities? OISCA’s first staffers set up the headquarters in Tokyo, but the or­ ganization quickly spread through affiliates across Japan with the help of Ananaikyō followers. The first staff members were unpaid volunteers, most of whom were Ananaikyō members who equated their work in OISCA with a religious commitment. They joined OISCA as part of their devotion to Yonosuke and to Ananaikyō’s visions of a better world, and they committed themselves fully to agricultural aid work without an expectation of remu­ neration, social benefits, or holidays. A middle-aged staff member who was

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not from an Ananaikyō family told me that when he joined OISCA after university in the 1980s, older staffers told him, “We don’t need university graduates!” (Daigakude wa iranai!). This was a criticism aimed at what the original staff members—coming from rural, poor backgrounds—per­ ceived as the overanalytical approaches of educated and urban Japanese who thrived in the rapid modernization of postwar Japan but did not under­ stand the values of practice-based and hands-on approaches to agricultural labor and trainings. From my life history interviews with staff members, it appears that the first staff members in OISCA came largely from poor backgrounds or after hardships trying to make it in an increasingly competitive society. This demographic makeup makes sense, given that new religions in Japan since the nineteenth century have tended to attract rural and poor populations, as reflected also in Yonosuke’s followers. Although data are insufficient to conclude that Ananaikyō provided a strong network and political voice for marginalized and poor citizens in 1960s Japan as the major new religion Sōka Gakkai did (McLaughlin 2014, 77), the characteristics of the early (and thus senior) OISCA staff members suggest this trend. Joining OISCA was more than a job for these first staffers; it was a way for people who felt left behind in industrial and Tokyo-centric Japan to find a meaningful vocation and a place to belong. Although since the 1980s an increasing proportion of staff members had been non-Ananaikyō, urban, educated, and young, the organization’s roots in rural and poor populations is important in how aid work has been understood in OISCA and even in wider Japanese aid discourses. From the 1980s onward, the number of active members in Ananaikyō fell to a couple of thousand, and it became increasingly difficult to keep the third- and fourth-generation children of Ananaikyō families interested in Ananaikyō activities, much less recruit new young members (Sagami 2014).10 Moreover, as international aid work became more popular in Ja­ pan and the sources of funding diversified with the rise of governmental schemes for NGOs and corporate social responsibility programs in the private sector, OISCA had to begin opening its doors to non-Ananaikyō workers. Today an unspoken divide exists between Ananaikyō and non- Ananaikyō staffers, generally coinciding with generational differences between those in their sixties or older and those in their late twenties and thirties. This is a distinction in which the former are the senior management staff and directors of training centers, positions that the latter can almost never achieve.11 As with many other NGOs in Japan, the retention rate of mid-level staff in their forties and fifties, especially those with families, was

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low due to humble wages and frequent overseas postings (JANIC 2011, 120–121). The wide generational gap created disparities in staff members’ views on what aid work should look like. One senior staff member, Ueda-san, described this difference in terms of the perception of OISCA as a movement-based entity (undōtai) or as a project-based entity (jigyōtai). He used these expressions to explain his theory and criticism of organizational change, but this description also mapped onto the shifts and tensions across the generational and Ananaikyō/ non-Ananaikyō divides. Although another senior staffer to whom I men­ tioned Ueda-san’s view disliked this simplistic characterization, I found the heuristic helpful because it captured how the older Ananaikyō staffers tended to see their work as a lifelong commitment to global change, while the younger non-Ananaikyō aid workers generally understood their work within the frameworks of temporally distinct and bureaucratically managed projects. Despite the authority of senior staff members, OISCA’s projects were now generally managed as in other NGOs: through budgets and proj­ ect reports. Work in the Tokyo office revolved around bureaucratic tasks informed by activities organized around projects as units of management. For Ueda-san, the transformation of the organization from a move­ ment-based to a project-based structure had been detrimental to the main purpose of the work envisioned by Yonosuke. In Ueda-san’s eyes, the concern over budgets, project management procedures, and the needs of corporate and governmental donors seemed to detract from the original aim of world renewal and global peace. This was a different era from the first decades when OISCA projects depended almost entirely on individual membership fees and private donations that allowed staffers to direct and implement projects in whatever ways they deemed fit. “Our mission was supposed to be about spreading our vision as a movement, but these days it is all about projects!” he complained. OISCA as a movement-based entity demanded from participants a commitment to the work that should go above and beyond the needs of a job description, captured in what senior staffers called hōshi. I translate hōshi as “voluntarism,” but it contains a sense of “serving” something of a higher order, rather than charity (cf. Georgeou 2010). In the realm of international aid, we see the term surface at the turn of the twentieth century among aid actors of the Japanese Red Cross Society, who explained their humanitar­ ian work as hōshi to the emperor (Kurosawa and Kawai 2009). A young Ananaikyō staff member in OISCA explained to me that, in Ananaikyō, hōshi refers to a dedication to the religious group, shown by living at the headquarters in Shizuoka or at other temples around the country. Working

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in OISCA formed part of this principle of hōshi in Ananaikyō. Accordingly, until the mid-1980s, staff members did not receive a salary, because their work constituted an act of hōshi. Senior staff members told me that many people in the first teams who went to India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and other countries in the 1960s and 1970s sold almost everything they had in order to pay for plane tickets and basic living expenses overseas, often leaving their wives and children to survive on their own in Japan. One man in his late seventies told me that his family eventually lost their farm after he left for India in 1965, and his wife struggled to raise their children without him. But even though there was no pay, staffers did not have to worry about food or lodging because the training centers became their home as well as their workplace. Work merged with life itself. Even today there are Ananaikyō women who cook lunch at the Tokyo office canteen as a form of hōshi, and most of the other young staffers who do not live in the dorms live together in OISCA-owned apartments a short train ride away. The younger non-Ananaikyō staff members in the Tokyo office gener­ ally resisted this definition of aid work in terms of the full-time commit­ ments of hōshi. I was told that, over the years, the new, young staffers had demanded more life-work balance—for instance, by reducing the number of weekends that staff members had to come into the office. In 2004 an external consultant team conducted a survey among current and former staffers titled “Project to Rediscover OISCA’s Appeal” (OISCA miryoku saihakken purojekuto), which reflected many of the contrasting views be­ tween older and younger staff members. Younger staffers commented that OISCA needed to make changes to strengthen a “consciousness of profes­ sionalism” (puro ishiki) and thereby reform the financial, membership, and administrative management systems; to improve the current labor condi­ tions and benefits package; and to unify staffers’ consciousness in order to solve the existing problems in the organization (OISCA 2004, 7). In the report, young staff members seemed to generally agree that the strong “volunteer consciousness” (borantia ishiki) stemming from the values of hōshi had led to a weak management system. This also related to their complaints about extremely low salaries, even by NGO standards in Japan, and the uncertainties that came with the nonstandardization of pay struc­ tures. Another complaint was the deep divide between older and younger generations and between Ananaikyō and non-Ananaikyō members. One young staff member stated in the report:

OISCA is a vertical society [tateshakai; i.e., hierarchical society] like in a Japanese corporation. Also like an established corporation, it is a static

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organization. The values between young people and older people are dif­ ferent. Young people today want to be convinced about the reasons for a task before taking on the work. But OISCA in the old days had big bosses who would tell others to do things without questioning anything. I think this was also based on the general sense at the time that it is not manly to be argumentative and fussy. The generation that has come through that era is mostly made up of Ananaikyō members and OISCA-only experts [rather than aid workers with diverse experiences]. In contrast, younger generations are not senior officers or Ananaikyō members, and their val­ ues differ from those of older people.

Other young staff members quoted in the report also pointed out that al­ though they could see the positive values of Ananaikyō visions of a better world and respected Nakano Yoshiko (Yonosuke’s successor) as a leader, the organizational structure based on the religious group was untenable. They wished to know more about OISCA’s religious roots and mission, a topic that they felt the older staff members avoided. Non-Ananaikyō staffers could vaguely understand the value of the spirit of hōshi, but they interpreted it as a religious mission, in which they felt they could not participate. “I left because I realized that this was not a workplace for people who have nothing to do with religion,” one former staffer explained (OISCA 2004, 10). In the report’s section on the views of senior management staff—that is, older Ananaikyō staffers—interviewees talked about the resistance that they saw from younger staff members about the organization’s religious background. The statements above from young staffers who wanted to know more about OISCA’s history suggest that this was not entirely true. Nevertheless, senior staffers said:

OISCA’s founder was a religious leader, and in the first years he used to do a monthly briefing for all staffers and members. At the time, I also did not understand everything that he said; it is only now that I get it. People in the past clearly understood the founder’s vision behind the organiza­ tion. But young people today seem to dislike that.

Another senior staff member stated that OISCA’s philosophy begins from a worldview in which the universe and humans are one, but when he made such assertions, young people complained that it sounded like religion. “I do not think that it is religion or anything like that, but young people these days get caught up in preconceived notions when we use words like ‘universe,’ ” he argued. Several older staff members quoted in the report

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agreed with younger staffers that they needed to update the management systems and employment benefits for staff, but there was a general criticism of young people’s distaste of the NGO’s religious origins. Given some of the statements by young staffers in the report, the generational conflict might have been an issue of misunderstanding or lack of information, not solely disagreement or even resistance to religion. But I did see pressures for reform during my time at the Tokyo headquarters, indicating that generational frictions and demands for change were pres­ ent. For instance, JICA officials had been asking OISCA to change the style of its training programs in Japan for several years, mainly the strict lifestyle and heavy load of physical labor. When I interviewed a JICA official who managed activities with OISCA, he told me that the style of trainings in OISCA was difficult to measure because staffers preferred a leading-by-example approach (sossen suihan), not always verbalizing the content or method of their training activities (C. Watanabe 2017b). In the survey report, both young and older staff members had voiced a similar characterization of OISCA’s trainings: that senior staffers in the training centers tended to be experts of practice-based agricultural knowledge but not always good at explaining things to other people. And so staff members in Tokyo had become accustomed to leaving decisions about projects to the discretion of the directors of the training centers, who had deep knowledge of agriculture, training, and local contexts but did not always articulate their work with words. The JICA official knew this about OISCA and ex­ plained: “This makes it difficult to fit OISCA’s activities into the logical designs of a JICA project, which is usually constructed around objectives, bases of measurement, and results that can be assessed against these goals.” His predecessors had told him that OISCA’s projects had to be favored because of certain political connections, but the need for activities to meet the logic of project management systems made it increasingly difficult for the JICA official to accept OISCA’s current training style. In addition to pressure from JICA, OISCA staffers in Tokyo at the time of my research were also trying to adjust the organizational structure to fit new changes in legal registration. Article 34 of the 1896 Civil Code had governed the registration of public interest corporations for more than a century in Japan, with the exception of some amendments by the US Occu­ pation immediately after World War II.12 Public and state-level discussions to change the law began in the year 2000, two years after the NPO Law went into effect and after several scandals surfaced involving incorporated foundations (zaidan hōjin) that were misusing funds. In 2008 the new laws for public interest corporations were established. OISCA, registered as an

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incorporated foundation in 1969, had to register anew as a public inter­ est incorporated foundation (kōeki zaidan hōjin) and accordingly begin to change its organizational and administrative system in the year 2009. The details of these legal changes are beyond the scope of my analy­ sis, but it suffices to say that the reforms were forcing OISCA’s senior managers to make fundamental changes to the organizational culture. For example, a staff member explained in an internal memo to colleagues that the new laws would affect accounting procedures. Before, the seasoned directors of training centers tended to strategize so that they would have remaining funds at the end of each fiscal year, which they used for other purposes as they deemed fit. The new laws now required all projects to have a balanced budget—that is, to ensure that income and expenditure would be equal, since a public interest group should not in principle generate profit. The memo explained that given both the organizational culture of frugality and the unpredictable situations of local project sites, this could be a difficult change to implement (OISCA Overseas Division 2009). The senior staff member’s description of the conflict between OISCA as a movement-based entity and a project-based entity captured the dis­ crepancies among different generations of staff and between Ananaikyō and non-Ananaikyō staffers, as well as the external pressures to which all staff members had to respond. Despite these differences, I refer to everyone who worked in OISCA full-time as staff (shokuin) because that is how they described themselves, regardless of pay or motivation. In this sense, everyone who worked full-time could represent OISCA to outsiders from the position of a staff member. I use the term “volunteer” to refer to those who worked for OISCA without pay and on a part-time or temporary basis, which is how they positioned me in their everyday activities.

Making Persons (Hitozukuri) The generational rifts notwithstanding, one thing generally united OISCA staffers: their commitment to the work of making persons (hito- zukuri). In international aid discourses, the term hitozukuri appeared in 1979, when former prime minister Ōhira Masayoshi gave a speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Devel­ opment (UNCTAD) (Ōhira 1979). He noted that Japan had historically emphasized the value of education, making the development of human resources (jinteki shigen) central to the development of the country. He referred to this work as hitozukuri and stated that one of the most important tasks in Japanese international aid rested on the nurturing of the “unlimited

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potential of young people” around the world through technical trainings based on Japan’s recent experiences of modernization. He elaborated that hitozukuri would be not only dedicated to the transfer of technical skills but also conducted through the fostering of mutual understanding within an interdependent (sōgo izon) global community. The approaches to hitozukuri in OISCA both reflect and depart from wider Japanese approaches to hitozukuri aid (OISCA 2002). The emphasis on human resource development is widespread in Japanese governmental approaches to development aid (Kato 2016). Within this, JICA is the ex­ emplary governmental agency that has used the concept of hitozukuri as its conceptual anchor. In 1999, JICA published a report outlining the ideas behind hitozukuri, surveying how international ideas of human resource development and Japanese approaches to hitozukuri have evolved in line with historical changes since World War II. The report does not quite push the definition further than the idea that the training of persons is key to a country’s economic, social, and institutional development, but it proposes that “human capital” and “capacity building” may be possible English translations of hitozukuri (JICA 1999).13 Nevertheless, although in some circles hitozukuri might look like these neoliberal traditions of “human capital,” I would contend that, contrary to the JICA report, hitozukuri as it unfolded in aid projects differs from such ideas, at least until the 2000s (cf. Douglas-Jones and Shaffner 2017). Scholars have understood human capital as the neoliberal ability of individuals to become self-entrepreneurs through an investment in one’s own training or education so as to produce one’s own future income and well-being (Dean [1999] 2010; Feher 2009; Foucault [1979] 2008). In contrast, at its most fundamental level, hitozu- kuri in Japanese aid activities has not been based on the framework of the neoliberal individual, a homo economicus “abilities-machine” (Foucault [1979] 2008). Rather, as JICA officials explain,hitozukuri has historically been defined as “a concept unique to Japan,” advancing activities that foster “mutual understanding” and take place “in a situation where culture, his­ tory, and values are different from those of Japan” (Kanda and Kuwajima 2006, 38). Differing from the self-enterprising neoliberal individual of human capital theories, the concept of hitozukuri has been about mutually constituted persons as much as it has been about skills enhancement. Observers have pointed out that Japanese experts in capacity-building projects tend to understand their work as one of sharing knowledge as well as attitudes—attitudes that “are frequently illustrated by the fact that the Japanese experts are actually to be found in the paddy field or on the project site itself” (King and McGrath 2004, 169). This is not an approach

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to training that happens with the expert-teacher standing aside while the trainee toils away; it is a process that demands both trainees and teachers to get their hands dirty together. Thus, hitozukuri activities differ from neo­ liberal forms of technical trainings and sustainable development initiatives (cf. Welker 2012). Hitozukuri points to a different world in the making and to different pasts. If anything, it resonates with traditions of “creating a new person” as a form of development intervention that come before the current development regime—that is, traditions of Christian missionaries (Cooper and Packard 2005, 132). I return to this point in chapter 4. JICA itself has changed its philosophy from hitozukuri to “capac­ ity development” to reflect global trends in international discourses (JICA 2008). But the concepts of hitozukuri as based on mutuality and working in paddy fields together continued to live on in the imaginations and practices of aid work in OISCA. This characteristic of “making persons” will become clearer in the ethnographic chapters that follow. One aspect worth mention­ ing here is that OISCA’s Japanese staff members emphasized values such as discipline and communal labor in their training programs, differing from mainstream forms of human resource development (jinzai ikusei) and the transfer of technical skills (gijutsu iten) in Japan. The training programs in OISCA are carried out at designated training centers over the span of a year, with an emphasis on communal living and collective labor, instead of the trainings that happen in a few days or weeks at places like JICA. OISCA’s website states that, in addition to imparting technical skills in organic and sustainable farming, the training programs cultivate people’s mind and spirit around values of mutual respect, cooperation, cultural diversity, and harmony with nature through a communal lifestyle.14 The staff members in the training programs sought to inculcate these values in trainees as manifestations of what Yonosuke termed the “spirit of Japan” (nihon no seishin) (Nakano Yonosuke 1970, 8). In many ways, staffers believed that spiritual cultivation (seishin ikusei) was more important in bringing about a transformed world than the technical aspects of the train­ ings. Teaching people to wake up at dawn to participate in shared cleaning duties and to put the interests of the group ahead of one’s own, for instance, was more important than imparting state-of-the-art techniques. Although seishin ikusei is translated as spiritual cultivation here, it refers not so much to a religious or supernatural process as to the development of personal character and fortitude through discipline and hardship, an approach to learning seen in a wide range of institutions in Japan (Befu 1980; Cave 2004; Dore 1958; Frager and Rohlen 1976; Moeran 1984). In religious and other settings of ethical learning, people also often speak of shugyō, a term

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that refers to disciplinary practices such as asceticism and meditation, as well as martial arts (Davis 1980; Kondo 1990; Reader 1991; Reader and Tanabe 1998; Schattschneider 2003). These notions of spiritual cultivation are usually tied to essentialized notions of Japanese cultural and moral values, such as perseverance, that are seen to benefit the development of the person. Thus, the emphasis on spiritual cultivation in OISCA is not in itself rare in Japan. Nevertheless, it is not a characteristic of activities in other Japanese NGOs, where skills in project management are valued more than the ability to live a disciplined lifestyle. And yet, in its exceptionality, OISCA managed to capture the imagination of many powerful political actors in postwar Japan.

The Prominence of OISCA When OISCA began its training programs in the early 1960s, the Japanese government had just begun similar initiatives. OISCA appeared on the scene, not simply when there were few other NGOs in Japan, but when the Japanese government’s own aid system was still in its infancy. In 1954, Japan signed the Japan-Burma Peace Treaty and Agreement on Reparations and Economic Cooperation, which was the beginning of the government’s financial aid in the form of war reparations to countries in Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific (MOFA 2015). Guided by the US government’s plans to make Japan the economic superpower and purveyor of US influence in the region, Japan’s state policies targeted Southeast and South Asia, in particular, as markets for Japanese goods and sources of raw materials. This policy enabled former wartime officials and others who had close personal ties with politicians in the region from before World War II to act as trading company executives and brokers (Shiraishi 1997). In 1958, economic cooperation through loans began in India, unrelated to the issue of war reparations, and this model helped expand Japan’s trade interests. In 1961, Japan joined the OECD-DAC alongside the other founding countries of Europe and North America, becoming part of the group of “traditional” donors (see introduction). The precursor to JICA was established in 1962, and the Japanese version of the Peace Corps, the Japan Overseas Coopera­ tion Volunteers (JOCV), began in 1965. With the input of the US Occupation forces (1945–1952) that wanted to build a strong capitalist (and democratic) Japan, the economic benefits of financing the Korean War (1950–1953), and other domestic factors, the Japanese economy grew exponentially in the decades following World War II (McCargo 2012). By the 1980s it was one of the most powerful industrial

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economies in the world. As the economy grew, so did politicians’ interests in contributing to international aid. In 1969 the OECD developed the term “Official Development Assistance” (ODA) to measure governmental aid flows to developing countries and stipulated in 1970 that donor countries should aim to achieve a target of 0.7 percent of their gross national product for ODA over a number of years (OECD 2017). In the 1970s, politicians and bureaucrats in Japan showed increasing concern over the country’s low level of ODA contribution relative to the levels from other developed countries.15 Japan completed the payment of war reparations to Asian coun­ tries in 1976, and in 1978 the government announced a plan to double its ODA of US$1.42 billion within three years (MOFA 2015). During this time, DAC countries and UN agencies were shifting their approaches to development aid from national economic growth to focusing on alleviating poverty, meeting people’s basic needs, and collaborating with new actors such as NGOs (ODI 1978). Soon NGOs in particular were seen as the solution to the problems and shortcomings of top-down, macro-scale ap­ proaches (Fisher 1997). Japanese state and aid actors were also influenced by these interna­ tional trends (Leheny and Warren 2010, 7–8). In the midst of discussions about foreign aid policies in Diet (parliamentary) committee meetings, OISCA often came up as an example of an NGO that the Japanese govern­ ment should encourage in its efforts to “catch up” to the West in terms of financial and other commitments to international aid. As early as 1975, OISCA had been recognized as an international NGO with Category I consultative status with the United Nations, one of only a handful of Japa­ nese organizations to receive this status.16 In a December 1978 hearing at the Committee on Audit of the House of Councillors, representative Sanji Shigenobu of the Democratic Socialist Party, which at the time was politi­ cally allied with the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party, made the following statement:

If I can give two or three examples, there are OISCA’s activities in Mind­ anao, in the Philippines, in which they increased rice production together with the local people. Then in two or three years, they gained an incred­ ible amount of trust from the local chiefs and people. So instead of build­ ing a center for agricultural experiments, I think that it would be more helpful for increasing the production of rice if we just had three or four young [Japanese] people like OISCA’s volunteers who go work in rice cultivation together with the local farmers. So there are cases like this. We are going to have many university graduates in the future [in Japan], and

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I think that instead of looking inwards, they should first jump into local communities; naked, so to speak, without special ideas or technical skills that would make them look at things from a superior position. No matter the problem, to help local people improve their livelihoods from within their own daily worries and lives. I really want to promote the spread of activities like this because this is what will create the foundation of [our country’s] economic cooperation in the future. That is, to send [Japanese] youth, our future leaders, to other countries, especially youth who haven’t been taught anything yet, but who come to understand things on their own by going into local communities, which I think will produce youth who have a strong sense of purpose in life. (Sanji 1978)

OISCA volunteers who work “together with the local farmers” were cited here as exemplars of what Japanese aid should look like. This politician was not the only one to refer to OISCA as a model of Japanese approaches to aid. In a hearing of the Cabinet Committee in 1985, Fujita Kimio—the director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Economic Cooperation Bureau (later reorganized as the International Cooperation Bureau) who eventually became the president of JICA—cited OISCA as an example of cooperation between the Japanese government and NGOs, a relationship to be promoted (Fujita 1985). Soon after, in 1987, OISCA became the first NGO to receive funds from the government’s ODA budget in order to establish a vocational training center for women in Bangladesh (Ishibashi 1998). This grant fore­ shadowed the official Japanese ODA schemes for NGOs that began in 1989 with the establishment of the Grant Assistance for Japanese NGO Projects and the Grant Assistance for Grassroots Projects. The emphasis on work­ ing intimately with local communities in “the field” (gemba) continues to be a core principle in aid officials’ notions about Japanese approaches to aid. This history suggests that prominent politicians and state officials saw OISCA staffers as embodying “Japanese” approaches to development aid. But let us take a step back for a moment. How did it come to be that a politician would mention OISCA as an exemplary organization for advanc­ ing Japanese approaches to development aid? Over the past half a century, OISCA has grown to become one of the most prominent Japanese NGOs. During a time when registering legally as a nonprofit organization was difficult, OISCA was able to become an incorporated foundation (zaidan hōjin) relatively quickly in 1969, subsequently receiving tax benefits and other advantages. Although the bulk of OISCA’s financial base at the begin­ ning came from membership fees and individual donations from OISCA members (kai’in) around the country, it is also significant that the NGO

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began receiving a government subsidy (kokko hojokin) from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1972 that continued until 2003. One of the reasons OISCA grew in size and prominence was the political support it received from influential conservative politicians of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the ruling party in power for most of Japan’s history after 1945, and affiliated political actors. In 1967, with the leadership of Prime Minister Satō Eisaku, LDP politicians formed the National Diet League to Promote OISCA’s International Activities (OISCA Kokusai Katsudō Sokushin Kokkai Gi’in Renmei; hereafter, “OISCA Diet League”) (OISCA 1967).17 As of 2011, the league had over fifty mem­ bers, most of them LDP politicians. The national OISCA Diet League has also spread to regional levels, and dozens of politicians’ leagues promote OISCA’s activities at prefectural and city council levels across Japan. The functions of these associations are to advance OISCA’s activities among lawmakers, bureaucrats, and other influential figures in Japan and overseas and, conversely, to provide politicians with opportunities to visit overseas project sites as a way to experience Japanese forms of NGO aid “on the ground.” Furthermore, given that the OISCA Diet League has always in­ cluded prominent LDP politicians such as Satō and other prime ministers, the associations have also offered ways to make and strengthen important alliances among conservative politicians.18 The support from Satō and the OISCA Diet League also facilitated OISCA’s registration as an incorpo­ rated foundation. But how were OISCA staffers able to gain support from a power­ ful conservative politician such as Satō Eisaku, especially during a time when NGOs were virtually nonexistent in Japan? The connections that I trace below between politicians and Yonosuke in the 1960s and beyond are important factors in understanding the extent to which the history of NGOs and international aid in Japan cannot be divorced from the history of new religious movements and politics.

Religious Leaders and Political Lineages According to a senior OISCA staff member, the person who con­ nected Yonosuke to powerful LDP politicians was a man named Furuta Jūjirō. Writings about him support this claim, as the backing of religious leaders such as Yonosuke fit into Furuta’s political ambitions. Born in 1901, Furuta attended Nihon University and became an instructor. By 1958 he had reached the position of university chairman, the executive leader of the institution. He was responsible for the university’s massive expansion

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and financial reforms, which made it one of the largest universities in the country. He also prohibited all student political activities and did not allow the students’ association to join the All-Japan Federation of Students’ Self- Governing Associations, a communist and anarchist organization of student activists. This stance, in addition to a state investigation of his financial activities at the school, led to a massive student uprising in 1968. He died in 1970 (Nichigai Associates 2004; Ueda et al. 2001). Nihon University was established in 1889 by Yamada Akiyoshi (1844–1892), the first minister of justice of Japan, and the institution al­ ways had strong connections with politicians and state actors. As chairman, Furuta made great use of these connections and nurtured a particularly strong alliance with Satō Eisaku, a leading member of the LDP and prime minister from 1964 to 1972. Satō and Furuta collaborated on many levels. For instance, they founded an association called Nippon-kai in 1962 to spearhead a movement for fostering world peace by emphasizing Japanese cultural values, which, its website asserts, naturally tend toward harmony.19 Satō mentions Furuta several times in his diaries, and it seems that Furuta attended not only Nippon-kai meetings with Satō but also informal and formal discussions with the prime minister regarding elections. The diaries indicate that the two men enjoyed a close relationship throughout Satō’s career (Satō E. 1998a, 1998b). Despite the general vilification of new religions in postwar Japan, Furuta saw religious leaders as valuable in supporting the Satō administra­ tion and the rise of conservative politics in 1960s Japan (Nakano T. 2003, 150–152). The end of World War II brought about unprecedented changes for religious groups, including former followers of Ōmoto such as Yono­ suke. In particular, the sudden end of an authoritative government, along with the freedom of religion ensured by the new constitution, emboldened new religions to engage with public activities, most notably electoral poli­ tics. For instance, two candidates related to the new religion Tenrikyō were elected to the House of Representatives in 1946, and members of other new religious groups also entered political races (Nakano T. 2003, 144–145). Sōka Gakkai and its political party, Kōmeitō, are probably the most famous example, generating much debate, political maneuvering, and conflicts over the question of religious groups’ participation in public affairs and politics (Ehrhardt et al. 2014). While many politicians and public figures opposed the engagement of religions with politics, others such as Furuta saw benefit in liaising with religious leaders, especially for votes, financial contributions, and human resources, at least to a certain extent and as long as the religion did not present a negative image for the politician. For new

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religions, the links with politicians appeared even more beneficial, because they saw these relationships as a potential way to protect themselves from state interference. For Yonosuke, according to archival records and recol­ lections from older staff members, relationships with politicians seemed to be not only a way to protect his religious movement but also a way to expand OISCA’s global activities and even shape general understandings of international aid in Japan. Satō’s diaries from the 1960s suggest that he and his entourage saw a need to befriend leaders of new religions in order to consolidate the LDP’s political influence in government and among the electorate. Starting in 1964 and 1965, for example, Satō approached Niwano Nikkyō from Risshō Kōseikai and Ikeda Daisaku from Sōka Gakkai, two of the largest new religions, to seek their support in various electoral campaigns. Religious groups were becoming a political force, and politicians in power were keen to bring these actors into their fold in order to strengthen the foundation of the conservative LDP faction. Entries in Satō’s diary also mention meetings with Yonosuke and his successor, Yoshiko, a few times (e.g., Satō E. 1998c, 221; 1998d, 191). An article in the OISCA magazine from August 1968, announcing the opening of the Astronomy and Geology Technical School, carries congratulatory letters from various OISCA supporters, including a message from Furuta and LDP politicians. They express excitement about the opening of the school and its mission to educate Japanese youth spiritually as well as intellectually in “the great workings of the universe,” through which “we may find true humanity” (OISCA 1968). Yonosuke’s teachings evidently resonated with such powerful men, whether spiritually, politically, or ideologically. The relationships between Furuta, Satō, and Yonosuke only scratch the surface of the vast network of politicians and business leaders who supported OISCA over the decades. Alliances among politicians, reli­ gious leaders, and other conservative public figures underwrote not only the political climate of the 1960s but also the environment within which an important pillar of Japan’s international aid system emerged. What is particularly interesting about this history is that these people converged to support a Japanese NGO at a time when NGOs were not yet in the public consciousness in Japan. The relationship between new religious organiza­ tions and politics was strained after the 1960s, marked particularly by a scandal in 1970 in which an author alleged that he had been censored and intimidated by Sōka Gakkai and Kōmeitō officials, as well as by affiliated powerful politicians. The case sparked national outrage at the links between

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religious and political actors, which allowed for such an “undemocratic” treatment of a citizen. Sōka Gakkai had to cut official ties with Kōmeitō (McLaughlin 2014, 75–76). Nevertheless, the initial political connections in the 1960s greatly contributed to OISCA’s rise to prominence. Fundamentally, these early relationships established the perception and the reality among conservative political actors that supporting OISCA, especially through the OISCA Diet League, would place them in the same milieu as Satō and other powerful LDP politicians. Backing OISCA was also a way to advance a “Japanese” approach to development cooperation, defined in terms of mutual relations of hitozukuri, working closely with aid recipients in the field, and suppos­ edly Japanese values such as discipline. As direct ties between politicians and religious groups became increasingly scrutinized by the media and the public after 1970, these reasons for and benefits of supporting OISCA—as well as the move to interpret the NGO’s Ananaikyō legacies in terms of nonreligious “Shinto” values—came to overshadow the fact that Yonosuke was a religious leader. Although much evidence of OISCA’s political connections exists, it is important to note that these relationships might not have been easy or automatic. One senior OISCA staff member who went with the first team to India in the early 1960s explained to me that when the team visited the Japanese embassy in Delhi, the ambassador and embassy officials told them that they were being a nuisance (meiwaku) and that agricultural aid in India had proved difficult even for government agencies and thus was impossible for civic organizations such as OISCA. These officials told the OISCA volunteers to go back to Japan because they would become a na­ tional embarrassment. But, the staff member told me, OISCA participants continued their activities, since Ananaikyō members and OISCA staffers themselves financed these initial projects. Eventually, OISCA’s first staff members successfully increased agricultural production in their project sites and thereby gained recognition from the Japanese government. Ban Shōichi, who served as a diplomat in India and subsequently became one of the founders of JOCV, writes that during his time overseas he came to admire OISCA as a group of people who were so committed to their work that they devoted their whole lives to living with local villagers (Ban 1974). Similarly, in a 1974 essay, the former Delhi bureau chief of Asahi shimbun, one of the major newspapers in Japan, wrote about the “rugged, simple Japanese farmers” from OISCA who would bring fresh vegetables to important functions at the Japanese embassy. He reminisced how these

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OISCA volunteers, who had experienced poverty in postwar rural Japan and could withstand the harsh conditions of rural India in ways that Euro­ peans and Americans could not, presented a positive image of the Japanese overseas—an important diplomatic mission especially after World War II (Hayashi R. 1974, 87–89). It does not matter so much if these stories were true or not. What is significant is that they traveled back to Japan through news correspondents and embassy officials, bolstering OISCA’s reputation within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and aid agencies over time. Although OISCA enjoyed unparalleled support from prominent public figures, this was not simply an instance of top-down, government co-optation as the orthodox interpreta­ tion of civil society in Japan might suggest (C. Watanabe 2017a). The story indicates a lineage of relationships that Yonosuke and OISCA aid workers cultivated with effort, navigating various political interests and pushing forward their own definitions of what development aid work, based on the Great Spirit of the Universe, should look like. OISCA’s relationship with the government may not be a horizontal one, but it is far from being a simple top-down structure.

The Value of Struggle Despite the importance of Ananaikyō and of Yonosuke’s role as a reli­ gious leader in the development and prominence of OISCA, the topic rarely came up in discussions among staffers during the time of my research. The public suspicion of new religions is widespread, and thus OISCA staffers’ ability to articulate a vision outside the parameters of “religion” has been imperative for gaining wide public support and, perhaps more significantly, the understanding of newer staff members.20 There was a palpable gap between older and younger generations, tensions between Ananaikyō and non-Ananaikyō staffers, and a general silence around OISCA’s religious legacies, which foregrounded a prevailing sense of confusion and struggle among staffers. For instance, many of the younger staff members did not understand the emphasis on a disciplined training program as the chosen method of de­ velopment aid. From another perspective, senior staffers at times expressed resistance or incomprehension over the organizational changes required by the new legal registration and the more general direction toward profes­ sionalization. Yet others such as young Ananaikyō staff members—a rare group in OISCA—talked to me about their struggles to bridge the two worlds and two sets of concerns. Even before I posed a question about the

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conflicting dynamics in the organization, staffers themselves were often already analyzing these tensions. In an early conversation with a young non-Ananaikyō staff member, it became clear to me that the struggles generated by these various lines of tension and silence were central to people’s commitments to their work and to OISCA. Takai-san was a man in his early thirties who had worked at training centers in Japan and Asia for a few years and was about to be posted overseas again when I met him in 2009. He told me that when he first joined OISCA through one of the training centers in Japan, the director sent him to the OISCA vocational college, where he first encountered the NGO’s history. He spent a month and a half there learning about sustain­ able agriculture and OISCA’s particular approach to international aid. But there was little talk about international aid, development studies, or other related topics. Instead, his classes consisted of lessons on Shinto and what it means to be Japanese in the contemporary world. “For example,” he said, “teachers told us that when Japanese people go overseas and are asked about their religion, they tend to answer that they have none, but that in most parts of the world, this answer would make people think that Japanese people are dangerous and immoral.” Even though he had been working in OISCA for a few months by then, Takai-san did not know that OISCA was related to a religious group until he participated in this short-term course. He told me that in seeing the Shinto shrine on the grounds of the vocational college and having to partici­ pate in the daily chanting of prayers (norito)—a practice that goes beyond the casual interaction with Shinto practices for most Japanese citizens—he thought that he might have joined a truly bizarre group. “I was seriously scared that I might not leave this place alive!” he laughed. “A few years earlier there was the Aum incident, which had made our allergies against religion among young generations even stronger than before.” Nevertheless, as time passed, he gradually changed his mind. “You know when you are a child and adults tell you that the sun [otentō-sama] is watching you if you do something wrong? The teachers at the vocational college told us that proverbs like that are Shinto teach­ ings. So what they said was not that complicated or weird after all,” he explained. He eventually came to the conclusion that learning about OISCA’s religious affiliation and philosophies simply showed him what was at the root of the NGO’s activities. The influences of Ananaikyō were historical and nothing more, he decided.

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Takai-san explained that his initial ambivalence about OISCA’s re­ ligious links reflected a more general sense of incomprehension about the organization among young Japanese staff members. He observed:

For young people who are interested in development work in the nor­ mal sense of the word, working at the training centers seems like an unbearable amount of agricultural labor every day. . . . Many of the young people who joined OISCA at the same time that I did were interested in NGO management and such, and they quit in about a year.

I asked him what made it so difficult to work at the training centers. He described how staffers and trainees lived and worked together for a year under the same roof, and so staff members had to set an example: waking up at dawn in time for the morning routines, getting to meals at the set times, participating in cleaning duties, leading the agricultural work and field-based classes, giving lectures, and tending the fields. In that sense, Takai-san explained, trainees were constantly watching staff, and there was no time to rest. Even Sundays were taken up by administrative duties and other chores. Life was contained within the training center, and other social ties were nearly erased. He admitted, “I always carry inside myself a sense of struggle [kattō] about my work in OISCA, and sometimes I wonder if there is any meaning to all of this.” He continued:

But what I like is that, even though it is difficult, there are many things that you cannot understand if you do not spend all day with other people. Teaching “spiritual” [seishin] things to trainees depends on how you yourself are acting. For example, are you taking off your slippers neatly? Are you properly changing slippers for the first and second floors? There are many things in OISCA that have nothing to do with development aid. But then, trainees are really watching closely when someone does not do these things or follow the communal rules, and they point it out! They would say, “Sensei [teacher], you said this, but why aren’t you doing it yourself?” I’d think, “Oh, you are so annoying . . . but you are so right” [laughs]. So I have come to realize that I have to act properly. . . . Being together with others all the time is a really difficult thing, but the difficulty of human relationships is part of the learning process here.

Despite his various misgivings, he had come to accept certain things about OISCA, such as the need to take off one’s slippers in a certain way, as an

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important rule to uphold and share with other staffers and trainees. He had found meaning in the daily struggle to live alongside the others, even going so far as to say that the Tokyo headquarters was “not really OISCA.” It was not OISCA without the struggle of living and working in intimate relations with others, and without the efforts to make sense of the communal life­ style. The experience of discomfort and struggle was an important aspect of his understanding of aid work in OISCA and of the organization itself. Takai-san’s words stayed with me for a long time. His commitment to his work revolved around a sense of daily battles in proximate relations with others. What he expressed also captured how aid actors in OISCA accepted and engaged with confusions, doubts, and uncertainties, such as those involving the organization’s contentious religious legacies. Of course, the struggles often also forced staff members out. But staff members’ com­ mitment and recommitment to their work hinged on such moments when they had to pause and reconsider what it was that they were doing and why. Their discomfort and moments of reflection were entangled with the history of religion and politics in Japan and with arguments about nonreligious and so-called Japanese values. It is to these arguments that we turn in the next chapter, which explores the logic and implications of claiming a “Shinto” environmentalism.

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anuary 5, 2010. I left my house at seven in the morning and braved the rush hour and the cold to meet some of Jthe OISCA staff members at a major Shinto shrine outside Tokyo. When I got there two hours later, before the agreed time, I could not get ahold of anyone. Finally, a woman from the administrative department picked up her cell phone and told me that everyone was already in line to see the kannushi (Shinto “priest”). I should have known that arriving ten minutes early was not early enough in OISCA. I hurried past groups and families making offerings at the shrine altars to join the others at the main building in the middle of the shrine grounds. While I was taking off my shoes as quietly as possible, I noted that almost all of the senior staffers were there—all Ananaikyō members—as well as the handful of young Ananaikyō staff members and one non-Ananaikyō staffer. Nakano Yoshiko, the adopted daughter of Yonosuke and chairwoman of OISCA, was also there. We sat quietly in the unheated tatami-floored room as we waited for the group before us to finish. My feet were quickly going numb, as they usually did when I sat seiza-style on the floor, legs tucked underneath me. Within five minutes, a young woman came to tell us that we would be seen soon. She gave Yoshiko a white silk vest to wear. This was a much more involved ceremony than I was used to when visiting shrines for New Year’s Day. Before long, we were led to a room farther inside the shrine. It could easily accommodate our group of fifteen. We sat on the floor, resting compactly on our folded legs, and faced the raised platform that housed what looked like an altar with a round mirror, branches, and the bottle of sake that OISCA staff members had brought as an offering. Two kannushi were sitting by the altar. We bowed twice. The kannushi waved a stick adorned with white pieces of paper over our heads as a cleansing ritual. The two men then turned to face the altar as well, and we bowed down deeply, our upper bodies bent to a forty-five degree angle toward the floor. I started to raise my head when I realized that the others had not moved. I froze in

60

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mid-motion. As we held our poses, one of the kannushi began to chant. It sounded like a prayer, the words of which I could not fully understand, but it dawned on me that he was “singing” about OISCA’s history: the year it began, that it was an NGO, that it conducted reforestation, conservation, and human resource training activities. He concluded with a wish for a prosperous year for OISCA. The chant lasted no more than ten minutes, but my arms were quivering from trying to keep my body at an angle. The kannushi stood up and walked over to Yoshiko to give her a branch. She took it and approached the altar. She sat down and bowed twice. We bowed with her. She clapped twice. We did the same. We bowed again with her. The kannushi told us that they had prepared some sake and refresh­ ments in the other building. So we got up and headed to the building next door. We entered a room where the people at the shrine had prepared long, high tables adorned with small white cups for sake, chopsticks, and small nibbles of dried squid and kombu seaweed. We each stood in front of a place setting. One of the senior staff members said a few words, and we all raised our cups to toast, “Kanpai!” We drank the sake in one or two sips and picked at the snacks, still standing. We chatted with each other for a while. Before long, one of the senior staffers told us that it was time to go to the office, and we walked to the vans parked outside the shrine compound. As we approached the parking lot, I saw a black car pull up ahead of us. One of the senior staff members rushed out of the driver’s seat to open the door for Yoshiko, who walked over to the car and stepped inside. He closed the door behind her and ran around to take the steering wheel again. I quickly copied the others who bowed as the car drove away. We arrived at the office at around ten o’clock. I had just sat down at my desk, when the secretary-general announced on the intercom that we were going to the shrine nearby for the New Year’s visit. “Everyone,” he stressed. Hearing his tone of voice, I wondered if some staffers had resisted going in previous years. Although I was surprised that we were going to a shrine again, I recognized that the non-Ananaikyō staff members had not gone yet, at least not with their coworkers. So I put on my coat again and walked over to the neighborhood shrine with the others. The shrine was in a compact but densely wooded space, tucked along a backstreet of this residential area. We stepped out of the bright winter sun to enter the shaded enclosure. Although we stood without being told where, a clear hierarchy had formed. The senior staffers who had gone to the shrine earlier in the morning stood in front, closer to the shrine structure; the few mid-level and middle-aged staff members, whether they were Ananaikyō or not, stood behind them. The rest of us young staff members and volunteers

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gathered at the back. Led by the senior staffers, we clapped twice. The secretary-general started chanting. As with the kannushi earlier, I could not understand most of the specialized and archaic language he was using, but I saw that the other senior staff members were chanting along. I glanced around and saw that most of the other people kept their palms together, with heads bowed, even if they were not saying the prayer. This was not surprising, since Japanese people, whether they identify as Shinto, Bud­ dhist, religious, or not, would put their palms together in prayer as a show of respect or customary practice in shrines. But I was surprised to see that some of the young staff members were just standing casually with their hands by their sides. I could not decide what I should do. In the end I put my hands together and looked down. When the chanting ended, we did a small bow. Without pause, the young staffers started chatting to me about their winter holidays and the weather, as if what we had just experienced was nothing out of the ordinary flow of things. Going to a Shinto shrine for a New Year’s visit is common enough that the Tokyo staffers, even those who were non-Ananaikyō, did not remark on it. It is an activity that I also engage in every year with my family. Most people in Japan describe this practice as a Japanese cultural tradition, not a religious one. Even those who identify as secular or are not affiliated with any religion would not hesitate to participate in practices such as the New Year’s visit to a shrine. The meeting of the kannushi with the Ananaikyō staffers and the chanting of prayers with the rest of the office staff were more involved than the ordinary informal visits, in which people simply clap twice and make a wish in front of the shrine, and perhaps get a fortune­ telling piece of paper (omikuji) or buy an amulet for protection (omamori). Nevertheless, most Japanese people would accept that going to a shrine is a cultural tradition and would conclude accordingly that what OISCA staffers were doing was ultimately a Japanese cultural custom rather than “a religious practice.” Thus, there was presumably nothing remarkable in going to a Shinto shrine for a New Year’s visit. Interpreting Ananaikyō as Shinto, and therefore ultimately as Japa­ nese cultural values and customs, was crucial to OISCA aid actors. Kimura- san, a senior staffer who came from an Ananaikyō family, expressed this point most clearly. During our interview, he seemed to think that I would be suspicious of new religions, as young Japanese people would be. Due to this wariness, I assumed, he tried to avoid the topic of Ananaikyō several times. After skirting around the issue for a while, I asked him directly: “And what is the relationship between OISCA and Ananaikyō?” He laughed and resigned to my insistence:

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It is not so much about Ananaikyō but about Shinto, and about valu­ ing Japanese traditions. . . . Shinto envelops many religions. . . . OISCA was established because we needed something that transcends religion to change the world. In the international conferences, religious leaders fought with each other all the time, and so we proposed Shinto. We re­ moved the barrier of religion and proposed agricultural work. In other words, a form of development that is in harmony with nature, a sustain­ able form of development.

Kimura-san was used to being asked about Ananaikyō by people outside the organization and had rehearsed this answer several times before. The logic that he used deflected the category of religion step by step: from Ananaikyō to Shinto to Japanese traditions, then to enveloping and transcending reli­ gion, and finally arriving at agriculture and a form of sustainable develop­ ment that is in harmony with nature. This was the reasoning that OISCA staffers and others used in transforming the self-essentializing and cultural nationalist ideology of “Japaneseness” into a globally appealing discourse of environmentalism. Stating that OISCA’s roots in Ananaikyō were fun­ damentally about Shinto worldviews served as an important first step in this argument. Kimura-san, like the other senior staffers, was very much aware that Ananaikyō as a new religion can trigger negative reactions from the Japa­ nese public. For this reason, he sidestepped the question of religion through appeals to Shinto as Japanese traditions. This argument in itself is not new, but in this statement, he had taken an even further step by connecting Shinto to environmentalist arguments with universal appeal. This chapter explains this conceptual and political move as the moral imagination under­ lying OISCA’s training programs. Yonosuke had shaped the course of the organization, but the claims by staffers and supporters that their work was nonreligious is as important a factor in understanding OISCA’s mission and activities. Here I take the statements of being nonreligious at face value, rather than seeing them as masks for OISCA’s “real” religiousness. I am interested in how arguing for a nonreligious position enabled certain his­ torical and political processes and, more specifically, particular frameworks for making persons as a step toward an environmentally sustainable future. At the same time, one of the key conundrums that emerges from the analy­ sis in this chapter is that much of the self-essentializing environmentalist discourses were absent in the mundane everyday activities of agricultural labor and hitozukuri activities, and some parts of the organization were invisible to each other (the utopian potential of this opacity is explored

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in chapter 3). But let us first turn to the making of this supposed “Shinto” environmentalism.

The Nonreligious When Kimura-san stated that Shinto transcends religion, he drew on a long and loaded history of Shinto in modern Japan. Historians have shown how Japanese intellectuals and state actors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries responded to the new Western category of “reli­ gion” as a marker of modernity by rationalizing religions and ultimately defining orthodox, state-sanctioned forms of Shinto as a national moral tradition (Hardacre 1989; Yasumaru and Miyachi 1988). By stating that orthodox Shinto and the veneration of the emperor were not religion but a moral pillar of the Japanese “national body” (kokutai), state authorities of the Meiji era (1868–1912) were able to merge shrines around a central­ ized hierarchy and demand that citizens adhere to this national “tradition” without contravening the newly adopted constitutional principles of the freedom of religion and the separation of state and religion. After World War II, US Occupation officials described this consolidation of Shinto as “State Shinto.” But in doing so, they advanced the view of State Shinto as a state religion, albeit one that claimed, duplicitously, to transcend the category of religion. Accordingly, US Occupation authorities concluded that State Shinto had to be eradicated in order to implement the secularist separation of state and religion, while advancing the freedom of religion in the private sphere. This history is well-trodden among historians and religion scholars of Japan. But what is often left out in these narratives is how the formation of Shinto as nonreligious in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries speaks as much to processes and dynamics of the secular as it does to religion making (Rots 2017a; Jolyon Thomas, pers. comm., April 2, 2016). Jason Ānanda Josephson (2012) argues convincingly that the story of Shinto in modern Japan can be understood better through the interrelated dynamics of the secular and religion, rather than through one or the other. He coins the term “the Shinto secular” to describe the twentieth-century national ideology that “was about creating a particular Japanese subjectivity or Japanese­ ness, formulated in terms of a nation-state and modern European science, articulated in relation to the person of the emperor, and mediated via a par­ ticular constellation of higher-order ideographs” (255). The consolidation of Shinto as a national moral ideology was not the establishment of a state religion but a secular move and a way to clarify the category of religion in

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contrast to it. Josephson follows Talal Asad and others who have shown that the secular has been about, not the opposition to or erasure of religion, but historically specific developments that have reorganized the role of religion in society and reinforced particular epistemological and ontological frame­ works such as the separation of the individual’s interiority from the external world, and the primacy of the “free” and rational individual (Asad 2003; Dressler and Mandair 2011; Mahmood 2006; Warner et al. 2010). Thus, in Josephson’s analysis, the Shinto secular distinguished itself from religion but did not seek to eliminate it. Instead, it transformed concepts of divinity into “ideographs” that could mold Japanese subjectivity in particular ways; that is, each ideograph was “a verbal abstraction representing collective commitment to a particular goal,” such as a nation-state with global reach led by the emperor.1 Shinto in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan, therefore, is a story of secularity as much as it is one of religion. One important point that Josephson makes about the Shinto secular is that, ultimately, what the Japanese state opposed through its formation of Shinto as a national moral category was not religion but what he calls superstition. As the Meiji state consolidated its rule in the late nineteenth century, practices such as spirit possessions, healing, and divination were labeled as irrational and backward—signs of madness that had to be sup­ pressed (Josephson 2012, 185; see also Sawada 2004). It is in this context that new religions posed a threat to the state during that era.

Ōmoto Legacies In order to understand OISCA, we need to know the history of Ōmoto, the religious organization that Yonosuke joined in the 1920s. Deguchi Nao (1836–1918), the founder of Ōmoto, was a poor, rural woman who derived her authority from the spirit possessions (kangakari or kamigakari) that began to plague her in middle age. It is said that Nao had her first spirit possession experience when she was struggling to deal with the madness of one of her daughters (Yasumaru [1977] 2013, 79). What gave Nao’s spirit possession its unprecedented wide appeal was that the spirit entering this humble woman’s body came from an absolute and true god, Ushitora no Konjin, another name for the first god in the origin myths of Japan, Kunitokotachi-no-ōkami. This was not a monotheistic god, for it inhabited a world of multiple deities and spirits, but it was a great god that spoke of revolutionary reforms across society and the world (Stalker 2008, 19). This characteristic marked her possessions as different from those by lesser spirits, which by this time were beginning to be seen as backward and a

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sign of mental illness (Yasumaru [1977] 2013, 83, 89–90). In contrast to these “ordinary” spirit possessions, Nao’s experiences and words indicated a greater force at play and captured the imagination and hopes of large numbers of people across Japan. Nao’s message predicted the end of times and new beginnings in the context of a tumultuous process of modern­ ization, international conflicts, and Japan’s rise as a global power. It is not difficult to see how this mass movement could be threatening to state authorities at the time: Nao and her followers were not simply distracting citizens away from the state’s centralized messages of national unity but were doing so through practices that diverged from the making of modern, rational Japanese subjects. Even from this cursory glance, one can see that the world-reforming message of Nao’s movement resonates with the visions in OISCA. In par­ ticular, one of the messages that Yonosuke might have taken to OISCA is the thrust of Ōmoto’s mission to make allegedly Shinto beliefs the founda­ tion of a global Japanese movement. Ōmoto owed its national expansion to the efforts of Nao’s successor and de facto leader, Deguchi Onisaburō (1871–1948). While Nao served as the spiritual founder, Onisaburō used his political savvy to orient the religious group to wider and more global purposes. On the one hand, Onisaburō, like Nao, practiced the arts of spirit possession, although he did so through the discipline of chinkonkishin, a mediated form of spirit possession. In chinkonkishin, two people face each other: the kannushi, the person (preferably a young woman) who receives the spirit possession;2 and the saniwa, an experienced man who evaluates the quality and status of the spirit as it violently possesses the kannushi (Yasumaru [1977] 2013, 165–166). Learning the practice from Nagasawa Katsutate (1858–1940), who in turn acquired the skills from Honda Chika- atsu (1822–1889), Onisaburō embraced this supernatural practice in the tradition of reigaku, or Spirit Learning (Hirose 2001, 69, 81–83). On the other hand, Onisaburō was also an adherent of kokugaku (National Learning). Kokugaku refers to a movement in the eighteenth century that sought to “recover” an idealized worldview of “the ancient Japanese” (Hardacre 1989, 16). Kokugaku’s nationalist thinkers first sys­ tematized Shinto as Japan’s indigenous moral tradition, basing it on secular formulations of science and rationality (Josephson 2012, 110–111, 255). Imperialists and militarists of the early twentieth century drew on these nativist ideas of Shinto to form the ideological foundation of the modern Japanese state (Breen and Teeuwen 2000; Kuroda T. 1981; Yasumaru and Miyachi 1988). Onisaburō adhered to the philosophies of kokugaku and advanced nationalist-imperialist claims, using the concepts of emperor

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veneration, the national body (kokutai), and a return to the world of ancient Japan. What often goes unremarked in these historical accounts is that the kokugaku group included intellectuals (such as Honda Chika-atsu) who embraced reigaku, the study of a spirit world invisible to the human eye, as described in the early eighth-century recording of Japan’s origin myths in the Kojiki. In the figure of Onisaburō, we find someone who embraced both nationalist and supernatural orientations, as expounded in kokugaku and reigaku. Yonosuke had been a devout follower of Onisaburō and inherited many of the Ōmoto leader’s approach. For instance, from 1932 to 1940, Yonosuke trained in reigaku practices such as chinkonkishin under Naga­ sawa Katsutate. It is said that, in 1899, Nagasawa served as the saniwa in a chinkonkishin session, in which the spirit prophesized the birth of a new global religion called Ananai in fifty years’ time that would “open the path of god to the whole world” (Inoue et al. 1996, 9). This was a vision that had been recorded in Ōmoto scriptures as well. Through a chinkonkishin process, Nagasawa determined that Yonosuke was the person who would realize this prophecy. In 1949, Yonosuke established Ananaikyō, just as the spirit that possessed Nagasawa had foretold. Much of Yonosuke’s philosophy resonated with how Onisaburō saw the world, from the belief in the existence of a universal spirit world that could be accessed through chinkonkishin to the notion that Shinto, and therefore Japan, could unite and lead the world toward peace. During the two-day teaching that I attended at the Ananaikyō headquarters, the Ananaikyō representative, Nagano-san, explained to me the bare bones of Yonosuke’s teachings and hence the Ananaikyō worldview. He began by telling me that the world is made up of things that can be seen (mieru- mono) and those that cannot be seen (mienaimono). The things that cannot be seen—the focus of Ananaikyō philosophy—exist, for example, in the spirit world of the universe (uchūreikai), which is an aspect of the universe without physical form and thus the opposite of science. This is the universe before its beginning, the force that created and continues to create the universe in the first place. This force, given by a god (kami), is what consti­ tutes the spirit that infuses humans as well, and it frames the importance of ancestor worship in Ananaikyō. Nagano-san explained that this god, which exists not as a monotheistic God but among other deities, is nature and the earth itself. This god of the earth—in the sense of a globe (chikyū)—is called Kunitokotachi-no-ōkami, the same deity that appeared in the spirit possessions of Nao and was called Ushitora no Konjin in Ōmoto. “Our festivals and rituals are for this great god who maintains the earth, which

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stands atop the local gods of our lands,” Nagano-san said. “It is the god of the whole earth and therefore exists everywhere.” The importance of the earth pointed to a worldview shared by Ōmoto and Ananaikyō, along with other Ōmoto-derived new religions that value the soil and nature. Ōmoto leaders set the tone for subsequent new reli­ gions that sought to create alternatives to modernity (datsu kindai), which was seen to have advanced negative trends of self-centeredness and of survival of the fittest (Hirose 2001). Onisaburō, in particular, saw sus­ tainable and organic agriculture as one of the ways that humanity could escape modernity and find a path toward world renewal. He drew from the utopian and agrarian ideals of kokugaku, particularly those propagated by Hirata Atsutane (1776–1843) in the nineteenth century (Stalker 2008, 46). A central tenet in kokugaku and Hirata’s philosophy foregrounded the importance of agriculture and the hard work and self-reliance needed for agricultural productivity. Onisaburō adopted this principle and emphasized the value of “a communal, agricultural lifestyle centering on work and worship” as a way to restore society to one led by the ancient divine rule (shinsei fukko) of one true god, Ushitora no Kojin (Stalker 2008, 47). This antimodern agrarianism—the nostalgic validation of rural life—as well as the emphasis on building character through labor—was popular among Japanese people and Shinto priests in the early twentieth century (Azegami 2011), and Onisaburō’s message had wide appeal. Onisaburō also advocated for natural farming methods, a principle that has endured in Ōmoto and related new religions today. He preached that the use of chemical fertilizers was harmful to the land and that farmers should hark back to traditional methods using human waste and natural fertilizers to support the regenerative power of the land itself (Stalker 2008, 67). We can see the influence of this thought in groups within the Ōmoto lineage today, such as Sekai Kyūseikyō, founded by Okada Mokichi (1882–1955). Okada created a religious and agricultural movement around “nature farming” (shizen nōhō), which goes even further than Onisaburō’s system in that it rejects all fertilizers and often other human interventions. This is different from organic agricultural methods that do not use chemi­ cals but do use fertilizers and pesticides made from organic materials. The Sekai Kyūseikyō’s nature farming activities have spread globally through its derivative entity, Shūmei (Shūmei Natural Agriculture Network 2018; see also chapter 5). We can understand how Onisaburō must have influenced Yonosuke’s worldview and his focus on sustainable agriculture. Another commonal­ ity is Onisaburō’s universalist message that went hand in hand with his

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kokugaku teachings, marrying visions of a liberal worldwide fraternity with Japanese imperialist ambitions. Onisaburō believed in a unity of human­ kind, which he sought to realize through initiatives such as the establish­ ment of the Jinrui Aizenkai, or ULBA (Universal Love and Brotherhood Association), in 1925. But his idea of the universal was based on a belief in Japanese superiority. For example, he preached the primacy of a cosmic emperor who would govern the entire world and was embodied in the his­ torical and political figure of the human Japanese emperor, and he believed that all civilizations, as well as Western science, derived from a univer­ sally applicable Japanese polity (Hirose 2001, 41; Yasumaru [1977] 2013, 195).3 As Nancy Stalker and others argue, Onisaburō’s global initiatives suggest that nationalism and internationalism, and right-wing and liberal ideologies, are mutually constitutive in Japan’s modern history, rather than reflecting different historical stages (Stalker 2008, 167; Hotaka 2012; see also Hirose 2002). The notion of Japanese superiority is undeniable in Onisaburō’s writings, but this was a nationalist vision that overlapped with the universal. In fact, the particularist language of Japaneseness served as the vehicle for his universal message, and vice versa. As we will see, the moral imaginations of Yonosuke and OISCA staffers echo this entangle­ ment, intimating traces of Onisaburō’s philosophies in the NGO. Even in this quick overview of Yonosuke’s philosophy, we can detect traces of Onisaburō’s teachings and reigaku.4 Yonosuke’s ideas about the spirit world and an omnipresent god that permeates nature resonate with Onisaburō’s engagement with the supernatural world. The claims of being nonreligious among OISCA staff members resisted the category of religion but did not completely shut out these supernatural worldviews. In fact, an attunement with nonhuman and nonmaterial realms was an element of the articulations of the nonreligious. At the same time, I resist calling this simply “spiritual” or “supernatural” because these were not the terms that OISCA actors used. Nor does “spiritual” capture the political implications of claiming that Ananaikyō is Shinto and that Shinto is about Japanese cultural values. When people in Japan say that something is “not religious” (shūkyō ja nai), they offer a specific positionality, one that we need to trace care­ fully—in this case, a position attained through constructions of “Shinto.”

“Shinto” Environmentalism In explaining the relationship between Ananaikyō and OISCA, Kimura-san talked about the value of humans living in harmony with na­ ture. This was not his original idea. The argument that Ananaikyō’s legacies

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could be summed up as Shinto, and thereby in terms of Japanese values of living in harmony with nature, had been expressed by Yonosuke and Yoshiko years earlier. For instance, in one of her books, Yoshiko writes extensively about the importance of remembering Japanese people’s in­ nate abilities to respect the workings of nature and live according to the principles of harmony (Nakano Yoshiko 2002). She explains this quality as a product of Shinto worldviews, a tradition supposedly born organically from Japanese people’s nature-based philosophies and lifestyles. Shinto values enable Japanese people to appreciate that what they see in front of their eyes could not be possible without the support of deities and the invis­ ible powers of nature. According to Yoshiko, the Japanese have a natural propensity toward humility in the face of nature, a mind-set that they must embrace in this ecologically imbalanced world. Yoshiko’s statements resonate with wider discourses in Japan and elsewhere. Popular views often describe Shinto as an animistic tradition, in which nonhuman actors from animals to rocks are sacred and invested with life because of their connection to deities. Miyazaki Hayao’s anime films such as Princess Mononoke (1997), in which nature is portrayed as saturated with spirits and supernatural life-forms, are instances in popular culture where Shinto-like cosmologies appear in nonreligious but also non­ secular ecological language (e.g., Boyd and Nishimura 2004). In watch­ ing such representations of human-nature relations, ordinary viewers in Japan would accept the explanation that seeing the natural environment as imbued with vitality is fundamentally a Shinto worldview and, thus, a Japanese one. As I noted above, equating Shinto with Japaneseness has been an important political program for nationalist thinkers and state offi­ cials in modern Japan, and it is largely accepted as “common sense” among Japanese citizens today. Within this ideology, the idea of Shinto as based on human reverence for nature has long been part of cultural nationalist ideas of Japaneseness. For instance, the kokugaku scholar Moto-ori Nori­ naga (1730–1801) was one influential person who argued that the Japanese have a unique ability to appreciate nature’s beauty, and subsequent thinkers such as Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) built on this tradition (Befu 1997; Dale 1986). The dominant cultural essentialist claim has been that “the Japanese” are inherently able to coexist with the natural world because they are able to respect the dangers as well as the sacredness of nature and have learned to manage a harmonious relationship between human and nonhuman worlds.5 Conceptions of “Japanese” and “Shinto” approaches to nature, then, are always entangled in nationalist and cultural essentialist arguments of nihonjinron (theories of Japanese essence).

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It is for this reason that I label the moral imagination of humans liv­ ing in harmony with nature in OISCA—and the related activities around sustainable development and environmental education—as a “Shinto” environmentalism in scare quotes. It is not a form of environmentalism that is Shinto in some categorical or straightforward way. The labeling of this ecocentric and environmentally friendly worldview as “Shinto” is a political and nationalist move and cannot be celebrated or simply ac­ cepted at face value (cf. Jensen and Blok 2013). Specifically, it is a way for certain political actors, including Yoshiko and senior Japanese staffers in OISCA, to transform cultural nationalist arguments about “Japaneseness” into universalisms. I use the term “environmentalism” broadly to refer to various movements around the world that are concerned with contemporary environmental issues such as pollution, conservation, and climate change (Rots 2017b, 67). It is this broadness and globality of environmentalism that proponents of “Shinto” mobilize. This argument has wider resonance in Japan and elsewhere. The Shinto Kokusai Gakkai (International Shinto Studies Association, or ISSA)—a nonprofit organization that aims to advance the academic study of Shinto and its positive image in Japan and overseas—has actively pro­ moted Shinto as a tradition that is based on a deep respect for nature. Interestingly, Yoshiko has attended ISSA events as a keynote speaker. In the Japanese version of the ISSA website, a section entitled “The Contributions of Shinto to a Global Culture of Peace” begins with the mention of a sym­ posium that ISSA held in 1997 on the topic of Shinto and the environment (Shinto Kokusai Gakkai 2015). The text cites American religion scholar Thomas Berry, who sent the following message to ISSA on the occasion of the symposium (orig. English):

The universal lesson of Shinto is that the way to the world of [the] sacred is through the place of our dwelling. The primary virtue of Shinto is its utter simplicity, its immediacy with the natural world in its primordial reality and its enduring value. The Japanese heritage now finds a reso­ nance throughout the Earth. Through a renewed communion with these powers under the inspiration of the Shinto tradition[,] the larger human community might attain that increase in the energy, the guidance and the healing that are among its present needs.

Using this English text from a renowned overseas scholar as the start­ ing point, the website explains Shinto as a traditional Japanese belief system that has been passed down from generations long ago, grounding

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the Japanese worldview on the values of living in harmony with nature, adopting ancestors’ spiritual traditions as one’s own, and caring for the bonds that connect people to each other. It warns of the environmental destruction around the world that has come about with scientific progress and emphasizes the urgency of solving this global crisis. Shinto is a pan­ theistic spiritual tradition that is all-embracing, the narrative points out, and its relativistic value system has the capacity to integrate the world’s diverse perspectives. The website states that now is the time to open our eyes to a shared mission and transcend the narrow interests of individual religions; Shinto can take on a unifying role. The text concludes that the “deep ecology” of Shinto, wherein humans are merely a part of nature, can become a universal foundation for a peaceful and better world (see also B. Taylor 2010). Taking inspiration from scholars and activists in Europe and America who have turned to religions as answers to environmental crises, organiza­ tions such as ISSA, the national administrative body of the Association of Shinto Shrines (Jinja Honchō), and the UK-based nonprofit organiza­ tion Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC) have linked ideas of Shinto and Japaneseness with global environmentalist movements (see also Grim and Tucker 2014). Aike Rots (2015, 2017b) has called this official stance from Shinto authorities the “Shinto environmentalist paradigm,” a phenomenon that echoes, albeit not exactly, what I found in OISCA.6 In the English version of the Jinja Honchō website, the section entitled “Spiritual Beliefs” begins with an explanation of “nature worship” (inter­ estingly, this section does not exist in the Japanese version). In particular, it talks of the sacred forest groves (chinju no mori) surrounding village Shinto shrines and how this setting reflects and reinforces the reverence that Japanese people hold toward nature (Jinja Honchō 2015; Rots 2017a). The section of the ARC (2015) website that describes Shinto and chinju no mori echoes this view and adds an Orientalist touch: “Just as Inuit have difficulty describing ‘snow,’ because they distinguish so many different varieties, in traditional Japan there was no single definition of ‘forest.’ . . . Shinto developed as a key part of this ecology.” Shinto as presented here is like other “indigenous” systems that do not attempt to dominate nature but, rather, respect it for all its sentient complexity.7 In this way, Shinto is presented as a worldview that can revolutionize people’s interactions with nature and the nonhuman natural world and thereby solve the world’s global environmental crises. What these appeals to a “Shinto” environmentalism demonstrate is that this imagination of human-nonhuman relations is not particular to

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Japanese nationalist claims but has resonance with universalist aspirations of an environmentally sustainable future. Therefore, my fundamental argu­ ment here is that articulations of the nonreligious, which combine ideas of “Shinto” with those of “Japaneseness” and the supposed cultural ability to live in harmony with nature, allow Japanese cultural nationalist arguments to appear as universals. As with Onisaburō’s philosophies, this collapsing of particularism with universalism, to make ideas of Japaneseness univer­ sal, is one of the most significant effects of the history of Shinto and the nonreligious on the moral imaginaries and practices of OISCA. Equipped with this historical and contextual background, we can now enter the ethnographic world of OISCA’s Ananaikyō staffers. While Rots (2015) argues that the Shinto environmentalist paradigm of actors such as Jinja Honchō is a way for them to claim that Shinto is secular, the “Shinto” environmentalism in OISCA eschewed both the secular and the religious. In OISCA a different worldview and, most significantly, a different type of personhood was promoted as the key to a sustainable future. But whether or not this aspiration of “Shinto” environmentalism translated into the monoto­ nous labor of agricultural work and hitozukuri activities was another matter.

The Miraculous Weather One of the things that confounded me in working with OISCA was that a number of the decisions made in the organization seemed to be based on beliefs such as miraculous weather conditions. For example, when the OISCA-USA chapter was established in New Jersey in 2011, I joined OISCA staffers and supporters at an event there to celebrate. A year later, on April 10, 2012, I accompanied senior and junior staff members and a group of OISCA supporters to the town where the chapter was based, Rari­ tan in New Jersey, in order to conduct its first major activity. Senior staffers at the Tokyo headquarters had chosen Raritan because it was the home of a longtime Filipino American supporter who had first met OISCA staffers decades earlier in the Philippines and had now become the chapter’s presi­ dent. His daughter Maria, in her early twenties, told me that she had come up with the idea for the inaugural activity: to plant cherry blossom trees. The staff members had then invited the select group of supporters—Japa­ nese men and women between the ages of forty-five and seventy, none of them affiliated with Ananaikyō—to help local children and citizens plant the trees in a schoolyard. The ceremony was due to begin at 4:00 p.m. The weather forecast had predicted rain that afternoon, and our bus ride from New York City to the

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New Jersey town was taken up largely by discussions of this possibility. When we got off the bus, the weather seemed to be holding up. Half an hour before the start time, people from the local area started to arrive, including the mayor of Raritan and some members of Congress.8 I counted approxi­ mately thirty adults and a dozen children. The last steps of the preparation were furiously under way, and I helped set up the chairs and the lectern on the stage. A couple of the supporters commented on the heavy clouds above. The OISCA-USA president echoed their concerns. But waving away our worries of rain, one of the senior staff members, Nakamura-san, told us that everything would be fine and we should continue setting up. The ceremony went according to plan, with even some glimpses of blue sky. The American participants and the Japanese side each presented speeches of friendship, including a nod from one of the US congressmen to Japan’s gifting of cherry blossom trees to the United States in Washington, D.C., a century earlier (National Cherry Blossom Festival 2016). Maria spoke as well. She explained that this activity was part of a United Na­ tions initiative called the Green Wave, in support of the objectives of the international Convention on Biological Diversity. The global event would create a “wave” across time zones as children around the world planted trees at their schools at the same time (UNEP 2009). OISCA participated in the Green Wave through its own Children’s Forest Program (CFP), and thus this OISCA-USA activity was part of the CFP too.9 After the speeches, the local children planted the handful of saplings that the OISCA-USA members had prepared in advance. The planting was symbolic, with the children sprinkling soil around the trees, which had already been placed in holes in the ground. The Japanese participants got down on their knees beside them to help them shovel the dirt, communicating with gestures and smiles. The OISCA staff members seemed satisfied with everything that had taken place that afternoon. Everyone was exhausted on the bus ride back to the hotel. Some of the supporters, young staff members, and I talked about our luck regard­ ing the weather. Nakamura-san, who had dismissed our worries earlier, turned around in his seat. He told us that he had been informing the chapter president that it would not rain, because April 10 was an auspicious day. He did not explain why, but this was no joke. “It was not going to rain,” he stated as a matter of fact. I would have probably dismissed this statement if it had been a one- off occurrence. But over the course of my two years with OISCA staffers and Ananaikyō members, I heard too many similar comments and stories about the weather to ignore them. If Nakamura-san’s belief in weather

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conditions during the tree-planting event in New Jersey could be shrugged off as a minor moment, the story of how he established the Myanmar proj­ ect had more significant consequences. In the spring of 1994, Nakamura- san flew to Myanmar to investigate the possibilities of starting an OISCA training center there. As one of the most senior staffers who had been with Yonosuke since the beginning in the 1950s, Nakamura-san was often tasked with such important responsibilities. I heard conflicting accounts of who initiated the mission, but everyone agreed that he traveled with a Japanese official from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) office in Myanmar and other Japanese and Burmese government officials. This UNDP official told me in an interview that he wanted to promote Japanese NGOs in Myanmar. He took them to various places around the Dry Zone in central Myanmar in search of potential project sites. The region was and is still poor, so there was no dearth of candidate locations. Their trip coincided with the dry season as well—a hot and sunny season, as the name suggests, with temperatures rising to as high as 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit). Poverty and the need for agricultural assistance were evident everywhere. One day, the UNDP official told me, they decided to cross the Ir­ rawaddy River into Pakokku District, which had no international agency or NGO presence. The stop there was simply on a whim, and he did not seriously intend it to be a potential project site. In Yesagyo Township they visited a monastery where, they had heard, the monks treasured a small Buddha statue usually hidden from view. The UNDP official and Nakamura-san asked the monks if they could see the statue. Given that they were special visitors from Japan, the monks agreed. The men paid their respects to the precious figurine. “Then, when we walked out of the monastery,” the official recalled, “we were hit by a torrential rain.” Struck by this sudden and unseasonal downpour, Nakamura-san apparently looked up at the sky and said, “This is a message from kami—OISCA is going to work here.” The UNDP official offered that perhaps Yesagyo was not the best location for agricultural aid and trainings since the weather and soil conditions were even harsher than on the eastern side of the Irrawaddy. “No,” Nakamura-san insisted, “this is the place.” When I asked Nakamura-san how he set up the Myanmar project, he did not mention this story, opting to emphasize the impressive fact that the UNDP wanted to work with OISCA as one of the first Japanese NGOs in Myanmar. But given what I knew of him, including the time in New Jersey, the story made sense to me. The belief and stories around weather-related miraculous situations seemed prevalent among OISCA’s senior Ananaikyō

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staff members, as I heard similar stories and utterances from them. Junior staff members in the Tokyo office told me that they did not know how projects and training centers were established. They had never seen needs assessments reports. Decisions were made in a black box that only senior staff members such as Nakamura-san could access. The story of the tor­ rential rain in Pakokku suggests that this black box may be inaccessible to senior staffers themselves; that is, they may adhere to what they interpret as a miraculous weather event, but this “sign” was not something that they attempted to decode further to reach a “rational” explanation.

Follow the Vegetable Nakamura-san and other senior staffers might have been confident about the powers of the weather to communicate a message or produce a miracle, but this did not mean that they claimed to understand it. In fact, expressions of incomprehension appeared in many of my conversations with staff members. I would comment on how difficult it was to understand OISCA’s history, mission, and activities, despite all the research and inter­ views I was conducting, and people would often laugh and agree with me. “I don’t understand at all either!” they would say. What surprised me was how this admission of incomprehension, and even a validation of it, fed into an important pillar of OISCA’s approach to hitozukuri aid. This is where I find OISCA staffers’ form of the nonreligious through allusions to “Shinto” environmentalism to be most different from modes of the secular. Although the secular has been variously challenged as being more than an elimination of religion, scholars have generally agreed that it is aligned with subjectivi­ ties of liberal political rule that upholds individual liberty and reason or, at the very least, that it provokes discussions about democratic government around the primacy of such values (Asad 2003; Mahmood 2006; Needham and Rajan 2007). In contrast, the arguments of the nonreligious in OISCA pointed to a different imagination of personhood. Let us take Furuichi-san, for example. Furuichi-san was a staff mem­ ber in the Tokyo office who carried his slight build with immense energy. He told me about his life as a young boy in northern rural Japan—evoking a humble and perhaps even poor upbringing—where his home served as a base for the regional chapter of Ananaikyō. His father always had guests who visited from all over Japan, and they would talk for hours into the night about spiritual matters, the universe, and world peace. Furuichi-san remembered how he would sit at their feet, enraptured by their discussions

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and stories. In his early twenties, he joined OISCA and was sent to an overseas project site for many years to manage the work there. He faced a number of difficulties in ensuing decades, ranging from work-related setbacks to health issues, but he told me that he also accomplished things he felt proud of. “But sometimes I am not sure if it is really me doing these things,” he said. “What do you mean?” “Sometimes I feel as if I am possessed by the natural world [shizen- kai], invisible to the eye,” he explained. At times he found himself being able to do things beyond his abilities. Is it not incredible? He looked excit­ edly into my eyes. He did not understand how these things were possible, but he had experienced them. We spoke for most of the afternoon even though it was during office hours. Toward the end, he told me his philosophy of agriculture. “Agriculture does not lie, and so if you teach people through it, you can cultivate a decent human being,” he stated. “Agriculture is a way to nurture people with a big and clean heart [kokoro].” For Furuichi-san, the purpose of the training programs rested not so much in creating technically skilled farmers but in shaping people with a particular kokoro, referring to something at the intersection of heart, mind, and soul.10 This kokoro would be one that is attuned to nature and the universe. “Nurturing the kokoro of vegetables will nurture the kokoro of hu­ mans,” he continued. He elaborated:

Daikon radishes grow like a screw. So if you turn the daikon slightly— unscrew it—before pulling it out, it comes out very easily. So you can understand the entire universe through one radish. The daikon is facing the sun as its parent, turning around and around so that every side faces the parent equally as it grows. The daikon can teach us everything. Just by studying the world of daikon, we can see the universe, the power of the sun. This is the kokoro of agriculture.

For Furuichi-san, vegetables were models for an ethical existence, hon­ est in their adherence to the laws of nature and the power of the sun, an allegory for the ethical value of following one’s parents and ancestors. If we paid attention to the ways that vegetables such as the daikon grow, we could learn how to live well and properly. What Furuichi-san argued was

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that as much as people work upon nature through agricultural labor, nature works upon humans with its teachings. He reiterated:

Nurturing the kokoro of vegetables will nurture the kokoro of humans. . . . If that kind of thinking were to spread, there would not be any more crime. Because there is no crime among vegetables! In the world of veg­ etables, parents and children do not kill each other, and friends do not kill friends. Once one understands nature and the kokoro of vegetables, one loses the kokoro of wanting to commit a crime. That is the way to direct society toward a better future. Vegetables will cleanse society. That is what agriculture is about.

Furuichi-san did not think that nature was benign. But he did believe that in nature one would not find the kind of death and destruction that goes against “the natural course of things,” as one might find among humans. For him, parents killing children, sons killing mothers, and children killing their friends—all crimes that the media in Japan have highlighted in the past decades—were unnatural and immoral crimes.11 According to him, na­ ture had certain laws that it would never violate, such as vegetables always seeking out the sun, to which he accorded the ethical value of filial piety. Through such analogies, he told me that training rural youth around Asia in sustainable agriculture was not merely a matter of imparting technical skills. He saw the cultivation of ethical values through agricultural labor, mainly an attunement with the natural world, to be an even more important aspect of “making persons” among trainees as well as staffers. Furuichi-san’s awareness of a sentient presence in nonhuman life- forms points to an understanding of personhood that breaks out of secular frameworks. In particular, that vegetables have a kokoro and that humans should learn from them alluded to a worldview that valued the submission of the self to something greater than the individual or even the human. Furuichi-san felt an invisible force of nature guide his actions in mysterious but positive ways, and this belief sustained his commitment to OISCA. No hurdle was too difficult to cross when such forces came to his aide. The belief in weather-related miracles and following vegetables as ethical models can be understood in this way—that is, in terms of a conceptual­ ization of the person as being attuned to inexplicable powers that humble himself or herself. Charles Taylor (2007) argued that the disenchantment of the mod­ ern world promoted a “buffered self,” a notion of the person who is

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individualized and disassociated from collective forms of belonging, with an accordant emphasis on emotional and psychological interiority (156, 539–542). If that is the case, the person promoted in OISCA was a differ­ ent one. Even if not everyone spoke in the terms that Furuichi-san used, there was a widespread acceptance of the importance in making persons who strive to stay in harmony with nature as well as the collective through communal living and shared physical labor in the agricultural fields. The person in this context was not or should not be a buffered self but instead was a porous one who became socially present through an attunement with the nonhuman natural world (C. Watanabe 2015c). As one senior staff member summarized, training and working in OISCA should be driven by a sense that you were being allowed to do those things thanks to a larger force, whether that was the collectivity of the organization or nature or the Great Spirit of the Universe. If this was a view that left younger non­ Ananaikyō staff members and trainees perplexed, that was fine. As long as people continued to struggle to grasp and embody these values despite the confusion and uncertainty of such imaginaries, the senior staffers saw their work as valuable. The claims of being nonreligious rejected religion but also distanced the secular, embracing instead this framework of making porous persons in attunement with forces beyond the individual and the human. Conceiving of vegetables as social actors and humans as porous enti­ ties in dialogue with the nonhuman suggests that OISCA’s senior staffers such as Furuichi-san are akin to people in other parts of the world who, for example, claim that “soy kills” (Kregg Hetherington 2013). It is pos­ sible to take Furuichi-san’s and other senior staff members’ statements as evidence of the existence of different ontological worlds and to conduct an analysis of their multinaturalism or cosmopolitics (de la Cadena 2015; Henare et al. 2007; Latour 2004; Stengers 2000; Viveiros de Castro 1998). However, such a perspective in this case risks overlooking the shifting temporalities of the nonhuman being or thing and, more importantly, the historicity of the claims to their agency (Keane 2009). In OISCA and in respect to claims of a “Shinto” environmentalism, the historicity of claim­ ing a human-nonhuman porosity today is its association with nationalist, right-wing politics. To bracket out this history is to depoliticize “Shinto” environmentalism and consequently support a nationalist political agenda (cf. Jensen and Blok 2013). Furthermore, worlds are not singular, and there are always those who doubt, take seriously one thing but not another, or change their minds from one reality to another (Heywood 2012; Vigh and

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Sausdal 2014). Appeals to “follow the vegetable” were never “taken seri­ ously,” or even considered, by everyone in OISCA.

Cultivating People I have discussed at length the discursive claims of a nonreligious “Shinto” environmentalism, which formed a fundamental vision for OISCA’s senior Japanese staff members. However, this imaginary was not necessarily visible in the everyday work of OISCA staffers. No one, for instance, actually showed me in practice how they followed the life of vegetables as a model of ethical living. Moreover, a common question that I have received from Japanese studies audiences upon hearing about OISCA is, “Is this really Shinto?” The question—and not the answer—points to an important aspect of the organization: that the invisibility of “Shinto” envi­ ronmentalism played a key role in the moral imaginations of sustainable development work. Except for the Ananaikyō people, most of the staffers and trainees at the training centers related to their natural environments not through an awareness of the mysterious forces of nature but through the tedious tasks of agricultural labor. And this work involved experimental and rational approaches, rather than the imaginary of an antimodern agrari­ anism. This difference between claims of “Shinto” environmentalism and everyday agricultural work proved to be an important tension in the utopian orientation in OISCA. The need for experiments and tedious work was particularly the case with organic and sustainable methods. As one Japanese staff member in the Tokyo office, Kawano-san, pointed out, organic approaches require patience and hard work because the results are not apparent in the first or even second or third years. “In fact,” he said, “you get little yield for the first three to five years after switching to organic methods, and there will be many insects and diseases.” Once the environment settles into its new configuration, however, the ecosystem would be stabilized. “But to reach that stage and maintain it, daily observations are crucial,” he added. This meant, for example, that at the training centers staffers and train­ ees had to go “insect watching” (mushimi) every morning and evening to search for harmful insects in the rice paddies and kill them by hand. They used natural pesticides made from garlic or chilies, but Kawano-san con­ fessed that this was not all that effective. So they needed to study the insects to figure out their life cycles and then go out to the paddies during times when they knew that the creatures were laying eggs to stop them before they took hold. They also made sure that insects did not infest young rice

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seedlings. It was an endless battle. During these times of insect watching, they also looked for signs of disease, and if they saw any sick plants, they removed them. People’s days at the training centers were filled with such monotonous, hands-on labor, usually without any reference to “Shinto” or the greater forces of nature. The Myanmar training center was no different in this sense from the training centers in Japan that I visited. As I followed trainees and staffers around in their daily activities, sometimes we did the same things over and over again. But this disciplined, repetitive work was imperative to the success of the organic rice paddies and vegetable fields. Ko Thein, one of the Burmese staff members in charge of rice cultivation, took me on a tour around the paddies one late afternoon. Since the sun was setting, this was a prime time for insects to flourish. A couple of other staffers decided to join us to check on the condition of the rice plants. We walked along the ledges of the paddies at a leisurely pace. The staffers occasionally waded into the sea of green and took the leaves gently into their hands to inspect them closely. Their fingers turned the leaves over to make sure that harmful insects had not attached themselves on the underside and that disease had not crept in. “How do you know what is wrong with the plants?” I asked Ko Thein. “We look at the shapes and colors,” he replied. “For example, if the leaf is yellow, it means that the plant is lacking potassium. If it is yellow and short, it means that the soil is bad.” These observations of the rice plants were also in part systematized through controlled experiments. Ko Thein and the others took me to an­ other part of the rice paddies and pointed to three small plots in front of us. They had been testing which form of planting worked better—planting a single seedling, two seedlings, or three seedlings together. In another set of plots a few meters over, they were testing different amounts of space be­ tween seedlings. Every two weeks they would measure the heights of each plant to see the effects of spacing on growth. They told me that sometimes they would invite nearby villagers to persuade them to follow one method over another. If the moral imagination of “Shinto” environmentalism suggested an attunement to the workings of nature and the universe, these experi­ ments were about scientific and pragmatic forms of learning and doing agricultural labor. A few days after my walk with Ko Thein and the others, I met with the staff member in charge of keeping the records for these tests. Ma Nyein was an authoritative person but warm and kind in her own way. When I asked her about the rice paddy experiments, she patiently

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explained to me the various tests that they had been conducting that year. For example, as I had seen, they were devoting the area that they had labeled C-6 to testing different spaces between plants—in plot sizes of twelve by eight feet versus ten by six feet, each with the same number of seedlings—as well as comparing single, double, and triple planting. They were also studying the differences between a plot using organic bokashi fertilizer made from pig manure and another plot using chicken manure. This approach was relatively new; a few years earlier they had been mixing different types of manure together. Ma Nyein knew that the experiments would not make sense without a systematic record, and so she made sure that staffers went out to the plots to take regular measurements. The Japanese director, Sakurai-san, also wanted detailed data. Staffers and trainees would select and cordon off three areas in each plot—the best, the worst, and the intermediate between them—using three-foot-long bamboo stalks to create squares. Then they would take measurements of the plants and record the number of plants and other conditions within each square. They would do this work across five plots that were testing different things. Sakurai-san had asked Ma Nyein to turn these data into a graph, and she was in the process of doing this. Eventually, Ma Nyein, Sakurai-san, and other senior staffers in charge of rice cultivation would look at the graph and records to figure out what was working, what was not, and what they wanted to test out the following year. They were now able to harvest one hundred baskets of rice per acre (approximately two tons)—almost 1.5 times the national average (World Bank 2016, 23)—but they believed that they could achieve even higher yields by honing their techniques. These experiments helped staffers build on what they already knew in order to develop their agricultural techniques. The rational aspects of these activities suggested a more controlled and anthropocentric view of the world than the submission to nature suggested by people like Furuichi- san. The two frameworks coexisted in the agricultural activities in OISCA, but there was an underlying ideological tension between agriculture as a method of transforming people and as a productive endeavor. During our interview, I asked Kawano-san how he saw the balance between the work of “making persons” and the need to ensure productivity through organic farming. “Good question!” he exclaimed. “The first thing is that we are not trying to create farmers; what we are doing is making persons.” He ran out of the room to grab a book that contained a chapter by Sakurai-san about precisely that topic. Kawano-san opened the book to Sakurai-san’s

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essay to show me the passage. The young director had written about the importance of “making persons” in a holistic sense as OISCA’s goal, not the making of skillful farmers. The previous director of the Myanmar training center had also said something similar in his writings, often speaking of the importance of imparting agricultural skills that are rooted in the heart and soul, in the kokoro of trying to exist in harmony with nature. Skills could only go so far in making persons. Techniques and experiments in farming could enter OISCA only if they adhered to sus­ tainable and organic approaches—not only because techniques had to be based on the ability of villagers to use nearby resources, hence making the method sustainable, but also because they needed to follow the principles of ecological harmony. Similarly, despite the experiments to enhance crop yield, productivity or marketability was not the ultimate goal of the training centers. Imparting the vision of a sustainable future according to Yonosuke’s teachings had to be more important than agricultural output achieved through technical sophistication and rational experiments. Japa­ nese staff members often stated that the purpose of hitozukuri in OISCA was to cultivate particular kinds of persons in line with the values of living in harmony with nature and through communal living and collective labor; learning agricultural skills and achieving productivity was secondary to the spiritual cultivation (seishin ikusei) of trainees and staffers through particular lifestyles. In the everyday work of staffers in the training centers, however, the emphasis on “making persons” over productivity was not always clear. Neither was the imagination of “Shinto” environmentalism visible in their activities. The labor of insect watching, of being attuned to the workings of nature, seemed to align with ideas of “living in harmony with nature,” but the message of an allegedly Shinto ecological worldview did not play an explicit or direct role in people’s daily work. Were the discourses about a “Shinto” environmentalism inconsequential, then? Or did this absence of explicit claims of “Shinto” environmentalism necessarily indicate an absence of their effects in practice? If I had started my analysis from the activities in the training centers, I probably would have never arrived at the claims of “Shinto” environmentalism. Yet, even if the rendering of “Shinto” environmentalism into everyday work was invisible, that did not necessarily mean that it was inconsequential. Moreover, the opacity of the steps connecting the ideas of “Shinto” environmentalism with the everyday labor of the training centers—the vision and the methods—was in itself generative for OISCA’s aid actors.

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Rethinking Nihonjinron The claims around certain environmental ideas and the “spiritual” cultivation of people as “culturally Japanese” are a familiar trope in Japanese culturalist and nationalist ideologies. Speaking about Japanese conceptions of nature almost always comes entangled with the issue of nihonjinron, theories about Japanese cultural essence. The Japanese, the theories go, are traditionally predisposed to live harmoniously with their natural environment. The early twentieth-century philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) proposed that humankind was shaped into different forms, depending on the climate (Watsuji 1935). Japanese people, just like other Asian peoples from wet monsoon-countries, are tolerant and passive, nurtured by the moisture in their environment. Moreover, Watsuji argued, the natural climate could be apprehended only through the subject’s sen­ sory experience, and accordingly, the subject could exist only in relation to his or her environment and with others. Watsuji’s most influential theories for nihonjinron centered on this notion of relationality: that the Japanese conceive of humanity as aidagara, or “being-between” (Sakai 1991). The individual in this paradigm is never an isolated subject but instead is primar­ ily relational and communal (Watsuji [1934] 2007). Thinkers throughout the twentieth century took up Watsuji’s ideas, among others, to articulate what made the Japanese unique vis-à-vis an encroaching West. Nihonjinron theories became particularly popular in the 1970s and 1980s, when scholars and popular commentators in Japan and elsewhere wrote hundreds of books about the uniqueness of the Japanese. They often attributed the country’s rapid postwar progress to special Japanese characteristics. Even as recently as 2011, the behavior of Japanese people devastated by a massive earth­ quake and tsunami—how rule-abiding and orderly they were, the world praised—has been discussed as an extraordinary national trait. This notion of Japanese uniqueness is an ideology that contemporary anthropologists of Japan always have to face. Ruth Benedict (1946), in her famous The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, set the stage for future anthropologists by associating “Japanese culture” with particular homogenous characteristics. Most challenging for anthro­ pologists has been that people in Japan themselves often repeat the essen­ tializations in Benedict’s study and other nihonjinron discourses to explain their behaviors and thoughts. If an anthropological approach prides itself on capturing research subjects’ interpretations of the world, an analytical problematic appears when these interpretations are also ideological, with political implications. The ideological weight of nihonjinron rears its heavy head particularly in discussions over conceptions of nature, because ideas

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of Japanese sensitivity toward the natural environment hold a central place in popular understandings of Japaneseness within Japan and elsewhere. Therefore, simply describing Japanese approaches to nature will not do as analysis. Scholars who study issues of nature are forced to tackle the ways that nihonjinron theorists, as well as citizens who adopt these views, have expressed essentialized ideas about Japanese approaches to nature (e.g., Kirby 2011). A refrain often heard in Japan, for instance, is that the Japanese find virtue in impermanence, a worldview said to be shaped by the ability to appreciate phenomena such as the beauty of cherry blossoms that bloom only for a fortnight in the spring. Common anthropological solutions to these discourses have been to denounce them as nationalist ideologies or to show how such essentialisms are contradicted in practice, given that pollution and environmental destruction have also been part of Japanese modern history. But staunch nihonjinron proponents might say that we can learn something from “traditional” Japanese ways of relating to nature and that the environmental destruction of the past century is due to Westernization. That the formulation of “Shinto” environmentalism among OISCA ac­ tors echoes nihonjinron tendencies cannot be denied. The view that Shinto is about Japanese values of living in harmony with nature, as Kimura-san had intimated to me, fits squarely within nationalist discourses of Japanese uniqueness. I could have dismissed these views as uninteresting in their nationalism. Or argued that they are simply discourses that mask a more complicated relationship between Japanese society and nature. Or set them aside because they are not really applicable in the everyday practices in the training centers. Instead, however, I have chosen to take the arguments of “Shinto” environmentalism seriously. By taking these claims seriously, however, I do not mean “taking literally” or “believing,”12 especially when making such a claim would suggest buying into nationalist views of a “Jap­ anese essence.” I take “Shinto” environmentalism seriously in the sense that I do not want to ignore it, to deem it unworthy of analytical attention. But I also do not want to overlook its political and historical implications, nor do I want to make overdetermined judgments of the projects in OISCA as “Shinto” or ecocentric, because staffers and activities were varied. I take the assertions of “Shinto” values seriously in that they are a product of a very specific logic of the nonreligious, in a specific context of OISCA’s history. I take these claims seriously not in that I adopt their ontological propositions, nor even in that I try to evaluate how accurate they are in capturing Japanese relations to nature, but in that I begin from the terms that OISCA’s staff members and supporters have set. This means that what

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I take seriously are the effects and implications of the imaginations trig­ gered by ideas of “Shinto” environmentalism—the resonances that these imaginations have in their particular historical, social, and political expres­ sions of a better world and better humans. And ultimately one of the most important consequences of arguing for a “Shinto” environmentalism is that it allowed OISCA staff members and supporters to connect particularist ideas about Japaneseness with global environmental movements, showing how cultural nationalist arguments could become vehicles for claiming universals (cf. Kalland and Asquith 1997, 26). We cannot ignore the historicity of “Shinto” environmentalism, for it resonates strongly with how Ōmoto’s Deguchi Onisaburō sought to link Japaneseness with a universal message, walking a fine line between as­ pirations for a universal fraternity and a Japanese empire. How did this collapsing of the particular with the universal play out across the various activities in OISCA and across different countries? How did understand­ ings of “Japanese” values inform the moral imaginations surrounding work in the training centers in OISCA? It is to these questions that we now turn.

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s Nakano Yonosuke had prophesized, the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development Ain Rio de Janeiro proved to be a key turning point for OISCA. Commonly called the Earth Summit, this conference had been years in the making. In 1983 the UN had created the World Commission on Environment and Development, and in 1987 that commission published the report Our Common Future, often referred to as the Brundtland Report. The document proposed the concept of “sustainable development,” which it defined as a form of “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987). Thereafter, a concern for the environmental impact of development processes became central to aid policies and activities (Es­ cobar 1995; Fernando 2003; Redclift 1987). In 1989 the General Assembly of the UN agreed to convene a confer­ ence on the environment and development, and the 1992 Earth Summit was born. The event helped nation-states, including Japan, reconsolidate their political agenda through new “green” ideologies and the concept of sustainable development (J. Taylor 1999). Around this time, the Japanese government also formulated its first development policy, the Official De­ velopment Assistance Charter of 1992, which emphasized the importance of sustainable development and environmental conservation. Although this move was in part a response to international and domestic pressures to be more environmentally conscious (Kim 2009), we can also see the moment as an opportunity for actors such as OISCA’s staff members to advance their ideas of a sustainable future for the world. Thus, the Earth Summit was a two-way street: an occasion to show Japan’s adoption of international sustainable development ideas; and a place where Japanese aid actors such as OISCA could articulate their own visions through this new global agenda.

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So it was that, in 1993, as a result of its advocacy activities in Rio and subsequent tree-planting activities with children around Asia (the start of the Children’s Forest Program), OISCA was awarded the Earth Summit Award for Sustainable Development (Nikkei Weekly 1993). According to staffers, their work had been framed by an earth ethics (chikyū rinri) that aimed to “shift from a human-centered ethics to an earth-centered ethics” and promote the idea that humans are part of a natural world (shizenkai) in which all life is interconnected (OISCA 2012a). In this ecocentric expres­ sion of sustainable development—and one that reflects the organization’s roots in Yonosuke’s teachings—OISCA’s Japanese aid workers found a global language for their work and a way to hook their cultural national­ ist claims of “Shinto” environmentalism onto international environmental discourses. Twenty years went by, and the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20, was held in Rio de Janeiro. Just as it had two decades earlier, the OISCA headquarters sent a delegation. This time staffers were equipped with a new concept: furusato-zukuri (making a homeplace). At OISCA’s fiftieth-anniversary international conference in 2011, supporters and politicians from around the world drafted a statement in which they defined furusato—usually translated as “hometown,” “na­ tive place,” or “homeplace”—as “a sustainable collectivity” (jizoku kanō na kyōdōtai) that is “in harmony with nature” (shizen to chōwa) (OISCA 2012b, 9). Laying out a vision of sustainable communities that would ho­ listically encompass social welfare, education, health care, environmental conservation, and economic development, OISCA staffers proposed furu- sato-zukuri at Rio+20 as a universal mission for people around the world. In one of the materials presented at the Rio Conventions Pavilion, OISCA defined furusato as “a place that comes down from our ancestors, who have cultivated harmony with nature,” with “various cultures, languages, traditions, spiritualities . . . evolved in beauties of nature, [and having] been cradled in the diversity.” The “furusato movement” envisioned “a world where people live in harmony with diversity of all life forms . . . as a universal family sharing the common furusato, ‘Mother Earth’ ” (OISCA 2012c; orig. English). Combining an imagination of oneness through terms such as “a universal family” and “Mother Earth” with ideas of diversity, OISCA staffers sought to connect the concept of a universal furusato with international discourses of environmentalism, biodiversity, and sustainable development. So then, how did OISCA’s Japanese and Burmese staff members understand, articulate, and translate this idea of furusato-zukuri in their

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everyday activities? This chapter builds on the historical and ideological background of OISCA’s activities explored in previous chapters and exam­ ines how staffers tried to concretize the imagination of “living in harmony with nature” through the idea of furusato. Furusato refers to a particular image: one’s ancestral home in an idyllic village in rural Japan, nestled between mountains and thick forests, surrounded by lush rice paddies and punctuated with the rhythms of “traditional life” as experienced through multigenerational households and seasonal village customs (Robertson 1991). Proposing that the imagined landscape of traditional rural Japan could be a model for a sustainable universal future, OISCA’s president and senior Japanese staffers presented furusato-zukuri as the organization’s new vision. In this sense, Rio+20 was an opportunity for OISCA’s senior staff members to articulate claims of “Shinto” environmentalism in ways that were simultaneously “Japanese” and universal through a vision that superimposed Japanese sceneries of a rural landscape with ideas of Mother Earth. But given that furusato is an imaginary that points to a specifically Japanese landscape, how did Japanese staff members in OISCA express this concept of furusato, or the making of furusato (furusato-zukuri), as a guiding mission for their global work? How was this vision translated into the daily activities at the training centers such as the one in Myanmar? How and to what extent did Burmese staff members also adopt this term to frame their lives at the training center? In many ways, Japanese staffers understood the training centers to be the first instances of furusato: an Eden-like prototype for a universal furusato movement in which humans live in harmony with nature. The making of a collectivist community in the centers and the establishment of a lifestyle in adherence to the rhythms of agriculture and nature seemed to capture the agrarian communalism of an idealized furusato. But the making of the training centers as furusato was not a smooth process. Japanese and Burmese staffers grappled with the aspirational vision of making furusato concrete, the realization of a landscape in the training centers that reflects human-nature coexistence. While senior Japanese staff members in the Tokyo office seemed to take furusato-zukuri as a self-evident concept, younger Japanese staffers and Burmese staffers struggled to make sense of and maintain this vision in their everyday activities. For instance, for junior staffers at the Tokyo headquarters, the ways and means to get to a universal furusato were unclear and confusing. For Burmese staffers in Myanmar, the disconnect happened in yet another way: they spoke of the training center as their furusato, but this was never linked to ideas of a universal furusato, and they were concerned with agricultural productivity as much

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as, if not more than, the ideals of human-nature coexistence. Moreover, the definition of the training center as furusato was something that required constant labor. The connections between the universal and the particular, the organizational vision and the everyday work of staff members, were not always clear. The making of furusato, therefore, was always an incomplete and frustrated endeavor. But this was precisely what gave the activities in OISCA their utopian character. Hirokazu Miyazaki (2003, 2004) and others have argued that a utopian orientation emerges not simply in the envisioning of an ideal future place but in the spaces between failure and fulfillment, in the distances between the arrival at the ideal state and the present labor to get there. This is the dynamic of incompleteness that fuels aspirational practices. Utopia in this sense can be understood only as a method to excavate histo­ ries of the future (Jameson 2005; see also Levitas 2013). Thus, “utopian” imaginaries and practices emerge from the struggles to connect scattered dots together into a narrative of progress. Staffers and trainees strived to achieve and maintain furusato, a unitary vision and place that were never quite complete, and I suggest that this effort to make connections between disparate elements in a vision of the future was precisely what made the work aspirational for participants.

The Mission of Making Furusato Although OISCA staffers officially proposed furusato-zukuri as a universal message in 2012, the concept was not new in the organization. A decade earlier, OISCA president Nakano Yoshiko had already articulated the vision of a universal furusato as the key to sustainable development by tying the importance of furusato to the idea of Mother Nature:

First and foremost, I believe . . . [that] people need to develop genuine love of home with a true attachment to their own culture, and their “soil.” If they think about the environment and how to cope with the problems of environmental destruction, they may realize that their love of home can grow into love of Mother Earth. (2001, 19; orig. English)

Yoshiko appealed to the image of a village where people are born and raised, arguing that a love for one’s home community would lead to a love for one’s world. In her words, “once one understands that the home village is located between Heaven and Earth, and living beings exist, blessed by Great Nature, then one can imaginatively see Mother Earth as home for

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all human beings” (2001, 30–31). In a world characterized by increas­ ing human mobility (UN DESA 2013), Yoshiko had referenced an almost anachronistic idea of an immobile village life that could be superimposed onto a conception of a universal home. As much as this conceptualization sought to make the past relevant for the future, it aimed to collapse vastly different scales—namely, that a love for one’s furusato would translate into a love for the entire earth as a universal furusato. How did OISCA’s staff members try to realize this vision? The work began in large part in the training centers. Rather than the “home” where staffers and trainees were born, the mission of furusato-zukuri started from the work of turning the training centers into the trainees’ and staff mem­ bers’ furusato according to the particular imagination of an environment of communal and sustainable living. Every training center would be a seed for a furusato landscape that would then spread to other places through the trainees and staff members. In this sense, furusato-zukuri in OISCA was clearly about creating new places, even while referring to ideas of return and home, and disseminating these types of places in different parts of the world. At first glance, furusato-zukuri might seem to be a question of scal­ ability—that is, furusato as “small projects [that] can become big without changing the nature of the project” (Tsing 2012, 507). A scalable project is able to expand without changing its elements; whether small or large, the form of the project remains the same, just as a digital image stays the same regardless of scale. But was the love for one’s home village that is then expanded into love for Mother Earth a project of scalability like World Bank development projects and international business models, which ex­ pand without transformation? There was something about the affective expansion envisioned in furusato-zukuri that differed from the scalability of “orthodox” development projects. For example, Japanese as well as Bur­ mese staffers saw furusato as always in the making, always in the zukuri (from the Japanese word tsukuru, “to make”). One continuously worked to cultivate and maintain a love for one’s home—the training center—and this was never a finished product. Nor was it entirely replicable: the love for and commitment to one’s training center did not necessarily exist in other places. The “project” was not a completed form that could be scaled up or down. It was a simultaneously singular and universal practice of continu­ ous making, living, and loving a homeplace that never stayed the same. Furthermore, the global expansion of a love for a place depended not so much on technical scalability as on an imagination whereby distances of all sorts—temporal, geographical, cultural, scalar, and interpersonal—would

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be diminished. The assumption was less about the ability of small projects to expand without change and more about there being no distance to travel in the first place. What I do today is the future, and what I do here is uni­ versal. And if enough people acted on this vision in their own homeplaces, a global revolution could happen in the form of a ripple effect, according to OISCA’s mission of furusato-zukuri. At least, that was the organizational vision.

The Satoyama Initiative It is important to note that the mission of furusato-zukuri in OISCA did not exist in isolation. A similar perspective on sustainable development that mobilizes images of a rural landscape appears in Japanese scholarly and state discourses of satoyama. Satoyama is a word that points to an imagery similar to that of furusato, but it depicts more specifically an ecology that is made up of “secondary woodlands and grasslands near human settlements that have traditionally used these lands as coppices and meadows for fuel, fertilizer, and fodder” (Takeuchi 2010, 892). Just as OISCA’s senior staff members have used the notion of furusato, Japanese scholars and government officials have mobilized the idea of satoyama to resuscitate notions of a “Japanese” ecology, felt to be lost, as visions of global sustainable development. The idea is that “traditional” Japanese landscapes, defined by a human lifestyle that coexists with the surrounding natural environment, can be recuperated and modeled to realize sustainable futures in Japan and elsewhere. It is important to note, however, that satoyama is not about protecting or recuperating a pristine nature. Rather, the satoyama landscape is a model for the promotion of biodiversity in environments that have benefited from appropriate human-nature interactions. The idea is that agricultural and forestry activities should introduce regular disturbances to the ecosystem in order to nurture biodiversity, because forest- and land-use practices can achieve the proper balance for the well-being of both nature and humans (Takeuchi 2010). This perspective resonates with how scholars have de­ scribed Japanese relationships with the forested mountains around them. People in Japan have tended to conceptualize nature as a differentiated space that ranges from okuyama (the deep mountain), where vegetation is thick and dangerous supernatural beings are said to reside, to areas closer to the village that have been used for hunting, gathering, and cultivation (Knight 1996). Nature and culture are not in opposition; they coexist on a continuum between the wild and the tame (Kalland and Asquith 1997). In

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this sense, wildness—as in the okuyama with its dangerous forces—is not revered. Instead, the idealized “harmonious” human relationship to nature in Japan is in the taming of nature, or in the ability to coexist with nature by keeping the wildness at bay. In this conception, satoyama ecologies serve as buffer zones where the potential threats of wildness are in the process of being transformed. This is what “living in harmony with nature” is sup­ posed to look like in these formulations. The Japanese government officially introduced the idea ofsatoyama in 2010 during the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 10), held in Japan. OISCA staffers had also used this conference as a platform—and as a rehearsal for Rio+20—to officially propose the message of furusato-zukuri to an international audience. At the event, the Ministry of the Environment of Japan and the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies organized a ceremony titled “Realising Societies in Harmony with Nature” that launched the International Partnership for the Satoyama Initiative. As the Satoyama Initiative’s (2016a) website explains, the partnership consists of international and Japanese organizations “committed to promoting and supporting socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes . . . for the benefit of biodiversity and human well-being.” The initiative defines this mouthful of a phrase—“socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes”—in terms of “local” and “traditional” sustainable uses of envi­ ronmental resources that exist around the world, satoyama landscapes be­ ing the Japanese iteration of this (Satoyama Initiative 2016b). The website goes on to define satoyama in this way:

Satoyama landscape is characterized by a mosaic feature of different land uses such as woodland, grassland, paddy field, farmland, irrigation ponds and canals, and human settlements, which have been maintained in an integrated manner. Satoyama are where farmers grow rice, cut grasses to maintain soil fertility and feed animals, and use wood for fuel and as a house-building material, just to name a few of the associated production activities. These landscapes also play an important role as the setting in which a range of religious and cultural activities are conducted. High levels of biodiversity have been maintained in these mosaics of diverse habitats, which were shaped and sustained by appropriate human manage­ ment such as coppicing and farming.

As this description indicates, imagined satoyama landscapes resemble the images of furusato. But whereas furusato in OISCA has remained

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somewhat undefined, the concept of satoyama in Satoyama Initiative has been shaped and reshaped in the hands of experts and state officials. The idea of satoyama as it is used in these policies has been largely a brainchild of Takeuchi Kazuhiko, a prominent agrobiologist formerly at the University of Tokyo and currently the senior vice-rector of the United Nations University. Through his advocacy efforts, the Satoyama Initiative formally appeared in government discourses in 2007. The cabinet-level decision, “Becoming a Leading Environmental Nation in the 21st Century: Japan’s Strategy for a Sustainable Society,” stated:

Japan is in an ideal position to create a working model of a sustainable society as a “miniature Earth,” in the sense that Japan has few natural resources as well as a population and industrial activities that are concen­ trated onto national land that is limited in size, and yet has strengths such as traditional wisdom from living in harmony with nature, environmental and energy-related technologies that have enabled socio-economic devel­ opment, the experience of having overcome severe pollution, abundant human resources with great passion and capabilities. . . . [Japan will create] a “Japanese model” in which Japan, as a leading environmental nation, contributes to the development and the prosperity of the globe, to be shared with Asia and with the world. (Government of Japan 2007, 6, 7; orig. English)

A central concept in this policy document is satoyama. Although the strat­ egy acknowledged that satoyama had largely eroded in contemporary Ja­ pan, the text proposes that it could tap into the “traditional wisdom of living in harmony with nature,” in conjunction with environmental technologies, to create a sustainable society not only in Japan but “also throughout Asia and beyond” (8). The Satoyama Initiative for building a society that exists in harmony with nature was then taken up in subsequent international meet­ ings, culminating in its recognition as a global strategy at COP 10 (2010). The Satoyama Initiative, and satoyama movements in general, are not only traditionalist discourses but also complex projects that articulate traditional and scientific knowledge in multiple ways around biodiversity conservation (Matsutake Worlds Research Group 2009). However, in light of OISCA’s furusato-zukuri, what interests me are the sentimental charac­ teristics of the satoyama concept that mobilize feelings of ecological and cultural loss to construct a message of global sustainability. This is what links OISCA’s furusato-zukuri with the projects around satoyama and is what continues to make OISCA’s work appealing to state actors today. As

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with satoyama, furusato is an imagination motivated by a sense of loss and, thus, by aspirations that reach toward the recuperation of a (nationalistic) past to articulate a future—a nostalgic future that always falls short of achievement (cf. Boym 2001; Cole 2010; Piot 2010).

Landscapes of Loss The concept of satoyama was popularized in the 1960s by a forest ecologist named Shidei Tsunahide, in the context of a Japanese society that was becoming increasingly industrialized and urbanized to the detriment of the natural environment (Takeuchi 2010, 893). The sense of ecological loss associated with this trend was about the loss of the human-nature interaction that had ensured a biodiverse environment. The out-migration of villagers to cities from the 1950s onward has contributed to this change in landscape, for there were now fewer people to make use of the wooded mountains (Knight 1996). Therefore, the destruction of nature by human intervention was not where the problem lay; the sense of loss that accompa­ nied the idea of satoyama was about the erosion of a human-nature balance. An important component of this sense of loss of satoyama landscapes has been the role of rice cultivation. While the use of forests for natural fer­ tilizer and fuel has been important in managing wildness at the boundaries of villages, woodlands have been essential in providing a source of water for rice paddies and controlling floods (Totman 1989, 213). The breakdown of satoyama environments and the mass migration of people from villages to cities have also implied a threat to rice cultivation. This has significant consequences, given the symbolic, political, and economic values that rice has carried in Japan. Rice was not always the staple food in Japan, but in the eighteenth century, kokugaku (National Learning) scholars such as Hirata Atsutane pointed to rice production and consumption as core practices in an idealized “agrarian Japan” and in supposedly Shinto traditions (Ohnuki- Tierney 1993, 104; see also chapter 2). The symbolic importance of rice for nationalist and imperialist ideologies continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and key imperial rituals today still involve rice (Bray 1986, 215; Ohnuki-Tierney 1993, 46). As Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (1993) stated, there is a dominant ideology in Japan today that presents rice as a fundamental metaphor of the Japanese self. The symbolic value constructed around rice also affected its politi­ cal and economic significance. As Japan quickly industrialized at the turn of the twentieth century, the consumption of white rice, and particularly domestically grown japonica rice instead of the more globally common

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indica rice, became associated with a modern urban identity, raising the demand for this type of rice across the country (Francks 2015, 322). People (especially the poor) who may have eaten white rice, but always mixed with cheaper grains such as millet, began to seek out white japonica rice during this time. By the 1920s, rice was the country’s main staple. Around this time, the symbolic value of rice shifted. Politicians and government of­ ficials began to view small-scale farm households, especially those of rice farmers, as “the backbone of the country, morally and physically superior to the increasingly dominant urban industrial producers” (Francks 2003, 140). As a counternarrative to “the West” and “Westernization,” rice cultivation and its associated rural communalism came to hold an important place in the imagination of national identity among these political actors. Rice became a protected agricultural product before and after World War II, with tariffs on imported rice and subsidies to rice farmers, and the imageries of rice, rice cultivation, and paddy fields nestled between mountains, which have existed from time immemorial, continue to have major implications in policies, including those around satoyama (Bray 2014, 11). It is in this context that OISCA’s senior Japanese staff members also emphasized rice cultivation in its training centers. Despite the privileged position that rice has maintained in Japan, however, the decline of farming in general has meant that rice cultivation has also fallen. In 1960, agriculture constituted 9 percent of the national economy, and nearly half of the total value of production came from rice cultivation; by 2005, agriculture accounted for only 1.1 percent of the economy, and rice 23.1 percent of the total agricultural production value (OECD 2009, 12). This trend reflects a fall in the consumption of rice as well, people eating only half the amount in 2006 (61 kilograms per year per person) than they did in 1962 (118 kilograms per year per person) (OECD 2009, 55). Accordingly, the acreage of rice paddies has shrunk in past decades. The demise of satoyama in contemporary discourses is framed not only as an ecological concern but also as a social and emotional one, particularly around the imagination of (diminishing) rice cultivation. The social and affective sense of loss in the idealized rice paddy landscape is captured in the concept of furusato. While satoyama refers more to an ecological balance, furusato connotes a village community that nurtures intimate social relations, the rhythms of manual labor in the paddy fields, and feelings of deep historical belonging. On one level, anthropologists have described furusato as a homeplace that never really existed for people in Japan, at least not in the form of a harmonious and unchanging village

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(Ivy 1995). This nonexistence of furusato is key here. Anthropologists have pointed out that furusato is an oxymoron in that it can emerge only at the moment when one realizes that it has been lost. The longing to return to a point of origin, felt to be lost, masks the fact that an authentic “Japan” perhaps never existed (Ivy 1995; Robertson 1997). By latching onto the idea of furusato as centered on images of rice paddies, people disavow the absence of the originary home, always deferring the possibility that there was no authentic place of origin in the first place and allowing a near obsession with furusato to continue in popular discourses. The furusato-zukuri in OISCA was slightly different from this anthro­ pological assessment because many of the younger staff members in the Tokyo headquarters could not quite grasp the notion of furusato for their work. What came to be foregrounded for these staffers was not so much a reified idea of furusato but the sense of loss, absence, and confusion that came with making anew an already-lost furusato as a universal message of sustainable development. For the younger staffers in Tokyo who were in charge of translating the organizational mission into projects, the making of a universal furusato often seemed like a vision from the past projected onto a very different context in the twenty-first century. They could not quite figure out how to realize it in their activities or why they should. This is not to say that OISCA’s staff members were more aware of the conceptual and social construction that is furusato than other Japanese people. Rather, my point is that in looking ethnographically at moments when people were trying to create furusato as a reality, we might find that our interlocutors are generally aware that furusato has been lost and perhaps even aware that it never existed. In short, people engaged in furusato-zukuri might not be as obsessed with an originary homeplace as scholarly analyses have suggested. They may be very much aware that furusato has been lost or has never existed. In OISCA, staffers over the decades talked about the loss of furusato in Japan, which they saw as an unfortunate consequence of fast economic growth. This discourse of a lost furusato resonated with a wider sense of nostalgia for a presumably past time of agrarian communalism that circu­ lated in Japan, especially since the years of rapid industrialization and ur­ banization in the 1960s (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993, 120–123). The sense of loss in OISCA amidst the “economic miracle” of postwar Japan reflected, in particular, the demographic character of staff members then—poor, rural, and marginalized in a rapidly industrializing Japan. On one level, rice farm­ ers did well in twentieth-century Japan, given the generous government subsidies and other support to them (Francks 2015). In 1945 and 1946 the

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US Occupation authorities instituted the First and Second Land Reforms, requiring landowners of more than one hectare to relinquish the extra land to tenant farmers, which meant that most farmers in postwar Japan came to own the land on which they worked (Bray 1986, 216). As the mechaniza­ tion of agriculture took off in the 1960s, combined with subsidies for rice, farmers were also able to spend less time on rice cultivation and diversify their sources of income with more lucrative enterprises such as growing profitable types of mushrooms (Bray 1986, 58, 134; see also Kelly 1986, 608–609). Most of them also switched to part-time farming and took on jobs in construction and manufacture (McDonald 1996). Moreover, rice farmers have been an important electoral base for Liberal Democratic Party politicians, and the political connections have been beneficial for these farmers (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993, 18). Nevertheless, it is important to note that farmers have not been nec­ essarily financially well-off (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993, 18–19). In the early 1980s a farm household needed an income of at least 4 million yen to make ends meet; farming would bring in only 2 million yen, and so both the hus­ band and the wife would need to take jobs off the farm, each earning about 1 million yen in factories and construction jobs (McDonald 1996, 67). The diversification of income beyond rice cultivation was not simply a luxury but often a necessity. An important element in OISCA is that the senior Japanese staff members left their farms, families, and in many cases Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, before mechanization and without providing that necessary additional off-farm income for their families. Therefore, many of them, or their parents, may have acquired land after the 1945 and 1946 land reforms, but they had not benefited from the changes that came about in later years.1 In a couple of the life history interviews with senior staff members, it seemed that they had lost their family farms while they were away, their wives and children unable to maintain the farms on their own. This means that, on the level of class consciousness, these staffers would not have attached themselves to the trend of rationalization and the “New Middle Class” identity that took hold across Japan after the mid­ 1960s (Kelly 1986). This identity was defined by William Kelly (1986) as “a new, glossy projection of a socially and physically nuclear unit of ricewinner husband, homemaker housewife, and two samurai-student children; [the husband engaged in] full-time, lifetime, large-organization employment (sararīman) . . . and [the children in] mass public education, relentlessly meritocratic and entrance exam oriented,” linking home and work, child and adult (604). Although this was an ideal and not a reality, it

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became the image that most Japanese people strived toward until recently, whether urban or rural. Thus, for the men in Kelly’s study who came to take responsibility of their family farms in the 1970s, turning to mecha­ nized and scientific approaches to agriculture was the way to associate with “a dense network of fellow agricultural experts” and identify as the New Middle Class, different from their fathers’ class (Kelly 1986, 610). OISCA’s senior staff members were not part of this cohort, because they had left the villages and Japan before then; they belonged to the previous generation, even if they were closer in age to the younger men in Kelly’s ethnography. As such, they identified themselves, and others identified them, as “toiling bumpkins (hyakushō)” from “a ‘hicksville’ (inaka),” at the same time that they also embodied “the last reserve of noble virtues . . . the quaintness of farmhouses, the integrity of farm work, and the bonds of the village community” (Kelly 1986, 606). Whether they were noble farmers or country bumpkins, OISCA’s senior staff members represented and viewed themselves in terms of a prewar agrarian identity, seen to be lost in the supposed rise of the New Middle Class. From this positioning, senior staffers lamented the direction that Japa­ nese society had taken—too much mechanization, too much “Westerniza­ tion,” too little appreciation for what came before World War II—and saw the possibilities of an alternative future in developing countries in Asia. In an OISCA Magazine article from 1976, the author (a staff member) writes that development aid had not actually helped people in developing countries but, rather, had financed the elites in those countries. “But this might have been a blessing,” he argues, adding:

I do not intend to disparage mechanization or reject modernization, but we [the Japanese] have lost our farming villages, the furusato of the heart. . . . But luckily, in developing countries, the sense of furusato landscapes still exists, and so we must take care of this. OISCA’s development work is a “furusato movement” in developing countries. (OISCA 1976, 43)

Suggesting that the uneven development and ineffective delivery of aid in developing countries had the unintended positive effect of maintaining what the staffer imagined to be furusato rural landscapes in those places, he connected the loss of furusato in Japan with its recuperation elsewhere. It did not matter that landscapes in other countries looked different from the images of furusato in Japan or that human-nature relations in those places might vary. What mattered was the concept of furusato as an environment

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of human-nature coexistence and “traditional” agricultural lifestyles adher­ ing to ancestral values, regardless of cultural differences in what this would specifically look like. The sense of the loss of furusato in Japan, then, was directly linked to the impetus for doing development work in particular ways among OISCA’s senior Japanese staffers. Feeling disconnected from the “miracle” that was Japan’s economic growth, they looked to other Asian countries for alternative futures based on a longing for an idealized agrarian past. From as early as 1970, OISCA staff members lamented the loss of traditional rural lifestyles, the collapse of the institution of the family, the erosion of social relations, and the degradation of youth in Japan (C. Watanabe 2013). Such nostalgic discourses, scholars have pointed out, always already accompany every story of modernity (Boym 2001, xiv–xvi). Underlying Japan’s developmentalist momentum of the postwar years was an alterna­ tive narrative among those who mourned the end of a Japan before wartime defeat and Westernization and referred to idealized images of the (prewar) past as answers to their sense of alienation. OISCA’s senior staff members then looked to Asia as places where Japan’s idealized past could be found, where furusato landscapes could still be realized alongside progress, offer­ ing a path of balanced human-nature relations.2 It is not difficult to see a resonance between this hope for furusato- zukuri in places other than one’s own and what Richard H. Grove (1995) called green imperialism. As Grove and others have shown, colonialism played a critical role in shaping environmentalist discourses in imperial centers, as colonies were portrayed as Edens where the paradise of human- nature harmony could be realized on earth (see also Drayton 2000; Peck- ham 2015). Japanese colonial authorities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also implemented environmental policies such as reforestation that were simultaneously modern, scientific, and rational, as well as ro­ manticist, using the colonies to enact an identity of “the Japanese” as both modern and nature-loving (Komeie 2006; Morris-Suzuki 2013). The con­ ception of furusato as being lost in Japan but found in developing countries in Asia echoes this effort. The imagination and construction of a specific kind of landscape also recall Japan’s settler colonialism. I refer back to this imperial and colonial history in chapter 4, but to summarize briefly: Japan became a unified state in 1854, after it was forced by the US government to end its policy of isolationism, and in 1869 it annexed Ezo (Hokkaido) and forced its Ainu inhabitants to assimilate. Japan’s quest to become a modern state went hand in hand with an expansionist agenda (Duus 1995, 12). Ryuku Kingdom

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was next, becoming Okinawa in 1879, and similar policies of assimila­ tion and Japanization followed. Japan won the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, laying claim to Taiwan, Korea, and southern Sakhalin. In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria, and in 1937 it entered into the Second Sino-Japanese War. The migration and settlement of “hardy agrarian pioneers” to these colonies were an important part of the Japanese state’s strategy to create buffer zones against China and Tsarist Russia and expand the boundaries of “Japan” (Uchida 2011a, 9). Unlike colonialism or imperialism, settler colo­ nialism involves ordinary citizens making a foreign territory a permanent home and reorganizing the environment to “improve” it or, in this case, to Japanize it (Elkins and Pedersen 2005; Veracini 2014). At the same time that settlers remake places, they are also transformed by those environ­ ments and the people there; they are inevitably changed in their interac­ tions with the place (Veracini 2014, 624). In the case of Japan, moreover, although settlers had more privilege than the local population in places such as Korea, the Japanese central government devoted “considerable material and ideological resources to cultivating the interests and loyalties of potential indigenous collaborators” and fostered “an anti-Western Pan- Asian alliance” that differed from European settler colonialism (Elkins and Pedersen 2005, 6–7). This was part of an imagination of similarity and intimacy that underwrote Japanese imperialism in Asia. The furusato initiative in OISCA finds historical precedence in Japa­ nese settler colonialism’s efforts to “improve” whole landscapes around Asia through ideologies of collaboration and anti-Western alliance. When that is combined with the element of green imperialism that accompa­ nied settler colonies, such as the reforestation projects in colonial Korea (Morris-Suzuki 2013), the resonances are undeniable. Nevertheless, set­ tler projects such as those “undertaken by communities driven by shared religious or national convictions and searching for new homes” are not the same as settler colonialism, because the latter is supported by strate­ gies, political authority, and military and police presence from a central government in a way that the former are not (Elkins and Pedersen 2005, 4; Uchida 2011a). I would classify OISCA as a settler project, if at all, because despite its political connections, it is not formally under the authority of the government. Nor does it show force through the military or the police. Yet the imagination driving OISCA’s projects and some of its environmental, political, and social effects evoke settler colonialism and green imperial­ ism, with the training centers appearing as efforts to create Edens—furu- sato—in Japanese eyes. Is it unfair to connect OISCA’s training centers to

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the history of Japanese settler colonialism? Or are there affinities without attribution that we need to consider, especially given some of the senior Japanese staff members’ historical revisionist statements? I will return to similar questions in chapter 4.

Operationalizing Furusato-zukuri How did current OISCA staff members attempt to create furusato in the training centers? Although the concept had been around for many decades, when it came to operationalizing the vision, many staffers were confused. This was especially the case for the twenty or so younger staff members at the Tokyo headquarters who were in charge of the daily man­ agement of projects overseas. A meeting at the Tokyo headquarters that I attended illustrated the perplexity among younger staff members. In early 2010, staffers in Tokyo were making preparations to attend Rio+20. One of their tasks was to clarify the mission statement of furusato-zukuri as an organizational message for the world. This concept was to be announced at the international conference, but it was also an idea that staff members had to clarify for themselves. Nagata-san, one of the few mid-level non­ Ananaikyō staff members, was in charge of the overseas department, which managed the training centers and other projects outside Japan. He told me that the term furusato as it was used in OISCA did not refer to an image of the past. “It is about making something [tsukuru],” he explained, referring to the phrase furusato-zukuri. He distinguished this work from the nostalgic connotations of furusato in popular understandings. “But,” he stressed, “we need to come up with a clearer definition of furusato so that we can know better how to make furusato in concrete steps and activities.” I offered a few ideas based on anthropological work on furusato, but he did not seem convinced. A few months after this conversation, he organized a meeting with the young staffers from the overseas department and volunteers in the To­ kyo office to brainstorm around the concept of furusato-zukuri. Everyone in the overseas department was young, and no one was Ananaikyō. This meant that none of them had knowledge about how furusato-zukuri was conceptualized as an organizational mission. Nagata-san had once told me that because he was not an Ananaikyō member, he was often left out of important decision-making conversations and roles. Thus, he did not have access to the high-level discussions among Yoshiko, senior staffers, and the board of directors that led to the adoption of furusato-zukuri as part of the organizational charter. But now junior staffers in the Tokyo office were

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tasked with interpreting and transforming the vision of furusato-zukuri into implementable projects. Nagata-san was a man with a small frame and a gentle demeanor, with a way of speaking that was slow and deliberate, as if he were explaining things to a child. He also always had a slight smile on his lips. But he was not condescending. Rather, he seemed to want to make sure that everyone properly understood what he was saying. At the same time, his delivery did not detract from the fact that he was also a strong-willed leader, as the meeting showed. The staff members in the meeting were responsible for managing projects at the training centers around the Asia-Pacific, and the volunteers included a retired official from a governmental aid agency who came to the office once a week to offer his time and also served as an adviser to the organization. The dozen participants and I sat around a large table in one of the meeting rooms in the basement of the main office building. Nagata-san, chairing the meeting, asked everyone how we should proceed. He added that the purpose of the meeting was to figure out how to actualize the ideas of furusato-zukuri in the overseas projects. One of the staffers in his thir­ ties, Kobayashi-san, expressed a concern with the premise of the meeting: regardless of what was decided at the meeting, it was vital to examine how the practices already taking place in the projects overseas would connect with our abstract understandings of furusato in Tokyo. Nagata-san looked at Kobayashi-san and nodded in agreement, but he emphasized that the first step was to formulate a theory of furusato from headquarters. Kobayashi- san groaned, replying that the definition could come only after surveying the activities in OISCA’s various projects. Raising his voice slightly, Na­ gata-san stressed his point again. The argument continued for a while until other staffers intervened and managed to shelve the issue for the moment. With the initial disagreement set aside, one of the female staff mem­ bers suggested that we could begin by brainstorming what came to our minds when we thought of furusato. Everybody agreed, and we spent ten minutes in silence writing down keywords on Post-it notes. We proceeded to go around the table to present each of our terms on the notes, which one of the staff members stuck to a board at the front of the room. The notes went up on the board arbitrarily, without any form of organization, showing a random constellation of words and phrases:

farming village nature a place where traditional culture is alive a balance of material things and spirituality and culture

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Some ideas were repeated:

where people can live comfortably (sumiyasui tokoro) where we can live at ease (hotto shite seikatsu dekiru tokoro) where we can feel safe (anshinkan no aru tokoro) where we can be healed (iyashite kureru tokoro) where there are rich human relationships (kankei ga koi’i tokoro)

Looking at the board, one of the participants, the former aid official, com­ mented that it seemed that people thought of furusato in terms of their ev­ eryday frustrations and anxieties. He cautioned that furusato-zukuri should not be about creating a utopia that excludes current realities for the sake of an ideal. He stressed that it should be about efforts to live in already- existing environments, making use of the resources at hand. After a short silence, one of the newest staff members ventured softly that the idea of furusato did not quite resonate with her. Kobayashi-san agreed enthusiastically, and the earlier disagreement flared up again. He asked, “Are we trying to create whatever the headquarters office thinks is furusato? Shouldn’t our task be to create a link between the idea of furusato and the reforestation and hitozukuri projects that are already happening in our project sites and training centers?” He was concerned that the Tokyo office was going to impose its idea of furusato onto the overseas staff members. Nagata-san repeated that, indeed, headquarters staff had to first develop a definition in order to be able to communicate the idea to the overseas offices and request feedback in the form of case studies from the field. Kobayashi-san pushed his point further that the activities at the training centers and the input of staffers there had to be included in the theorization of furusato in the first instance, not relegated to case stud­ ies. They continued to argue. The discussion finally petered out, but the disagreement between the two men remained unresolved. Two things merit highlighting here. The most salient characteristics of furusato that emerged in this meeting were the emotional aspects of the concept—a place where one can feel at ease and safe. Although some people mentioned the importance of nature in this landscape, the words that came to most people’s minds were mainly affective conditions. It is not surprising, then, that this was what trainees took away from the term furusato when they learned it from the Japanese staff members. At one of the training centers in Japan, a Turkish trainee told me (in English), “I like what I am learning in OISCA. In addition to organic farming, OISCA is teaching us to make our furusato.”

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“Wow,” I exclaimed, “furusato is quite a Japanese concept. How did the Japanese staffers explain the idea to you?” She laughed. “It was hard, but it makes sense, you know. It is the home inside”— she pointed to her chest—“what you think and feel is home.” She understood the main message of the training course to be about working toward a sustainable future, which was not only about acquir­ ing skills in organic agriculture and communal lifestyles but also about cultivating a particular affective orientation. Furusato was something to be planted anew from the inside out. The disagreement between Kobayashi-san and Nagata-san is also important here. While the dispute was, on one level, about different un­ derstandings of the power relationship between headquarters and project sites, on another level it reflected the disjointed character of furusato as an imaginary and an actual place. The volunteer and former aid official had picked up on this distinction when he pointed out that we should not be thinking in terms of a utopian ideal. For him, it was important to figure out the practical steps necessary to make furusato out of an actual place, not simply to capture the affective connotations of the term. Writing about a very different but resonant context, historian Greg Grandin (2009) de­ scribes Henry Ford’s utopian settlement in the Amazon, Fordlandia, as an endeavor that was energized by the dissonance between Ford’s vision and the realities of the ecological, social, and historical place. I understand the story as a plot driven by efforts to close the gap between imaginaries and places. As Grandin puts it, Fordlandia embodied a vision in which a “frustrated idealism” was built into its very conception (15). Although Grandin describes this frustrated idealism as a quintessentially American ethos, it seems to me that the way disappointment—or the possibility of it—is integrated into hopes for a new world is more widely a utopian mo­ dality. Utopian undertakings are about the human effort that arises from the difficulty of discerning the links between the final vision and the steps to get there. What makes something utopian is not just the existence of a vision of an ideal place in the distant future but also the uncertainty that obscures the connection between the future vision and the current reality. In this sense, we can interpret the conflict between Kobayashi-san and Nagata-san as reflecting this dynamic in furusato-zukuri. They could not agree on how to relate the idea of furusato-zukuri with existing activi­ ties because the steps between the present and the future vision were not clear or predetermined. The difficulty of pinpointing the actual methods of furusato-zukuri in practice was precisely what gave OISCA actors’ work its meaning and utopian orientation.

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Living Furusato at the Myanmar Training Center I left the furusato-zukuri meeting as confused as the other staff mem­ bers. As I looked over my field notes that evening, I realized that a couple of months earlier Nagata-san had given me a hint on how to think about the concept. During an interview, I had asked him about the meaning of a common phrase that OISCA staff members used, “the OISCA spirit” (OISCA seishin). He replied:

In the end, the spirit of serving [hōshi suru] others is what’s important, and more than that, to be rooted in the soil and entangled in nature. Nature has rules, and we can learn from that. If we humans separate ourselves from that, the direction of how we should live will become more and more difficult to grasp.

He explained that furusato-zukuri captured the effort to communicate and materialize (gugenka) this vision in the form of a project. It was in this context that he understood the value of the training programs: “Seen from this perspective, the training programs are just the means [shuhō] to this [vision].” In light of this statement, it made more sense why Nagata-san had insisted on the demarcation of the roles between headquarters and the overseas projects. For him, the message of the goals of furusato-zukuri had to come from Tokyo, while the training centers would provide the means for actualizing this endeavor. But if in the meeting the younger staff members in Tokyo found the links between the vision of furusato and the means to get there unclear, Burmese aid workers in the Myanmar training center simply did not have a concept of a universal furusato or Mother Earth. The vision of the orga­ nization’s mission in the terms set by headquarters was invisible to them. But they did talk about the training center as a particular kind of furusato, using the Japanese term, and valued their labor in maintaining the place as such. When they created a small restaurant in the nearby village to cook and serve food using the training center’s agricultural produce, they named it Furusato. The training center was the means as well as the ends of furusato- zukuri for them. Nevertheless, just as the concept of furusato seemed slip­ pery to the Japanese staff members in Tokyo, the furusato landscape of the training center was not always guaranteed for the Burmese staff members. From the very beginning of the Myanmar project in 1996, physical labor constituted Burmese staff members’ experiences at the training cen­ ter. The center stands in Yesagyo Township, a rural region in the Dry Zone in central Myanmar. This semiarid place experiences frequent droughts

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and extreme heat during the dry season in April and May, making it one of the most difficult areas for agriculture. Farmers are dependent on rain from the monsoons that occur during mid-May to October, but the average annual rainfall is below 1,000 millimeters, even though other parts of the country receive 5,000 millimeters (Poe 2011, 4). The soil is claylike and hard, making for a high risk of water and wind erosion that negatively af­ fects agricultural production. Most households rely on casual wage labor, followed by farming; the prevalence of nonfarming households in the Dry Zone has been the case for at least a few decades (Takahashi 2000, 312). Migration to other parts of Myanmar and overseas is also common. Of the farming households surveyed in a study conducted in 2011, the majority relied on rain-fed cultivation of flatlands, and a little less than half engaged in wet paddy cultivation. Only 13 percent had access to irrigation (Poe 2011, 15). Most farmers grew pulses and sesame, and 38 percent grew rice (16). In Yesagyo Township, OISCA staffers and villagers told me that most farmers plant two crops a year: rice during the rainy season from June to September and pulses such as lentils or chickpeas from October to December. After that, they engage in casual wage labor or make and sell products from palm sugar (called jaggery) until the monsoon season starts again in or after mid-May. The Dry Zone overall has high levels of food insecurity and income poverty (Sibson 2014). Within the Dry Zone, Pakokku District, where Yesagyo Township is located, had the highest level of food insecurity and the poorest access to food in 2011 (Poe 2011, 24). A year after the establishment of the training center, the training programs began, running for eleven months from May through March. Every year, the Japanese director and the Burmese staffers in charge of trainings select ten boys and ten girls around the ages of eighteen to the mid-twenties from various regions in Myanmar. The basic criteria are that they must be young people whose parents are farmers and who have some experience doing agricultural work. The backgrounds of the trainees, and hence those of staff members, reflected OISCA’s close relationship with the government. The ethnic majority group in Myanmar is Burman and largely Theravada Buddhist, and members of this group occupy most of the positions in government. Of the more than 135 different ethnic groups said to inhabit the country, the seven largest, which constitute a third of the population and live along the mountainous and coastal borders, are the Chin, the Kachin, the Karenni (or Kayah), the Karen, the Mon, the Rakhine, and the Shan. The Chin, Kachin, Karenni, and Karen are mostly Christian, although some are Buddhist and animist, and the Mon, Rakhine, and Shan are mostly Buddhist. There are also ethnic groups that are unrecognized

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by the government, such as the Burmese Chinese, the Burmese Indians, and the Rohingya. The OISCA trainees I met were mostly ethnically Burman, and there­ fore Buddhist, but two or three were from ethnic minority areas such as Kachin State or Chin State and were Christian. From what staff members told me, there had never been a Muslim trainee, perhaps because recruit­ ment often happened through local government officials, who would most likely not have relationships with Muslim communities or be interested in promoting the training program to them. Staffers told me that the ethnic- religious makeup was generally the same every year. The recruitment of trainees happens mainly through the Myanmar Agriculture Service (MAS), which posts announcements at its regional offices or spreads the word through contacts. Oftentimes young people apply through family friends or neighbors in their village who recommend that they attend the training course. A few are from nearby villages. Most of the trainees tend to be from middle-income farming families who have some kind of connection to the government or to local leadership. Thus, in general, they are not landless or from marginalized communities, a focus that makes OISCA’s work in Myanmar different from that of other international NGOs. At the same time, because OISCA staffers in the training center are all former trainees, they also differ from Burmese staff at Euro-American and international organizations, who are English-speaking and tend to be highly educated. OISCA staffers might have some regional connections to MAS and gov­ ernment authorities, but they are rural and do not, for the most part, speak English, making them less upwardly mobile within the international aid community in Myanmar. As in the other OISCA training centers, the year-long training courses in Myanmar value the cultivation of “spiritual” (seishin) qualities that im­ prove the character of the person, such as a commitment to hard work. In many ways, since trainees already have a certain degree of knowledge about farming, in Myanmar as well as in OISCA’s other project sites, Japanese staff members tended to emphasize what they believed to be their unique contribution: teaching trainees a supposedly “Japanese” character based on discipline and collectivism. Therefore, the Myanmar training center staffers looked for trainees who showed promise not only in technical terms but also in other areas unrelated to agricultural skills. For example, one of the topics covered in the interviews with prospective trainees referred to the applicant’s ability to live and work in harmony with others (kyōchōsei). The young Japanese director, Sakurai-san, explained to me that the inter­ viewer usually tried to get at this through indirect questions, such as, “What

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would you do if a family member in your house was causing trouble for others?” Although trainees sat in the classroom for part of the mornings or afternoons to learn about farming techniques and other things such as the Japanese language, most of each day was spent doing shared agricultural work in the fields, cleaning, learning to be punctual for meetings and tasks, and engaging in other duties associated with communal living. Being able to adhere to these collective rhythms and forms of disciplinary life was an important goal of the training course in order to foster leaders of commu­ nity development, according to the Japanese director and Burmese staffers. Nevertheless, the training center was also a working farm, and train­ ees, alongside staffers, had to learn to cultivate and maintain the place, using particular organic methods. The beginning point was, as in most other OISCA training centers around the Asia-Pacific, rice cultivation. In the context of Myanmar, the emphasis made sense, given that the government had implemented policies and invested a great amount of resources into rice cultivation since the 1970s (Takahashi 2000). Despite the fall of rice production in the last few decades and the fact that fewer than half of farm­ ing households grew rice in the Dry Zone, rice is still the most cultivated and consumed crop in the country (Kyaw 2009; World Bank 2016, 20). Rice farming also correlates with food security for a rural household, in part because after several years of cultivating rice, farmers can maintain a high level of production almost indefinitely (Poe 2011, 16; Bray 1986, 28). From the perspective of Japan, the concern with growing rice in Myanmar also had historical significance. During the colonial era, Japanese state authorities instituted Burmese rice as “the food source of the empire” and hoped that Burma would provide rice to its other colonies in Southeast Asia (Kurasawa 1997, 135). The emphasis on rice in OISCA’s activities echoed the colonial-era policies of rice cultivation across Asia to support Japan and its expansionist ambitions, although that result was never achieved in reality (Francks 2015). In a more immediate sense, however, rice may have been the fo­ cus at the Myanmar training center because that was what the Japanese staff members knew from their farming experiences in Japan. When the project began in 1996, the first director, a man in his sixties at the time, Kawaguchi-san (director 1996–2008), was an expert farmer, but he was having problems producing rice. He consulted with another long-term di­ rector at one of the training centers in the Philippines, who recommended an indica variety that he had been cultivating in the Philippines. The latter sent some seeds to Kawaguchi-san, who grew it at the Myanmar center suc­ cessfully. Over the years, Kawaguchi-san and the Burmese staff members

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experimented with the variety. Ma Sanda, a senior Burmese staff member who had been at the center for almost a decade, explained to me that, at first, the rice was a bit sticky, like rice in Japan. “But people in Myanmar don’t like this kind of rice,” she told me. The staff worked on it so that it would suit Burmese people’s preferences better and they would be able to sell it. Recently, they had officially presented their variety of rice to state authorities in Nay Pyi Taw (the capital of Myanmar) and registered it as “Pakhan Golden Rice” (Pakhan Shwe Wa). This meant that the training center now had a state-sanctioned variety of rice whose seeds could be sold anywhere in the country. Over the years, agricultural operations and the training curricula had expanded from rice and vegetable cultivation to include sustainable poultry, quail, and pig farming, as well as food processing (for example, baking breads and sweets), which began as a project for women to learn new income-generating activities. As of 2011 the training center covered more than 18.5 acres (7.5 hectares), divided into two areas: one contain­ ing living quarters, a kitchen and dining hall, an office building, a larger second kitchen for food processing, a vegetable field, and poultry sheds; and the other, across the road, containing more than 9 acres (3.6 hectares) of rice paddies, additional vegetable fields, pig sheds, and a kindergarten for local children. Burmese staff members told me that Kawaguchi-san had introduced poultry and pig farming primarily to make organic bokashi fertilizer from the manure.3 But the livestock also helped increase income from the sale of eggs, quails, and piglets and, along with the sale of bokashi fertilizer, natural pesticides, and baked goods, enabled the training center to be self-sufficient—that is, the training center no longer needed money from the headquarters to operate. This self-sufficiency allowed Kawaguchi-san and Burmese staffers to be the decision makers for the center, rather than having the Tokyo headquarters and donors dictate what they could and could not do. In 2005, Kawaguchi-san decided to also undertake World Food Programme (WFP) projects, conducting Food for Work, Food for Training, and Food for Education projects through which staffers provided nearby villages with, respectively, work in infrastructural construction, training in agriculture and other topics, and incentives for children to attend school, all in exchange for the distribution of rice. Before starting the WFP projects, OISCA staffers rarely worked with villagers outside the training center. Now about half of the staff members were involved in the WFP projects, delivering training courses lasting a few days to a few weeks. The topics of these courses were mainly about organic agricultural methods, but they also included curricula on environmental

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education, hygiene and sanitation, and reproductive rights. The agricultural courses included lessons on the importance of planting seedlings at appro­ priate intervals so as not to overcrowd them, how to make bokashi fertilizer using soil and available material in villages, and specific methods such as the Dapog method.4 In general, farmers in Myanmar use chemical fertil­ izers to a certain extent but not organic fertilizers (compost, manure, farm residues), even though the agricultural land in the country would benefit from the input of organic matter (World Bank 2016, 32). The bokashi fertil­ izer that OISCA staffers developed and promoted among villagers would help enrich the soil. In fact, the soil at the Myanmar training center had been high in alkaline, which is characteristic of the clay soil in the region and is troublesome for plants. In the center’s initial attempts at farming, most of the plants died. Over the years, with the addition of organic fertil­ izers, the soil had improved. In principle, the importance of using organic methods in OISCA rested on the ideologies of “Shinto” environmentalism and the teachings of Yonosuke to “live in harmony with nature,” rather than on agricultural productivity. Productivity, however, was a crucial element in the uptake of the methods that OISCA staffers taught villagers. One day in November 2010, I accompanied a Burmese staffer, Ko Hlaing, to a village to follow up on some of the farmers who had participated in an agricultural Food for Training course a few months earlier. We visited a household where the father had put to practice what he had learned from OISCA. He was the only one from the village who had done so. The family had been making bokashi fertilizer, and they were in the process of making it for the third time. We arrived to the house soon after some heavy rains. The family had two dwelling structures made of bamboo, wood, and palm leaves, as well as another covered area where they were making jaggery products from palm sugar. The structures stood amidst tall trees, making it seem as if we were deep in a forest, an uncharacteristic setting in this region. The man who had attended the training course was not at home, but his wife and daughter greeted us. After some introductions, the woman told Ko Hlaing that the bokashi had gotten wet from the recent rains, and she wanted him to check on it. We walked over to the mound that was in the middle of a clearing, and Ko Hlaing bent down to touch the mixture. It was indeed wet, and he saw that the cow manure stored nearby was also wet. He told the woman that they should try to keep at least the manure dry, if not the bokashi mixture as well. The woman then took us to the family’s paddy, a few minutes’ walk through other people’s muddy paddies. Ko Hlaing inspected the rice plants

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carefully, taking the seeds in his palms. He told me, in Japanese, that the woman had been against the idea of using OISCA’s methods at first. She wanted her husband to simply use the same approaches as everyone else in the village and did not want to invest in new ways. But the man had seen OISCA’s training center and believed in the methods that he learned in the Food for Training course. In the end, they decided to test OISCA’s methods on one of the seven acres they owned. Their neighbors made fun of them for it, and they even had quarrels. But now that the rice plants had grown, it was clear that they were stronger and bigger than those of their neighbors’ paddies. Apparently, other villagers were now interested in trying OISCA’s methods. Ko Hlaing switched to Burmese and explained that this family’s paddy also seemed to have fewer insects than the other paddies around it. The woman added that the only issue they had was the availability of water, a challenge for many farmers in the region (Poe 2011). I asked her about costs, and she explained that they shared the paddy with thirteen other people, mostly family members. The labor cost for transplanting seedlings was now about 750 kyats (US$0.75) per person, whereas before it had been 1,300 kyats (US$1.30). She explained that the labor cost was lower now because they used the cost-effective Dapog method, which her husband had also learned from OISCA. The Dapog method was introduced to the Myanmar training center by Kawaguchi-san, who had been the director of one of the training centers in the Philippines. The Dapog method is a traditional method used by farmers in the Philippines. At the Myanmar training center, Kawaguchi-san had adapted it, using a vinyl sheet on which he laid down bark from banana trees, newspapers, and other everyday items, followed by a layer of soil, bokashi, and ash, on which rice seeds would be sown. Covered with another layer of soil and ash, then watered regularly, this planting bed would pro­ duce seedlings in about eighteen days and could then be rolled up, carried to the paddies, and transplanted in its entirety. Although most farmers who grew rice during the monsoon season, as they did in Yesagyo Township, already transplanted seedlings (World Bank 2016, 31), the Dapog method required less area, seed, and water than ordinary nursery methods, the cost of uprooting was minimal because the seedling beds could be lifted up in one go, the roots were rarely damaged in the process, and, in OISCA, wider spacing during transplantation led to healthier plants (JICA 2010, 270–271; IRRI 2007). The woman had attributed the decreased costs and increased productivity on her household’s farm to these changes. We returned to the woman’s house and talked some more over tea and snacks. She wanted to buy more of OISCA’s natural insecticides, including

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one using rice vinegar and milk and another type using cinnamon and licorice. The family sprayed these on the seedlings before transplanting them. I asked about the costs of buying these insecticides from OISCA. Ko Hlaing explained that the family probably spent about 5,000 kyats (US$5) in total on insecticides. The woman stated that OISCA’s methods were not costing much. “The chemical stuff is more expensive,” Ko Hlaing added. One bottle of chemical insecticide would cost about 5,000 kyats, and they would need two to three bottles per acre. The organic agricultural methods that OISCA’s staffers taught and pro­ moted were, therefore, not only in line with Yonosuke’s teachings but also cost-effective and increased production. The work in villages that began in 2005 with the WFP projects provided evidence of the benefits of OISCA’s methods, and this added to Burmese staff members’ sense of commitment to the training center. As several of them told me, they felt “like a family” be­ cause they shared a belief in OISCA’s approaches and in the work they did to improve people’s lives in nearby villages. One staff member who came from the Ayeyarwady Region in southern Myanmar told me that people in Yesagyo Township seemed very poor in comparison with people in his home region and that he wanted to improve their lives. Helping increase their agricultural productivity, while protecting the environment through organic and sustainable methods, was a meaningful way for him to do that. Senior staffers, men in their early thirties who had been at the training center almost since its establishment as trainees and then as staff members, told me that there was nothing in the area when they first arrived. No trees or large agricultural fields. The soil proved dry and hard, and nothing grew. But they toiled away, driven by Kawaguchi-san’s conviction that rice could be cultivated there and, what is more, using organic methods. During an interview, one of the Burmese staffers, Ko Win, pointed to a tree standing next to the office building and told me that when he first arrived as a trainee in 1998, it was the only tree in the area. Now it stood surrounded by more trees and bushes. Other staff members who experienced the first couple of years of the training center also told me that the place had been envi­ ronmentally harsh. Their work consisted mainly of trying to transform the claylike soil into something usable for agriculture—a challenge that the UN Development Programme official who led the original trip to find a project site had thought impossible. The director at the time, Kawaguchi-san, also worked the fields alongside the trainees and staffers, everyone struggling in difficult conditions without a definite end point in sight. It was hard to imagine a barren landscape from where I stood—thir­ teen years later the training center and its surroundings were vibrant with

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trees, expansive rice paddies, and a growing community of OISCA trainees, staffers, and even some of their families. It was an environment that Ko Win and other Burmese aid workers proudly called furusato (in Japanese). People talked about the place in terms of individual and collective memo­ ries, feelings of belonging, and promises of a transformative future. The productive outcomes of the agricultural methods that they learned, used, and taught confirmed the sense that they were making a difference. Staff members and trainees spent months and years working the soil and tending to the rice plants, vegetable fields, and animals whose by-products were circulated back into the ecology of the training center. We would eat the eggs that the chickens produced, and their droppings would go into the organic bokashi fertilizer for rice and vegetable cultivation. During my time there, trainees and staff members spent hours tending to pregnant pigs, gently rubbing their stomachs to ease the birth of half a dozen new lives. The condition of the pigs mattered for rice cultivation as well, because the animals’ manure was used in the fertilizer. When I arrived in 2010, the training center was led by a new director, Sakurai-san, a man in his early thirties, and supported by more than forty Burmese staff members (full-time and in training). Only a handful of the senior staffers led the lessons for trainees; the others carried out the WFP projects by delivering the short-term training courses and helped with the various agricultural tasks around the center. As I had learned from Japanese and other staffers in OISCA, organic methods require intensive labor. There was always work to be done at the Myanmar training center. In addition to the staff at the center, another Japanese employee and a couple of Burmese staff members were in Yangon at the time of my research. They were in charge of finances and other administrative duties related to communica­ tions with the Tokyo headquarters and organizing visitors from Japan. Of the Burmese staff members at the training center, Ko Win was one of the most seasoned. Like the other staffers, he was a former trainee. He then spent a year in training as a staffer at the Myanmar center and a second year at a training center in Japan before returning to Myanmar as a full-time staff member. He had been in the second batch of trainees twelve years earlier, alongside a couple of the other senior Burmese staffers. This group of men had therefore spent most, if not all, of their twenties living together at the center. Ko Win now served as one of the leading training instructors, and trainees and other staff members alike held great respect for his knowledge as well as for his calm and dignified demeanor. Ahandsome man of few words, he had the innate ability to put others around him at ease. He had

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begun to carry his weight around his waist, and the roundness added to his affability. One day as we sat in the shade during a break from mak­ ing bokashi fertilizer, I asked him how he had become a trainee. Echoing several other former and current trainees’ experiences, he explained that his father was a farmer who had acquaintances at the local MAS office. These officials had suggested that he send one of his sons, Ko Win, to this Japanese agricultural training center to study new farming techniques. So Ko Win had ended up at the center in 1998 to join the second group of OISCA trainees. “Although I was interested in rice cultivation since I was young,” Ko Win told me, “I was not really interested in agriculture in general.” At first,he simply wanted to go home. He had never lived away from his parents and he was homesick. His experience surprised me, given that I did not associate him with such feelings of vulnerability. It occurred to me that many of the current trainees, rural youths in their late teens and early twenties, must also feel this way. After all, they too were young men and women generally from rural areas who had never lived far from home. But within a few months Ko Win adapted to life at the training center. “Now it is like a furusato for me,” he said, using the Japanese term. He married another trainee from the same cohort, and they were rais­ ing a child at the training center, a boy six years old at the time of our conversation. Given the amount of work required at the center, Ko Win and his wife went back to their respective villages only once a year, or at most twice. The boy had grown up in the center, surrounded by trainees and other staff members, following the same daily rhythms as everybody else. For Ko Win’s son, the center was the only home he knew. Ko Win’s life showed that the training center was not only a place where many of the staff members had spent their formative years but also a home where they raised families. I could understand how it became a furusato for many of them—a place that they had themselves cultivated into an ecologically rich environment and had invested with emotional and social attachments. I was curious to hear not only Ko Win but also other staffers use the Japanese word furusato to talk about the training center, rather than any other Burmese equivalent. The word seemed to capture for them a sense of belonging to a place where they lived in proximity to others, like family, and engaged together in agricultural labor, with neither the necessity nor the exclusion of blood ties. But the training center did not necessarily have an eternal hold on people. Despite the ubiquity of talk about their shared sense of belonging and commitment, Burmese staffers also had dreams pulling them in other

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directions. Some of them spoke about responsibilities outside the training center, such as the need to take care of their aging parents. Others, such as Ko Win, caught me by surprise, confessing that one day he would have to leave the center for the future of his nuclear family. He wanted to go home—the home of his birth—to send his son to a better school than what the village near the training center could offer. A few years later I heard that, sure enough, Ko Win had returned to his home village. In some ways, if former trainees and staff members such as Ko Win went home to disseminate the message of furusato-zukuri around organic and sustainable agriculture and the ethos of collective living, staffers in Tokyo such as Nagata-san might say that the organizational mission had been realized. But those who left OISCA had never been able to implement a lasting and widespread project of furusato-zukuri in their home villages. A number of them managed to continue sustainable agricultural practices and even influence their families and other villagers to follow suit, but these initiatives had never transformed into a larger movement. Despite his skills, Ko Win was no exception. In the end, to expect young people in their late teens, early twenties, or even early thirties, such as Ko Win, to start community development or agricultural activities and thereby create whole furusato landscapes on their own proved unrealistic. It was also untenable that staff members would remain at the centers forever, even if they described the place as their furusato. Ko Win and his wife wanted the best for their son, and they could not find that in what the training center promised them. I also had many conversations with the female staff members in their mid- and late twenties who believed in the work that they were doing but also dreamed of meeting a dashing young urbanite, swept away in love. Just as young people in all furusato—rural places of “traditional” life, according to idealized definitions—often leave for better economic and other opportunities, OISCA trainees and staffers did not have an unending attachment to the training center. Life in OISCA offered stability and meaningfulness in many respects, but people at the centers searched for other life goals as well. A few years before Ko Win left OISCA with his wife and child, he said to me:

I want the center to continue for many years, for a hundred years. Be­ cause if the center exists, we can continue to help people in surrounding villages. For that, we need good staff—people who will work hard and think about others. If not, this center will fail after Japanese people leave. It would be like when parents pass away and the children divide up the parents’ heritage. OISCA will break up like that if we do not work hard.

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I do not see his eventual leaving as a betrayal of his own sentiment. On the contrary, the fragility of the training center as a cohesive and stable furusato, and the constant labor that this uncertainty produced, fueled the utopian orientation of the staff members’ activities. I say this because Ko Win often talked to me about both his commit­ ment to OISCA and his vacillations about leaving or staying in the same conversations. His thoughts of leaving the training center might point to a crack in his sense of belonging there or suggest that furusato in his view did not mean an unchanging and originary home. But the uncertainty was not in contrast to the commitment and feeling of oneness with the oth­ ers in the training center; they coexisted. The questioning of his life at OISCA did eventually lead Ko Win to leave the organization and return to his birthplace, but not because his sense of belonging in OISCA had dis­ solved. If the disconnect between the means and ends of furusato-zukuri had agitated some of the staff members in Tokyo, it was the balancing act between a commitment to OISCA and other aspirations that preoccupied people such as Ko Win. It was in these negotiations between different futures and in the uncertainties between the now and what is to come that people reconsidered and reaffirmed their commitment to OISCA and the world that it promised. The disconnect between a final vision and present activities, and the labor that an existing furusato demanded, defined furusato-zukuri. This was a work that raised more questions than answers. How was one to get to a universal furusato from the everyday activities in the training centers? How could a training center as a furusato continue as a homeplace for people if they kept leaving? How and to what extent did the mission of furusato-zukuri and its manifestation in the building of training centers as collectivities relate to the “Shinto” environmentalist vision of living in har­ mony with nature? What do we make of the rift between such environmen­ tal imaginations, which seem absent in people’s everyday consciousness, and the salience of agricultural productivity? These were questions that were never answered. Having no answers might suggest that the activities in OISCA largely failed because they did not meet their stated goals of creating a universal furusato, nor did they lead to trainees establishing successful community development projects. “Shinto” environmentalism as such also seemed absent in the daily tasks of agricultural work. But the struggles to make sense of and maintain the organizational vision were not failures but an incompleteness that was generative of the aspirational quality of OISCA’s visions. The disagreements over how to translate furusato-zukuri into practice and the labor of staying committed

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to the furusato of the training centers attested that furusato was always already lost but also yet to come. The training centers might have been a kind of prototype furusato, but they were also suspended in process, not quite stabilized as an accomplishment. The vision of “Shinto” environmen­ talism was also invisible in the day-to-day activities in the Myanmar and other training centers, the majority of staffers and trainees ignorant even of Yonosuke’s teachings around the Great Spirit of the Universe. But the labor of making a furusato, always incomplete and fragmented, was what gave ethical value to aid work in OISCA.

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ovember in Yesagyo Township should not have been a hot time of year. And yet I woke up drenched in sweat None morning. I looked at the small clock ticking by my head, and the time was barely five o’clock. I strained to see in the dark. I heard murmurs and rustling coming from outside my window. It was my last week at the OISCA training center in Myanmar. I slid out of the stiff bed and reached for my clothes. Navy blue jersey trousers and a sturdy white T-shirt with the word “OISCA” on the back—a thoroughly familiar uniform by this point from my months at the training centers in Myanmar and Japan. I put it on, thinking as always that the material was too thick for this climate, and tiptoed down the corridor to the common room. I was staying in the Japanese staff quarters, and this meant that only Sakurai-san and I slept in this wooden building. Sakurai-san had not come out yet, but I could hear him moving around in his room, adjacent to the common room. The front door was always open, and I could make out shadows of people passing by. I heard a water tap turn on outside. As I had done every morning for the past few months, I took the rag hanging from the side of a bucket in the hallway and got down on my knees to clean the bathroom. After the morning roll-call routines in the courtyard, we had a twenty- minute break—a respite that still felt like a luxury in comparison with the even more rigid schedule I had experienced at the training centers in Japan. I changed into one of my regular breezy shirts and wrapped one of the longyi (a type of wraparound skirt) around my waist. It was a relief to get out of the jersey pants and feel the cool texture of the cotton cloth flutter around my legs. Someone struck the gong a couple of times. Staffers and trainees made their way across the courtyard to the dining hall, several of them linking arms, a few others singing songs. The forty Burmese staff members, the twenty trainees, Sakurai-san, and I crowded into the dining room and sat around the long tables. I made my way to the benches where

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the young female staffers were sitting. The staff members and trainees in charge of cooking for the day hurried to finish placing the mountains of rice, bowls of soup, and small plates of cooked vegetables from the fields on the tables. Once everyone was seated, a Burmese staff member yelled in Japanese, “Put your hands together!” (Te wo awasete!). With our palms touching, we responded in unison, “Itadakimasu!”1 Then chatter filled the room. Everyone piled their plates with rice and a modest serving of the vegetables. We were eating quickly so that we could maximize the break between breakfast and the morning activities. We finished our food and crowded around the sink in the kitchen to wash our plates. The communal sharing of these everyday tasks was the same as in the canteens I had seen at the training centers in Japan and the Tokyo office. When the short break was over, I went to the office to see what I should do. Sakurai-san told me that, on that day, everyone was helping out with the rice harvest. I was delighted to hear this. When I first arrived, the rice seedlings had just been planted and the paddies were barely green. Seeing the fields turn a lush hue over the months and then become a sea of pale gold, I had been looking forward to harvest season. I walked over to the paddies with a couple of the staffers. Everyone was cheerful. I could see staffers, trainees, and some women from the village helping out. After some strong winds and heavy rains in the last couple of days, the rice plants were all a mess. The heads of rice seed drooped down heavily this way and that, some of them plastered almost completely against the earth. One of the male staff members, Ko Win, motioned for me to crouch down closer to the ground. Seizing a big handful of rice plants, he showed me how to cut them with a sickle. The blade sliced through the stems, and he put down the cut handful as if laying it down to sleep. The beads of rice seed rustled against each other as he did this. As he repeated this process several times, his arms moved swiftly in an elegant arc, effortlessly. He finished the neatly stacked pile by tying a few rice plants around it, mak­ ing a bundle. Handing me his sickle, he told me that it was time for me try. So I took over, cutting through the rice stems and trying to stack them together. It was not as easy as it looked. The straws in my pile stuck out in different directions. I told Ko Win that his pile was much nicer than mine. “It comes from years of practice,” he said to comfort me. I supposed that he had been doing this work since childhood. We worked in silence, and eventually even the villagers who had been singing became quiet. As we waded through the paddies, the messy field transformed into neat rows of bundled straw. I kept wiping my forehead with the towel around my neck; I could feel my shirt sticking to my back. “I am so tired!” exclaimed one

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of the staffers. People grunted and chuckled in agreement. I stood up to stretch my legs. I was shaking. It was not even lunchtime yet. Bending down became increasingly difficult, and I could not stop my muscles from trembling as I moved. I was also itchy and kept scratching myself. The heat, the sweat, and the manual labor were not friendly to my sensitive skin. The women around me pointed to the bumps on my arms and asked in Burmese, “Did you break out in a heat rash?” (Meik pauk th lā?). They told me that Burmese people get them too and that applying thanakha (a paste made from ground tree bark) would help. One of them promised to put some on me after work. I could not wait.

The Gemba (“The Field”) When I asked Burmese staff members and trainees why they liked OISCA, a common refrain was, “Because we don’t have any divisions among us” (Āloūn hkwai chā ma shị lọ). Living and working together in the fields fostered this sense of oneness. Staff members and trainees alike often commented that even Sakurai-san participated in the communal cleaning and work. The mud and the sweat signaled this ethos, and despite the discomfort of the itchy bumps on my skin, these visible side effects of labor helped me feel connected to the others at the training center. But the sense of oneness did not indicate an untroubled and seamless connection for the participants of the training center. Neither did it exclude hierarchies and unequal relations. In one instance, two Burmese male staff­ ers got into a fight and one of them hit the other. Staffers later told me that friction had been building up between them for weeks, exacerbated by their sharing the same sleeping quarters and working on the same activities. The tension from not being able to get away from each other had escalated to a physical altercation. The use of violence upset everyone, and senior staff members brought the two young men to Sakurai-san. I happened to be pass­ ing by the Japanese quarters’ common room when they came to him. The two sat stiffly on the bench while Sakurai-san looked at them severely from across the coffee table. He gave them a long speech about the importance of living together peacefully and resolving conflicts without the use of fists. He talked to them in Japanese; who knows how much of it the two staffers understood, but they seemed to grasp the gist of the message and responded from time to time in halting Japanese.2 After they left, Sakurai-san told me that an important aspect of his job was to deal with such scuffles between people. This was not the first fight he had mediated.

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“The training center,” he explained, “is not just a place that teaches skills but also a place that nurtures people [hito wo sodateru].” This work of nurturing people who know how to live in harmony with the community involved repeated and often tedious efforts. One could not expect results in the first attempt. “But it is through such instances of fights and conflicts that the people in the field [gemba] of aid can teach trainees about OISCA,” he said. According to Sakurai-san, it was in such messy situations that staffers could teach trainees about character, discipline, and the value of not only achieving but striving to create a harmonious collectivity. In this chapter, I examine the central ethic of what I call muddy la­ bor in OISCA: the virtue of immersing oneself in the literal muddiness of physical labor and in the metaphorical messiness of intimate relationships in collectivist settings. I begin with labor and end with history because the muddiness of the labor derived its value from particular historical conflu­ ences. I take the phrase “muddy labor” from the term that many of the Japa­ nese staff members used to describe their approach: dorokusai (smelling like mud). The entanglement in the material and relational muddiness of communal living entailed both personal and collective forms of intimacy, and the recognition of both an individual’s inner self and the intimacies that come from collective interests, all in the service of becoming one.3 Muddy labor was a central method in becoming one across cultural, national, and interpersonal boundaries. To understand the logic and effects of this ethic, I make comparisons with other allied phenomena—humanitarianism and faith-based development. The work of “making persons” in OISCA is mul­ tivalent, and its significance differs, depending on the framing used. By specifically tracing the similarities and differences with humanitarianism and faith-based work, I highlight the implications that the ethic of muddy labor had on the kinds of moral imaginations underlying OISCA’s projects and other Japanese aid initiatives—namely, the non-problematization of differences and a history of what I call intimate imperialism. To understand the imagination of becoming one promoted in OISCA, we first ne ed to look at the idea of “the field” ( gemba) in Japanese discourses of aid. As Sakurai-san’s statement above indicates, relational struggles in the field were integral to the making of persons, both of staffers and of trainees. Other staff members echoed this understanding. During one of my visits at a training center in Japan, a senior Japanese staffer told me that young staff members needed to first experience the field of aid, whether at a training center in Japan or overseas, because there was something

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to be gained in struggling amid the “muddiness” (dorodoro) of human relationships. Working in the Tokyo office would not do. He stressed that the “something” to be gained could not be explained in words and could be understood only through bodily practice and experiences over time in the challenges of the field. This emphasis on “the field” in OISCA resonated with wider Japanese understandings of how aid work should be conducted through intimate relationships. A general view among development practitioners in Japan is that they might not be skilled at communicating verbally or writing reports, but that they work closely with aid recipients and counterparts in the field, sharing “tacit skills, knowledge, and attitude in addition to explicit ones” (Kato 2016, 11–12). I observed a similar discourse in June 2010 when I visited one of the training centers of the Japanese Overseas Cooperation Volunteers (JOCV), the Japanese government’s version of the US Peace Corps, where Japanese volunteers were preparing for their assignments overseas. JOCV was established in 1965 in the image of the American program, with the aim to foster friendly cross-cultural relations and culti­ vate a global outlook among Japanese youths, as much as to initiate local development efforts (Ban 1978; Toba 1985). Three hours on a train from Tokyo and a short taxi ride took me to the doorstep of this training facility, reminiscent of OISCA’s training centers. The white and nondescript build­ ing was divided into classrooms where future volunteers studied topics such as international development, hygiene, and the languages they would need at their volunteer sites. I happened to arrive in time for their morning routines. The young men and women leisurely filed out to the courtyard in front of the building and stood in rows, facing three flagpoles. “In rows” might be an overstate­ ment—trainees scattered here and there in halfhearted attempts to line up. A couple of staff members stood by the flagpoles. After singing the Japanese national anthem and saluting the Japanese flag, which stood alongside the JOCV flag and a flag from one of the countries where volunteers would be sent, everyone turned, at his or her own pace, to face the building. Again, we scattered about in what seemed to be a haphazard formation. I imagined how OISCA staffers and trainees would gasp in horror if they saw this dis­ orderly scene. Chuckling at this thought, I followed the others in the rajio taisō (radio exercises). The floppy arms and sleepy movements differed, once more, from the morning routines I had experienced at OISCA. One of the JOCV staffers explained to me later that the strict routines of the training courses had been modified over the years, as disciplinary practices

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became increasingly unpopular in Japan, especially among young people. The shared bedrooms had also gradually changed into individual rooms for each volunteer. On my second day at the JOCV training center, a JICA official came from Tokyo to give a speech to the prospective volunteers. About two hundred people assembled in the auditorium, the trainees sitting in chairs and the staff members standing in the back. The JICA official stood at a podium on an elevated stage in front of us. He had prepared a PowerPoint presentation that was projected onto a large screen behind him. “What is a volunteer?” he asked rhetorically. “To be a volunteer is to take initiative in doing things.” Quoting JOCV’s foundational concept, he added, “But another definition is the effort to ‘become one with the local people’ [jūmin to ittai to naru]” (see also Ban 1978). Using the term ittai, literally meaning “one body,” he highlighted the importance of forging oneness with aid recipients. He explained that the work of a volunteer is not simply a job but something that demands an everyday commitment. Volunteers should also work from the same perspective as the persons in their host country and with respect for their culture. He added that an important element in this work was the power of human emotions. Becom­ ing one with local communities meant sharing emotions with them—the whole range of happiness, anger, sadness, and joy (kidoairaku) that makes us human. He stressed that this was an important ability that the young Japanese volunteers should cultivate. However, if the principle of “becoming one” pointed to an ethos of solidarity, what came next in the speech took on a different tone. A slide ap­ peared: “What does ‘developing country’ mean?” Another slide followed: “Inconvenience, difference in values, that people in such countries will most likely fail to keep promises and always be late to appointments.” The JICA official had written on another slide: “These are the reasons why de­ veloping countries are developing countries, and if they could be different on their own, then they would have been a developed country by now.” He concluded, “It is important to take a step back and see things from a wider perspective, which is what makes you [the Japanese volunteers], different from them [local people].” The official emphasized the importance of becoming one with aid recipients, but in the same breath he spoke unequivocally about the supe­ riority of Japanese people in these relations. He implied that non-Japanese people inherently did not have the proper work ethic and that living and working with Japanese volunteers and aid workers would help local people learn, by emulation, the necessary dispositions to develop themselves and

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their countries. At first glance, it might seem that the coexistence of the two messages of oneness and Japanese superiority were contradictory or that the language of “becoming one” simply masked the reality of a hierarchical worldview. But what OISCA and other Japanese aid actors showed is that the two aspects of the JICA official’s presentation were not contradictions at all. The conceptualization of the field in aid work as a locus of the moral imagination of hitozukuri aid revolved precisely around the inseparability of oneness and inequality, an imagination with historical resonances in the context of Japanese aid in Asia.

Labor in the Field A young Japanese staff member at one of the training centers in Ja­ pan wrote in an OISCA Magazine article that there was no manual for making persons in OISCA. The “textbooks” for the hitozukuri of trainees and staffers were the visceral experiences of being “tossed about by the mess and challenges of the field [gemba de momarete]” (Shibata 2006). He explained that in his first year as a staff member at the center, he did not know anything and simply followed his elders, doing his best to keep up. In his second year, he was transferred to another training center in Japan. He described this second year as “an unforgettable year of failures.” He had no experience teaching agriculture to the trainees who came from all over the world, and felt that he barely had enough knowledge about organic farming. Trainees made fun of him: “You are just a teacher who gives out rules without any knowledge.” “You are not a teacher.” His vegetable crops also failed. But he worked as hard as he could, and at the end of the year, the trainees who had complained about him cried and told him, “Thank you very much, teacher.” He explained that, with just those simple words, the suffering of that year evaporated. He was filled with a sense of gratitude to the trainees for the richness of their shared experiences, and a feeling of regret for not having been able to teach them properly. Although years had gone by, he still carried these lessons that he learned in the first years: “I enter the emotional world of the trainees, at the same time that I pull the trainees into myself, and it is with the buildup of such give-and-take, shar­ ing sufferings and joys together, laughing, and getting angry, that relations of trust can be built” (Shibata 2006, 19). The making of such intimate and intense relations and the struggles within them in the messiness of “the field” defined hitozukuri work for this staff member. The “doctrine of field practice” (gemba jissen shugi), as Yoshiko de­ scribed the approach of OISCA staffers, indicated both the importance of

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manual labor in the agricultural fields and the value of sweating alongside local people (Nakano Yoshiko 1991, 156). What mattered in OISCA was a commitment not only to labor but also to collective forms of physical labor that would diminish the distance between people. The focus on enhancing people’s agricultural and managerial skills rather than investing in machin­ ery is characteristic of the “Japanese model” of agricultural development (Bray 1986, 155). The emphasis on labor and repetitive action in self- cultivation efforts, despite confusions and resistance, is also reminiscent of other training activities in Japan, from those in educational settings and corporate environments to religious practices (Kondo 1990; Rohlen 1974; Schattschneider 2003). In OISCA, staff members sought to fundamentally transform people through shared hard work. In many ways, the approach and process of this work—the how of the action—were what mattered most, more than the ultimate goal of creating the desired and ideal person and bringing about a sustainable world. As in many other examples of self- cultivation around the world, the means and the ends were indistinguishable in the efforts to become ethical subjects (e.g., Lambek 2010; Mahmood 2005). This was an ethic that arose from the daily agricultural tasks and training activities, but it was also reinforced during periodic emergency situations when a commitment to collective well-being became paramount. On October 23, 2010, Cyclone Giri hit the western coast of Myanmar. Although the OISCA training center in Myanmar was about two hundred miles from the eye of the storm, heavy rains and strong gusts swept across the region. By midday the rains had subsided, but winds continued to rip through the area, knocking down a tree behind the office building. As we stood by the windows, a staff member came running into the room to relay the rumor circulating in the village: the dam upstream from us was about to break. People gasped. Someone told me that a few years earlier the dam had cracked, flooding the training center and damaging tons of rice stored for the World Food Programme. Sakurai-san feared a repetition of this disaster. As soon as he heard the rumor, he called on all staff and trainees to prepare for the possibly imminent flood. I noticed that the women had gone to the other side of the courtyard to shovel sand onto a tractor. I quickly joined them. Most of the time in OISCA, neither staffers nor trainees told others what to do, and this case was no different. People were expected to notice what was needed and to take initiative. I looked around anxiously to figure out how I could help. Seeing one of the staff briefly stop her task, I quickly picked up her shovel and took over the job of hauling sand onto the tractor.

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Moments later, I saw that some people had gone inside one of the storage houses to start packing bags with corn. There were two rooms, about thirty by forty feet, filled with loose kernels of corn that were piled chest-high on the ground. We were to put all the corn in bags and move them to a higher position to protect them from floodwater. More staff and trainees joined us, and we split up the various tasks of bagging, shoveling, sealing, and hauling. The bags could hold fifty-five pounds each, which meant that I could not lift them once they were full. So I helped hold the bags open or put the corn inside. These tasks were also challenging, as the continuous crouching and bending strained my joints. Once in a while I glanced up to see that the mountains of corn looked the same, no matter how many bags we filled. I had to fight the urge to stop; everybody else was moving at least double my speed, including Sakurai-san. It felt endless. The dust was starting to become unbearable, weighing down our breath, leaving all of us wheezing and coughing. Some of the men had wrapped their shirts around their faces. Finally, three hours into the labor, all the corn had been bagged and stacked securely from floor to ceiling in one of the adjacent rooms. It was dark outside, and the rain had started again. After washing up, we dragged ourselves to the dining hall for a very late meal. The large flood never came. But the stream nearby did overflow, and water surrounded the pig sheds for a couple of days. The morning after the storm, we all went to see the damage, and staffers and trainees waded through the muddy water to save the animals from the flooded sheds. Aside from the help given these pigs, our flood preparations turned out to be unnecessary in the end. Nevertheless, the collective effort and our shared literal muddiness seemed to have strengthened our sense of solidarity at the training center. From our perspective downstream from the dam, the crisis on the horizon, not yet arrived, seemed unpredictable. We were un­ certain what actions would ultimately help us, but all of us having exerted ourselves in labor while anticipating the worst had bound us in a sense of mutual commitment. Shared muddy labor created a sense of intimacy among staff mem­ bers and trainees in OISCA’s Myanmar training center, showing how this aid ethic depended on contingent conditions and material effects for its actualization. The bonds of the collectivity might not have been so strong without the unfortunate yet fortuitous emergency of Cyclone Giri, and the sweaty, backbreaking shared labor that day. Such intimate, visceral, and circumstantial experiences defined the concept of aid work and shaped aid actors in OISCA, whether staff or trainees. But this also meant that social

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and cultural others beyond immediate relations and shared experiences rarely received OISCA’s hitozukuri aid. This pattern had significant ties to Japan’s colonial legacies in the Asia-Pacific, and it might explain why OISCA did not have training centers beyond those former colonial borders. As much as collective labor had the affective appeal of belonging and solidarity among aid actors in OISCA, the ethic of muddy labor also relied on certain structures of inequality, ones almost reminiscent of Japanese imperialist ambitions.

Contra the Paradox To show how oneness and inequality worked together, I compare the ethic of muddy labor with Euro-American approaches to humanitarianism, faith-based development work, and other Asian examples of “doing good.” The first point to note is that the centrality of “the field” is not unique to OISCA’s or Japanese approaches to aid work. For instance, the Peace Corps has always promoted the importance of American volunteers immersing themselves in shared labor with villagers (Peterson 2011). American de­ velopment workers and European emergency humanitarian workers also value the immediate experience of being in the field over the work done in NGO offices (Bornstein 2005, 39; Redfield 2006). The “voices” of aid recipients in the field become cornerstones for global calls for donations and the reform of aid systems among aid practitioners and policy makers. This attention to “local voices” points to the underlying ideal principles of solidarity in terms of relations of proximity in the field. This understanding of solidarity, however, differs from conceptions of solidarity in terms of “becoming one” that defined the importance of the muddiness of the field in OISCA. Solidarity-as-proximity and solidarity-as-oneness have different implications. OISCA is not a humanitarian organization in the strict sense of the term, in that it is not a medical or emergency aid NGO and therefore has a different emphasis, temporal modality, and aim. Nevertheless, I compare the activities in OISCA and humanitarian efforts as allied projects of “do­ ing good.” I take the position that humanitarianism is a wider social mode of engagement and imagination than emergency medical relief; it is an impetus to care for others that seeps into contemporary understandings of citizenship, for example (Fassin 2012; Muehlebach 2012). The differences and similarities between OISCA’s work and humanitarian imaginations broadly conceived can illuminate what is at stake in the ethic of muddy labor and its underlying aspiration of becoming one with cultural others.

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Scholars looking at Euro-American forms of humanitarian ethics have tended to think of the moral impulses of aid as arising in response to the suffering of distant others (Boltanski 1999; see also Barnett 2011). Hannah Arendt ([1977] 2006) famously distinguished compassion from pity, arguing that the former depends on the immediacy of a genuine and face-to-face encounter, whereas the latter emerges as a response to suffer­ ing perceived from a distance. In this conceptualization, compassion is un­ derstood as an expression of symmetry and solidarity that can happen only in proximate relationships, and pity produces a generalized politics that ultimately reproduces unequal relations. Scholars using this line of analysis have argued that humanitarian sentiments as responses to distant suffering tend to play into a politics of pity (Boltanski 1999). In simpler terms, the structure described here is one of solidarity, proximity, and compassion on one side and inequality, distance, and pity on the other. But others have pointed out that contemporary humanitarianism in fact exists in the tension between these two possibilities. Didier Fassin (2012) argues that compassion in today’s mediatized world can “be ex­ pressed almost identically whether one is face to face with the person or thousands of miles away,” because images and stories of distant suffering are brought into our living rooms in intimate ways (27). He demonstrates how this situation complicates the binary opposition in Arendt’s formula­ tion, producing a dilemma for spectators of distant suffering who are caught between the intimate mediatized demands to respond and the difficulties of putting sentiments of compassion from afar into “true” solidarity. Fas- sin asserts that this dilemma is precisely what characterizes contemporary humanitarian reason:

A remarkable paradox deserves our attention here. On the one hand, moral sentiments are focused mainly on the poorest, most unfortunate, most vulnerable individuals: the politics of compassion is a politics of inequality. On the other hand, the condition of possibility of moral senti­ ments is generally the recognition of others as fellows: the politics of compassion is a politics of solidarity. This tension between inequality and solidarity, between a relation of domination and a relation of assistance, is constitutive of all humanitarian government (Fassin 2012, 3).

This “remarkable paradox,” Fassin states, is a tense coexistence of in­ equality and solidarity. Working through a paradox—a situation or logic that appears to be self-contradictory—is one of the main ways in which academics, including anthropologists, frame their analytical interventions.

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Beyond Fassin, in the literature on humanitarianism, observers describe the paradox of the humanitarian imperative to end suffering, which, contrary to stated aims, prolongs it by colluding with political and warring parties (e.g., Terry 2002). In studies of development, anthropologists have also shown the paradox of organizations that aim to alleviate poverty but whose exis­ tence is predicated on continuing to label certain people “poor,” “in need,” or “beneficiaries” (Bornstein 2005, 116). These paradoxes often provide an analytical hook for scholars and also cause great consternation among aid workers who want to act on a belief in a common humanity but find that it seems impossible in the face of the realities of inequality in aid work (Redfield 2013, 139). Humanitarian labor in these studies is paradoxical, a Janus-faced endeavor that often leaves participants and observers caught between contradictory demands. Despite the different engagements with Arendt’s thesis, what remains constant is the opposition assumed between solidarity and proximity on the one hand and distance and inequality on the other. In the end, scholars often conclude their studies by taking a side in this opposition. Toward the end of his book, Fassin (2012) writes that humanitarian reason perhaps “makes possible a proximity between the humanitarian agents . . . and the people being aided,” but that aid interventions often reduce recipients into positions of victimhood (254). In this passing comment, there is an allu­ sion to a “true” kind of solidarity-in-proximity that is made impossible by the politics of inequality. Fassin is not alone in his yearning for solidarity with victims as a solution to the paradox of humanitarianism. For instance, China Scherz (2014) concludes her monograph on sustainable development aid in Uganda with the suggestion that thick, deep relationships between NGO workers and aid recipients could lead to real improvement in people’s lives (141). In these hopes for a better world, “true” solidarity based on proximity can counter inequalities. Distance and inequality as one side of the equation are framed as the problematic, and solidarity and equality in the form of proximate relations are presented as the solution and end point of our analyses. These proximate relations become the other half of the humanitarian paradox that we should at least try to rescue. The moral imagination driving OISCA’s aid actors was also one of solidarity, but it was one of solidarity-as-oneness. The contrast with solidarity-as-proximity in humanitarian action reveals how difference is treated in these varying frameworks.4 Peter Redfield (2012) describes how proximity for Médecins Sans Frontières aid workers in his study was “a perpetual problem of relation across difference” (369). Relation across dif­ ference is perceived and analyzed as a problem because, in these situations

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of aid interventions, differences (in terms of culture, social status, and eco­ nomic capacities, for example) are seen as the bases of relational distances and inequalities. Difference does not necessarily need to be understood through projects of inequality; differences can be the bases for forms of solidarity that are built on the acceptance of difference, even radical forms of alterity (e.g., Povinelli 2001). But for aid workers striving for solidarity- in-proximity, differences between international aid workers and local actors are tantamount to distant and unequal relations. Difference in the context of these humanitarian aid activities quickly becomes inequality and, thus, an obstacle to solidarity-in-proximity and the realization of a universal humanity. In faith-based development organizations and charities, especially those based on Christian teachings, difference also emerges as a problem but one that is meaningful for aid workers’ commitments to their work. As in OISCA, with its imagination of becoming one, aid workers in Christian NGOs and charities seek to create bonds, extend hospitality to suffering others, create profound personal relationships modeled after Christ’s and those of other saintly figures, and even value messy manual labor as a way to form solidarity (Bornstein 2005; Fountain 2011; Scherz 2014). Within these efforts, aid workers value building intimate and giving relationships with people they deem to be different and unknown, because the deep engagement with strangers—a “stranger sociality”—captures the Chris­ tian principle of compassion (Trundle 2014). This principle of creating meaningful connections with strangers is also present in ideologies of “liberal altruism” (Bornstein 2012, 147–149). Differences are valuable for Christian and liberal development and charity workers because they help showcase compassionate action. Yet, ultimately, difference and distance in these studies also become the source of inequalities, producing difficult paradoxes for aid workers. Other religious and cultural traditions of giving, charity, and humani­ tarianism present a wider picture. The impulse to “bond” with suffering others in solidarity is present in ideologies and practices of giving in Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, for example, but difference is not necessarily a source of ethical meaningfulness. On the one hand, in the case of a Sinha­ lese Theravada Buddhist NGO in Sri Lanka that Nalika Gajaweera (2015) studied, difference was important insofar as the transcending of ethnic and religious differences shaped the NGO workers’ conceptualization of a cos­ mopolitan and universal Buddhism. But in other cases, such as the Islamic principle of zakat (the giving of alms), the act is aimed at other Muslims as recipients, thereby serving to create an “Islamic solidarity” (Benthall and

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Bellion-Jourdan 2003, 68). The Hindu concept of dān in India, in contrast, is attached to practices of renunciation, and thus the almsgiving is based, not on ideas of shared community, but on anonymous strangers as recipi­ ents (Bornstein 2012, 28). But forms of humanitarian action in India are multiple, as Erica Born- stein (2012) shows, and there is also a “relational empathy” at play that is based on social and kin-like obligations (145–170). This model contrasts with the renunciation of dān and the stranger sociality of liberal and Chris­ tian altruism because giving is based on existing relations and intimacies rather than on difference as a source of meaningfulness. Similarly, among NGO workers in China that Carolyn Hsu (2008) studied, what is valu­ able in humanitarian and charitable acts is not giving to strangers but gift- exchange relations of obligation and reciprocity that incorporate recipients into pseudo-kin networks. In this model, relational difference is neither a problem nor a value; it does not play a part in people’s understandings of “doing good.” In contrast, among corporate actors engaging in charitable work in China in Kimberly Chong’s (2015) ethnography, difference is something that has to be produced between the giver and the recipient so that the latter would seem needy and a “proper” beneficiary to the former. But this is a move that sprung from the assumption that the givers and re­ cipients might be too similar; thus, the work is about “making strange what might otherwise be familiar” (338). These cases across various contexts in Asia are most akin to OISCA, particularly in the centrality of kin or kin-like relations, not stranger sociality, as the foundation of humanitarian-recipient relationships.5 OISCA can be understood from numerous vantage points, be it in light of development NGOs, agricultural extension projects, capacity-building programs, sustainable farms, or Japanese training and educational activities. The comparisons I chose with humanitarianism, faith-based development and charity, and examples of “doing good” in Asia serve to highlight the various ways that difference—cultural, ethnic, religious, interpersonal, and so on—is negotiated in aid work. This in turn helps reveal the major histori­ cal and political stakes of the moral imagination that drives the organization forward. In the case of OISCA, the emphasis was on not problematizing difference. Differences were present in OISCA, but they were never an object of inquiry. Foucault defined “problematization” as “the ensemble of discursive and non-discursive practices that make something enter into the play of true and false and constitute it as an object of thought” (Rabinow and Rose 2003, xii–xiii). The imaginations of becoming one in OISCA and

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other Japanese aid discourses foregrounded similarities, and if differences surfaced among aid actors, they were absorbed into the whole, into the service of the collective. Difference was generally turned into a nonissue. I identify four mechanisms by which difference was unproblema­ tized. First was the organizational emphasis on collective labor in which everyone, regardless of status, had to participate equally. Hierarchies still existed, but everyone had to contribute to the physical labor to main­ tain the training centers as working farms and living spaces. Second, as I discuss below, Japanese staff members, especially senior ones but not exclusively, appealed to the idea of cultural (not racial) similarity between “the Japanese” and “the Burmese.” This understanding had resonances with Japanese imperialist aspirations. Third, issues and questions of dif­ ference were relegated to the private realm, never allowed to enter pub­ lic discussions in the organization. Manifestations of difference such as conflicts among staffers, as in the fight between Burmese staffers, neither threatened nor built the foundation for the organization’s moral imagina­ tions of becoming one. Conflicts had to be mediated, but they happened in delineated spaces and moments that did not enter into larger discussions about how to incorporate diversity in the lifestyle of the training centers, for example. In this framework, difference was acknowledged but, in the process, domesticated. The fourth mechanism of turning difference into a nonissue was through metaphors of family, which is the topic of the next chapter. The non-problematization of difference meant that the aid actors I met did not see the existence of inequalities and hierarchical relations as paradoxical in the moral imagination of becoming one. This was the case for both staffers and trainees, Japanese and non-Japanese. Lines of dis­ agreement appeared not necessarily along cultural, racial, or ethnic lines but along a multitude of intersecting boundaries: generational, gendered, epistemological, ontological, religious/secular, and so on (C. Watanabe 2015a). Staffers and trainees in OISCA, as well as other Japanese actors such as the JICA official mentioned above, sought to become one with others while they also recognized and reproduced unequal relations. This means that solidarity cannot be presented as the solution to inequalities in my analysis; the framing of the problem and the solution needs to be com­ plicated. Solidarity-as-oneness is itself the analytical and political problem, and we need to examine it beyond the paradox. And this problematization of solidarity allows us to see historical and political resonances in Japan’s relationship to Asian others that we might not perceive otherwise.

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Intimate Imperialisms If we take seriously that aid actors such as those in OISCA and JICA did not see a paradox in the coexistence of ideas of oneness and unequal relations, what kinds of questions become possible? One avenue is the historical implication of this imagination, especially as it takes us to Japan’s imperial relationship to Asia. In regards to European colonialism in South­ east Asia, Ann Stoler (2002) has shown how racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies worked in relations of intimacy and care. Through rich studies of legal cases and historical documents, she examines the “tensions of em­ pire” that appeared in intimate colonial relations—tensions between “the discourses of inclusion, humanitarianism, and equality that informed liberal policy at the turn of the century in colonial Southeast Asia and the exclu­ sionary, discriminatory practices that were reactive to, coexistent with, and perhaps inherent in liberalism itself” (Stoler 1997, 198). Intimate relations between the colonizer and colonized, therefore, captured the Janus-faced character of liberalism underlying European colonialism—humanitarian on the one hand and discriminatory on the other—which has clear reso­ nances with the paradox of contemporary Euro-American humanitarianism explained above. In trying to resolve and manage this tension, European colonial authorities policed intimate relations with great energy. In contrast, Japanese imperialism in Asia also contained simultaneous processes of inclusion and exclusion, but it imposed policies of assimilation wherein cultural as well as interpersonal intimacies formed an operational core of discriminatory colonial rule, rather than one side of a paradox. In other words, inclusion and discrimination were not two conflicting sides of colonial ideology but, rather, blurred into each other (Ching 2001; Dikötter 1997; Uchida 2011b). Policies of assimilation and ideas of Asian com­ monality confounded intimacy and rule, discrimination and “becoming one.” Racial and moral beliefs of Japanese superiority marked the core of this global principle of familiarity and oneness. In addition, by making the cultural (Asian) other not simply an object of inclusion or exclusion but invisible through a presumed “oneness,” Japanese imperial rule sought to render submission and belonging indistinguishable from one another. Thus, Japanese imperialism suppressed difference and enabled oneness and inequality to coexist without apparent contradiction. While the colonial systems of Britain and other European countries laid the foundations for their postwar development aid structures (Cooper and Packard 2005; Hodge 2007), a similar continuity does not appear in the case of Japan, because much of its pre-1945 systems were dismantled by the US Occupation. Nevertheless, OISCA’s case shows that certain

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ideologies and imaginations of the future have endured through different eras in various forms. One of these imaginaries that can be seen in OISCA’s activities, and in their appeal to other Japanese aid actors, is Pan-Asianism. The idea that Asian people could and should unite, particularly in opposi­ tion to European colonial expansion in the region, has existed since the nineteenth century, as old as the notion of “Asia” itself as a commonly ac­ cepted geographical unit (Szpilman and Saaler 2011). Pan-Asianist move­ ments were centered in Japan and its expansionist ambitions, but they also appeared from China, Korea, India, Siam (Thailand), the Philippines, and the Turks in Central Asia (Szpilman and Saaler 2011, 5). In Japan itself there were various types and generations of Pan-Asianism, from “the kind that emphasized Asian commonalities . . . which included both China and India” to one that became “enmeshed with Japan’s expansionist and ultra- nationalist thinking” (Hotta 2007, 7–8). Although Pan-Asianism quickly became synonymous with Japan’s imperialism, it is important to remember that it was also about fraternity and solidarity; Pan-Asianism was not sim­ ply a disguise for imperialism (Duara 2001). Despite the various directions that Pan-Asianist ideologies could have gone, they did quickly become part of the Japanese military regime’s ambi­ tions. In the 1930s, Japanese intellectuals and state actors first proposed an East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Tōa Kyōei Ken), which was limited to Ja­ pan, its territories (Korea, Taiwan, and southern Sakhalin), and Manchuria, as a way to create a self-sufficient entity with Japan as Asia’s superpower (Koschmann 1997). Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, categorized as “the South” (Nanyō or Nanpō), did not have any political significance until it became clear that Chinese and European powers were moving into the region for its rich natural resources. To counter these advances, in 1939 the Japanese strategy expanded to become the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Dai Tōa Kyōei Ken), which came to include not only East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands but also South Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and even Alaska, the northwest of the United States, and Central and South America in its imagined geography (Shiraishi 1997). Although Japan’s imperialist ambitions were officially cut short in 1945, the aspirations of Asian oneness continue to creep into various postwar phenomena. Koichi Iwabuchi (2002), for instance, has described how the Japanese “soft power” of popular culture in Asia draws on a con­ struction of cultural similarities and intimacies between Japan and Asia, appealing to their shared distinction from “the West.” In a different domain, Chigusa Yamaura (2015a, 2015b) analyzes how cross-cultural marriages between Japanese men and Chinese women happen around the construction

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of ideas of similarity from both sides, all the while informed by various memories of Japanese colonialism and persistent hierarchical aspirations for ultimate “Japaneseness.” These phenomena exist within wider trends of various forms of New Asianisms since the 1980s, the boundaries of “Asia” and the kinds of relationships within it constantly shifting (Avenell 2014). They mobilize ideas of similarity and oneness, which go hand in hand with the domestication of difference, a logic of homogenization that is reminiscent of wartime Pan-Asianism (Hotta 2007, 204). In OISCA and associated Japanese development efforts, Japanese superiority and becom­ ing one with Asian others formed part of the same aspiration. The discourse of cultural similarity and oneness clearly exists among Japanese people who are “crazy about Burma,” humorously nicknamed birukichi (an abbreviation for biruma kichigai, “crazy for Burma”). A for­ mer Japanese ambassador to Myanmar (1995–1997), Yamaguchi Yōichi emphasizes this point in his 1999 memoir. He notes allegedly shared na­ tional characteristics between Japanese and Burmese people such as polite­ ness, humility, the importance of families and social relations, and respect for elders (Yamaguchi 1999, 161–162). He claims that even in comparison with other Asian people whom he has encountered in his diplomatic mis­ sions, there is greater similarity between Burmese and Japanese people. This discourse echoes Japanese colonial discourses of a hierarchi­ cal unity between Myanmar and Japan from World War II (Takeshima 2007). Aung San (1915–1947), a nationalist hero and the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, was training in Japan when he founded the Burma Inde­ pendence Army and then launched a rebellion against British colonial rule (the British had annexed Burma in 1886). In 1942, Japanese troops entered Burma and set up a Burmese government under a man called Ba Maw, who had been advocating for Burmese self-rule since the British era. The Japanese policy was one of Burmanization, promulgating Bur­ mese as the official language, changing street and city names from English to Burmese, and ultimately allowing Burma to declare itself a sovereign state (shuken kokka) within the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Nemoto 2007a; Takeshima 2007). Although Aung San and his comrades eventually launched a rebellion against Japan, Japanese rule influenced Burma’s military and its postwar regime and instilled ideas such as the importance of self-discipline and spiritual (seishin) strength among a wider public in Burma, as in other Japanese colonies in Southeast Asia (Callahan 2003; J. Lebra 1977, 171). Underlying these Japanese policies, ideologies, and activities was the notion that “the Burmese” and “the Japanese” were fundamentally united in a Pan-Asian community, with Japan as the leading

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nation. It is important to note that the notion of unity during Japanese colonial rule referred largely to the ethnically Burman Buddhist majority, and the militarism and other aspects of Japanese approaches also appealed to this group, while other groups—the Indian, Muslim, Karen, Chin, and Kachin ethnic communities, for example—remained anti-Japanese and pro-British (South 2008). Moreover, the above analysis of hierarchical unity is in reference to Japan’s relationship to Myanmar. Discourses about Japan and other countries in Asia and elsewhere might have other politics of similarity and difference. I found surprisingly analogous discourses between the colonial-era notion of hierarchical unity and the former Japanese ambassador’s views on the one hand and OISCA staffers’ opinions of Burmese people on the other. Having been told by numerous staff members that the Myanmar training center was now the most successful project in the organization—success defined as a self-funded project with hardworking and competent trainees and local staffers—I met with the former director, Kawaguchi-san, to find out how this status had been achieved. As people who knew him in Myan­ mar and Japan had told me, he was a gentle and understated man in his mid-seventies, although I knew from organizational lore that he was a force to contend with. I could see that he had been a very handsome young man. He had been director of the projects in the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Myanmar for decades, having left Japan in the 1960s with the first teams. He was also a member of Ananaikyō. Coming from a poor farming family, it seemed natural to him to go into agricultural work, although he did not expect to work in a development aid organization for so many decades. But as an extension of his commitment to Yonosuke and Ananaikyō, it made sense. I knew that life with OISCA had not been easy for him or his family, given that he had left his wife and son in Japan for almost half a century until his recent retirement. According to many staffers in Japan and Myanmar, the training centers where he was stationed would not have succeeded or even survived without his agricultural and management skills, as well as his ability to lead others. Yet, when I asked him about the rea­ sons for the Myanmar training center’s success, he replied, “It is probably because Myanmar is the country [in Asia] that feels most familiar [ichiban shitashimi yasui kuni] to Japanese people.” Dismissing my comment that, according to other staffers, it was his abilities as a director that led to the success of the training center, he explained, “People in Myanmar are extremely hardworking, presumably because they have a strong foundation in Buddhism, something that Japa­ nese people can relate with.”

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According to Kawaguchi-san, it was the supposed similarity between the people of Myanmar and Japan that brought about the training center’s success. Other Japanese staff members echoed this view. Ideas of similarity and inequalities were not disconnected in OISCA, and they appeared simultaneously in staffers’ everyday activities.6 Work in the training centers involved three concurrent processes that entangled becoming one with the production of differences. First, although the one­ ness promoted through the “muddiness” of communal living and labor in the Myanmar training center at first glance seemed to erase differences, the presumed similarity between “the Japanese” and “the Burmese” went hand in hand with the production of a hierarchical view. That is, Japanese staffers saw the former as superior to the latter, as being able to teach “the Burmese” how to behave and think in ways that would help with their personal and national improvement. So it was that Kawaguchi-san spoke of the similarities between the two countries, but he also talked about the need to instill discipline among Burmese staffers and trainees so that they would, for example, learn the Japanese value of collective harmony in developing their country. This was a hierarchical view that emerged in conjunction with efforts toward oneness. We saw this in the earlier accounts of the JICA official as well. Second, the similarity between the Japanese and the Burmese that Japanese aid actors spoke about depended on a differentiation of the two from other kinds of “Asians.” Kawaguchi-san’s opinion about Burmese people was possible because of his and other Japanese staffers’ assumptions of a geography of difference as well as similarity—that is, Burmese people could be disciplined to become like the Japanese because they were thought to be more similar than other Asian peoples. For instance, I heard Japanese staffers in Tokyo praise the Burmese trainees and staff and contrast their successes to their own projects in Bangladesh. The people and culture of that country were seen to be more different from those of Japan, and hence the projects there more prone to “failure.” These differentiations were also a by-product of the aspirations for oneness. Lastly, “becoming one” with “the Japanese” also created hierarchies among the Burmese staff members: those with more experience training with OISCA in Japan and with more Japanese language skills had greater social capital at the Myanmar training center. Thus, for instance, Ko Naing, a staffer who had been a trainee in 1998 in Myanmar and had subsequently spent two years training in Japan, held a senior status. When more junior Burmese staffers discussed the possibility of eventually having a Burmese director at the training center, Ko Naing’s name came up as a candidate.

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At the same time, however, many junior staff members advocated for Ko Win, another senior staffer from Ko Naing’s cohort of trainees but with less training experience in Japan, to take the directorship role in the future. The sense of oneness at the Myanmar training center seemed to unite everyone in a sense that “we don’t have any divisions among us,” but ultimately the idea of “becoming one” was calibrated in reference to notions of “Japanese values.” As such, “oneness” also created divides along such criteria. The impetus to become one with specific others also produced particular lines of difference and inequality. Analytically, this coproduction of oneness and difference seems like a paradox. But to interpret it in that way would not do justice to the logic underlying the ethic of muddy labor in OISCA. Differences existed and were even produced or heightened by the very efforts to become one in the training centers, but these were not matters of public discussion. Differ­ ences were attended to insofar as they led to productive struggles to make sense of the situation and ultimately domesticate them under the banner of becoming one. In many ways, it was in the work of unproblematizing dif­ ferences that becoming one emerged, and thus the production of difference was itself fuel for this aspiration. Burmese staffers did not simply internalize the hierarchies or aspira­ tions for oneness in the terms set for them by the Japanese staff members. Ko Naing was a prime example. He joined the OISCA training program in 1998 based on the suggestion of his uncle who worked for the Myanmar Agriculture Service. He told me that during this first year as a trainee, the trainees and staff did not spend much time doing actual agricultural work. They devoted most of their year leveling the ground, making the infrastruc­ tural foundations, and trying to improve the quality of the soil. Despite this unexpected year, he decided to join OISCA and became a full-time staff member in 2001. I asked him about the changes that he had noticed in the last decade. He nodded thoughtfully, resting his large hands on his spread knees, and sat back on the wooden chair. “At the beginning,” he said in Burmese, “it was very difficult to be working at the training center, because the villagers around us did not understand what we were doing.” Apparently, villagers were puzzled that OISCA staffers and trainees worked the fields in the middle of the afternoon, for example, when it was too hot and local farmers tended to rest. “They would laugh at us,” Ko Naing told me. I asked him why he decided to stay. He replied, “Seeing Japanese people come here [to Myanmar] to do things for our country, it made me

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feel that we, as Burmese people, also need to work for this same purpose [of development].” Ko Naing also told me that he was deeply committed to teaching what he had learned in OISCA to younger people—staffers and trainees—be­ cause he believed that these were things that they could not learn in school. Elaborating his point, he said in Japanese:

In the beginning, I didn’t really understand how to use my time or work properly, but now I know. I realized that, in order to develop, you need to change yourself, your family, your village, your region, your country. For that, things like time management are important. It’s about doing things with others, not just by yourself. Some people are content with just their own lives, but you can only be truly happy if others around you also develop, right?

He had absorbed the main messages of the training programs—the im­ portance of “making persons” as a method of national development, the value of time management and discipline as ways to work in harmony with others, and the mission to develop others as well as oneself. It was not unsurprising, therefore, that he had received awards from the OISCA headquarters for his work in the training centers in Japan and was praised among Japanese staffers in the Tokyo office. His success in passing a na­ tional Japanese language proficiency test at a high level also added to the Japanese staffers’ high regard of him. Toward the end of the interview, I asked him how he thought that OISCA in Japan and OISCA in Myanmar were connected. His reply sur­ prised me in its divergence from the dominant ideas of oneness:

Japan is Japan, and Myanmar has Myanmar culture. If our ways of think­ ing here were completely different from those of the villagers in the area, it would not work. It’s about incorporating what’s good about Japan into Myanmar but not about doing everything like Japan. It’s not about doing things in a Japanese style here just because there are Japanese people here. Just as in Japan the staffers tell trainees that they should do things in Japanese ways because they are in Japan, here things should be done in Burmese ways because this is Myanmar. If you just copy everything in the way that outside people do it, the country will be destroyed. You have to do things according to that country, that culture, just as we have to bring about democracy in our own ways.

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What Ko Naing advocated here was a relativism that was absent in the dominant Japanese visions of becoming one in OISCA. More fundamen­ tally, it was a recognition of difference, not to serve the collectivity but to make distinctions. Other Burmese staff members also voiced ideas about the differences between Japan and Myanmar, such as differences in familial relationships. Nevertheless, these discussions of difference occurred mainly in private and one-to-one conversations, never in a public setting. As an or­ ganization, OISCA at the Myanmar training center as well as in Japan did not create spaces where staff and trainees could foreground questions of difference as such. A number of the younger Japanese staffers I met in Ja­ pan also expressed views dissenting from the general ideas of oneness and the supremacy of “Japaneseness,” but these were simply that—dissenting voices. In fact, despite dissent, the majority of the younger staff members also seemed to find valuable the persistence of imaginaries of oneness and ways of conducting trainings such as through disciplinary routines. One young staff member at the Tokyo headquarters told me once that she planned to stay in OISCA for a while because she found its activities in the field (gemba) interesting and fun (omoshiroi). “What makes it interesting and fun?” I asked. She thought for a while before replying, “Probably because people in OISCA insist on [kodawaru] hitozukuri, and because they insist on doing it in ways that are not swayed by the trends of the times.” She referred to the morning routines and the emphasis on commu­ nal living and collective labor at the training centers. In her view—which echoed the words of many senior staffers and of several younger Japanese staff members and non-Japanese (Burmese or otherwise) staffers and train­ ees I met—the struggle to understand these seemingly anachronistic but persistent forms of aid work was itself meaningful.

The Specter of Decolonization While the previous chapter examined the utopian orientation that emerged in the gap between an ideal future and the current place of furu- sato-zukuri, this chapter has looked at the ethics underlying the practices in the presumed furusato of OISCA’s training centers. I traced the histori­ cal implications of the ethic of muddy labor in the communal lifestyle in OISCA’s training centers, an ethic that runs through all the chapters of the book. The value placed on “smelling like mud” pointed to the importance

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of shared physical labor and struggling in the challenges of intimate rela­ tionships in collectivist settings as ways to “become one” across cultural and national boundaries. I showed how this ethic of muddy labor existed in the wider context of the importance of “the field” in discourses about so-called Japanese approaches to development aid. The emphasis on “mud­ diness” referred to a form of solidarity as a way of becoming one, in con­ trast to ideals of solidarity-as-proximity in paradigms of Euro-American humanitarianism. The comparison foregrounded the divergent conceptions of difference, whether cultural, interpersonal, or otherwise. The muddy labor in OISCA’s training centers promoted a type of solidarity that treated difference as a nonissue, neither a major problem nor a meaningful thing to overcome, at least not in public spaces of discussion. By problematizing the kind of solidarity that existed in OISCA—by making it the object of analysis—I illustrated how moral imaginations to bring about a better world through efforts to become one with others have specific histories and therefore political implications. In the case of OISCA, the coexistence of the imaginations of becoming one and hi­ erarchies resonated with former imperialist Asianist imaginations. Yet I contend that OISCA staffers’ and other Japanese aid actors’ expressions of Asian oneness today are not simply a resuscitation of militaristic imperial­ ist ambitions. At the very least, Japan’s positioning in Asia and vis-à-vis “the West” in the twenty-first century differs from eras before 1945, before global capitalist geopolitics and the rise of Asian countries as economic powerhouses in their own right (Ching 2000, 251; see also Hoang 2014). What the resonances of visions of Asian oneness indicate is that liberal discourses of internationalism go hand in hand with possibilities of im­ perialism (Koschmann 1997, 110). It would serve us well to remember that Pan-Asianism at the turn of the twentieth century did include ideas of solidarity and equality before it was quickly usurped into the militaristic expansion of the Japanese empire a few decades later (Duara 2010; Hotta 2007; Saaler and Koschmann 2007). This history and the echoes of the idea of Asian oneness today suggest not so much an imperialistic turn or return but, rather, that the imagination and efforts of oneness have always blurred liberal and illiberal aspirations, universal visions and nationalistic ambitions.7 Thus, in the work of OISCA, visions of oneness have always enabled the coexistence of solidarity and inequality, without their being seen as a paradox, as a way for Japanese international actors to relate with Asian others. The ways that the articulations of becoming one in OISCA resonate with previous visions of Asianism point to the fact that Japanese citizens

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and former subjects of Japanese colonialism in Asia have not engaged with decolonization. Arriving at the end of World War II and Japan’s colonialism with the sudden bangs of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, turning “the Japanese” into victims, and then entering a period of US Oc­ cupation during which time Japan’s political and ideological systems were “reformed” by external forces, historians have argued that Japan and its former colonies never went through the decolonization processes of other former empires. Leo T. S. Ching (2001) states this condition succinctly:

Not only the colonized peoples of Korea and Taiwan but also the Japa­ nese colonizers were excluded from the liberation and decolonization processes. The dominant narrative of Japanese historiography is therefore able to circumvent the dissolution of its empire altogether, insulating itself and moving briskly from defeat to U.S. occupation, from demilitar­ ization to “democratization” and unprecedented economic “miracle” (37).

The ways that “becoming one” and racial, cultural, and political hi­ erarchies have dynamically erased and shifted lines of difference across varying historical periods have disappeared from view. In this absence of decolonization, solidarity-as-oneness remains unproblematized among aid actors and observers. Even Ko Naing’s alternative reading of the work at OISCA’s training centers did not quite challenge the fundamental virtues of “becoming one” and national unity. Difference as radical alterity remained a nonissue. Although offering a method of decolonizing Japanese aid is beyond the scope of this book, the absence of decolonization elucidates how “becoming one” could appeal to so many of the Japanese and Bur­ mese staffers, trainees, and other aid actors involved with OISCA without implications of imperialism. The allure of becoming one was achieved, for example, in reference to ideas of “being like family,” as I explore in the next chapter. My pursuit here, then, is to shed light on the continuing power of Asianist aspirations today in the form of development aid, under the elusive specter of decolonization.

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he issue of “becoming one” was not only a moral imagi­ nation but a way of life for many of the OISCA staff Tmembers I met. Japanese as well as non-Japanese actors often referred to oneness in terms of their relationships to each other and to the organization as “being like family.” Many of them also envisioned oneness to emerge from an erasure of the distinctions between life and work in OISCA. From where I sit at my desk in a British university where “work-life balance” seems like a holy grail, this blurring of life and work is frightening to me. Yet the majority of trainees and staffers spoke of this kind of engagement with OISCA as a positive form of belonging. This chapter continues the exploration of the coexistence of oneness and inequality by asking how “becoming one” could be meaningful to OISCA aid actors through reference to ideas of “being like family.” The idea of family-ness has existed in OISCA since its inception. In 1965, OISCA International outlined the mission of its global endeavor in its magazine of the same name.1 On a two-page spread, a photograph depicts a sea of mostly men in black suits from around the world, gathered around a circle of about twenty men seated at tables, with various national flags lining the back wall. The scene resembles a United Nations meeting from the era. Under the photograph, the caption on one page reads (in Japanese), “Jinrui ga ‘dōhō ki’itsu’ suru tameni” (For humanity to “unite as brethren”), and on the opposite page is a caption in English: “To unite all humanity as one family” (OISCA International 1965b). Later in the magazine, there is a section in English titled “Realization of a Universal Family of Man,” which states, “[The] promotion of international goodwill and amity requires na­ tions and peoples to act as close brothers. . . . [A]s friendly relations are enhanced, thanks to the plentitude of all nations, the spirit of belonging to a single world family will surely shine in the heart of every human being” (OISCA International 1965a, 26). The use of metaphors of “family” from the beginning of OISCA’s activities is evident here.2

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In the following pages, I examine, first, how the idea of “being like family” in a communal environment served to focus Japanese and Burmese actors on a shared commitment to collective labor, rendering differences and hierarchies a nonissue. Another way that people incorporated the vi­ sions of becoming one was through blurring the distinction between life and work, especially among older Ananaikyō staffers whose lives over the past fifty years or more were inseparable from OISCA. Devoting their entire lives to OISCA had made the idea of becoming one with other staff members meaningful because of the bond of having grown old together, like family. What these instances show is that hierarchy in oneness was naturalized, because people saw collective labor in OISCA in terms of meaningful constructions of “relatedness” of a particular kind (Carsten 2000). My aim in this chapter is to understand how OISCA’s aid actors could have made sense of the coexistence and coemergence of oneness and hierarchy as nonparadoxical through the work of kinning, turning both biological kin and strangers into families of a particular form, and through its counterpart labor of de-kinning to make “being like family” possible in OISCA (Howell 2006; Lazar 2017). Becoming one required the severing of certain relations in order to make new connections possible.

Being an OISCA Staffer Japanese and Burmese staffers and trainees told me that OISCA was “like family.” On one level, when people spoke of “being like family,” the phrase pointed to consanguineal and affinal ties that existed throughout the organization. I found many Japanese staffers whose mother, father, sibling, or child worked in another part of the organization or in one of the NGO’s affiliate institutions. This trend tended to be confined to members of Ananaikyō families, but it also appeared in cross-cultural families—that is, families in which a Japanese staff member had married a non-Japanese staffer or trainee. A significant number of these couples even raised chil­ dren at or near the training centers. During my time at the Tokyo office in 2009 and 2010, I met one young man, Tanaka-san, whose father was one of the longest-serving Japanese directors at a training center in the Philip­ pines and whose mother (a Filipino woman) had been a trainee and then a local staff member there. In this sense, OISCA and that training center in the Philippines were not simply workplaces for him and his parents but the “home” where he grew up.3 As a second-generation OISCA child who had chosen to join the organization, I assumed that he wholeheartedly believed in it, but in fact he expressed ambivalence. His father had sent him to the

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OISCA high school for a year when he was seventeen, as well as to the Ananaikyō headquarters for a while, although his father was not officially an Ananaikyō member. Despite or perhaps because of these experiences, Tanaka-san seemed uncertain about his feelings toward OISCA. He was, however, clear about his interest in international aid work. When I saw him again in 2011, he was preparing an application to join a training program on accounting and management for NGOs. He talked about the need for OISCA to update its management systems and hoped that this training would help him do that. In the end, what seemed to define relatedness for most people in the organization was the combination of biological or affinal relations with relations based on shared labor and communal living, although the dif­ ferences between these types of kinship still mattered. Once, at a training center in Japan, I heard a staff member tell a group of trainees, “We are like family here; we are all brothers and sisters. Some of the previous trainees even called me ‘mom’ [okaasan].” In making this point, she wanted them to know that they could talk to any of the Japanese staff members whenever they felt sad or worried. Being like family meant that they could and should trust and depend on each other—or, rather, that trainees (the “children”) should seek the support and guidance of staffers (the “parents”) but usu­ ally not the other way around. This was a construction of family-ness that emerged from various discourses and practices that turned everyone in­ volved in OISCA into kin, mobilizing certain moral values attached to the notion of family—trust, mutual dependency, commitment, and so on—in order to discipline people in particular ways (De Neve 2008). Family is not about egalitarian relationships, as we all know. When Japanese staffers talked about the training centers as being like family (kazoku no yō), they did not indicate that everyone was equal. This was evident in a staff member’s comment about observing how vegetables turn toward the sun as a metaphor for filial piety (see chapter 2). I also noticed that even though Japanese staff members talked about being like family in the training centers or in OISCA as a whole, the framing did not question existing hierarchical relations in which the director or the senior staff­ ers were unequivocally in charge. In a promotional video about OISCA’s training centers in Japan, titled Like the Bonds of Family: OISCA Chubu Japan Training Center (Kazoku no kizuna no yō ni: OISCA Chubu Nihon Kenshu Center), staff members said things like “OISCA is about the power that comes when human relationships come together . . . about nurturing people in interactions that support our spirits, that come out of sharing our everyday lives and treating each other like family” (OISCA, n.d.). People

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often talked in this way about sharing lives and treating each other like family in collective lifestyles and labor, but they did not define “family” as an egalitarian unit. In Japan, as many anthropologists and sociologists have observed, family ideologies revolved around the ie, especially before 1945. Ie is the household unit that is maintained and reproduced as a patriarchal and eco­ nomic corporate group, with emphasis on ancestral continuity and ideas of family that go beyond blood ties.4 People might have shared the labor entailed in the maintenance and operation of these family units, but this happened within a patriarchal structure. Moreover, the Japanese state at the turn of the twentieth century projected this ideology onto the nation— and the world—with the emperor as the moral “head of household,” an ideology known as kokutai (Gluck 1985). While conceptions of kinship based on blood ties and nuclear families began to spread throughout the twentieth century and became more central after World War II (Goldfarb 2012; 2019), expansive and figurative notions of “being like family” con­ tinued to exist in Japanese society. This was particularly so in corporations where executives used ideologies of “traditional” paternal benevolence to discipline and manage workers, a trend that grew from the early twentieth century and persisted in the postwar years (Gordon 1985; Kondo 1990). As in these well-rehearsed conceptions of the Japanese business model and “the company as family” (Bestor 2004, 240; Ishino 1953), what mattered most in OISCA was the sense of relatedness based on communal living and collective labor that bound everyone regardless of nationality, culture, or blood. This was evinced in the fact that staffers often talked about “being like family” in figurative terms but rarely mentioned the biological or af­ final ties that also existed throughout the organization. Ideas of relatedness were also important among Burmese staffers and trainees. When I asked one of the newest Burmese staff members what he liked about OISCA, he immediately replied, “That it is like a family” (Mịthāsụ lo ne lọ). Then he elaborated: “For example, I get up every day at five in the morning to clean, and so does the director, and so do the senior Burmese staff members.” When Burmese staffers talked of being like family and alluded to col­ lective labor, they did not mean that everyone was equal. In these expres­ sions, they did not challenge the family ideologies in Myanmar in which parents are one of the “five gems” to be revered, alongside monks (the sangha), teachers, the scriptures (the Dhamma), and the Buddha himself (Skidmore 2004, 180; Spiro 1977). A child would always be in an inferior position to a parent. Being like family meant that differences in social

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positions existed but that everyone participated in collective labor and a communal lifestyle. The moral value of family-ness emerged in the fact that, in the eyes of Burmese staff members and trainees, everyone contrib­ uted to the physical labor required in the training centers; hierarchies did not need to be upended for this value to appear. For instance, when I asked Ko Naing what he thought was the best thing about OISCA based on his years of experience with the organization, he replied without hesitation: “It is how OISCA brings together people’s feelings into one, like family.” He continued:

It is not about separating people into Muslims, Christians, Buddhists. It is not about saying that one country is this way or that way because it is poor or rich. OISCA taught me to make my feelings one with others. OISCA does this by having different people live together, without distinguishing between them based on nationality, ethnicity, religion, et cetera. Even people in authority participate in the daily cleaning duties, for example.

Echoing other staffers’ responses, he pointed out that there were people in authority at the training center—the Japanese director, the senior staff­ ers, and so on—but that these hierarchies did not exclude anyone from contributing to the collective labor. Being like family meant that people from different backgrounds and statuses shared work, meals, and the same roof over their heads, but this sharing did not require egalitarian relations. What mattered, according to Ko Naing, was involvement in the collec­ tive life and labor at the center, everyone committed to the development of the country through trainings in sustainable agriculture and the values of a disciplined and labor-intensive communal life. Solidarity-as-oneness and inequality enabled each other in this framework of relatedness, which encompassed relations based on shared labor and lifestyle as well as biol­ ogy and marriage. Although Japanese and Burmese staffers similarly valued notions of family beyond biological ties, there were also differences in how such rela­ tions came to matter for them. Specifically, the participation in communal living and collective labor played a central role in both frameworks of relatedness, but Burmese staff members and trainees also foregrounded the importance of emotional labor in their definitions of family. For example, at one staff meeting conducted mainly in Japanese, a Burmese staffer brought up the issue of a trainee who was having extreme pain in his legs. Appar­ ently, the young man could not even move. Staff members had taken him to the doctor in the closest town, about an hour’s drive away, but the doctor

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did not know what was wrong. At this point, another staffer at the meeting remarked that perhaps the trainee’s pain was due to his getting wet in the rain a couple of weeks earlier when he was home for a holiday. Sakurai-san seized on this offhand comment. “Trainees should not forget that they are still OISCA trainees, even when they’re away during holidays, and they shouldn’t go around playing in the rain without taking care of their health,” he stated. He went on to emphasize that trainees as well as staff members had to take care of their health as long as they were affiliated with OISCA so that they could commit themselves fully to the training program and the life at the training center. “A holiday in the middle of the year does not mean a holiday from being an OISCA trainee,” he repeated. He then told everyone at the meeting that perhaps he should talk to the trainees about being mindful of their daily behavior so that they would not get sick like this trainee. Sakurai-san was the only Japanese staffer at the training center, so it is hard to generalize from his comment. But the contrast between his reac­ tions to the situation and those of the Burmese staff members and trainees highlighted the importance of emotional labor for the latter. While Sakurai­ san focused on the trainee’s inability to participate in the usual collective duties of the training center because of his illness, the Burmese staffers and trainees with whom I spoke concentrated their attention on taking care of the trainee. A few days after the meeting, the trainee had a sudden attack of convulsions, his legs shaking uncontrollably. Staffers rushed him to the hospital in the nearby town. The following day, the trainee returned on crutches with the staffers, who had spent the night with him. In the fol­ lowing weeks, the other trainees took turns caring for him—bringing him food, playing the guitar and singing by his bedside to cheer him up, and, with the help of staffers, even constructing a wooden contraption to make it easier for him to use the squat toilet. At a later date, when I asked one of the trainees what he liked about the training center, he replied, “That everybody is like family here because we take care of each other during sickness.” Even in the absence of physical collective labor, therefore, Burmese staffers and trainees valued the emotional labor of caring for each other. Accounts of contemporary kinship ideologies in Myanmar, though few and far between, attest to the importance of fictive ties based on emotional as well as collective physical labor. In a rare contemporary ethnographic analysis of (Buddhist) rural kinship in the Dry Zone, Naoko Kumada (2015) shows how conceptions of family and relatedness are fluid and

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depend on emotional intimacy, co-residence and the sharing of meals, and ideas of merit making and rebirth, for example (see also Tamura 1983). Biological and affinal ties are not the only determinants of kinship, and the boundaries between friends and relatives often blur. OISCA’s Burmese staffers and trainees showed that this blurring and the work of kinning, for them, involved emotional labor as much as a communal lifestyle and shared physical work. This was not an aspect of “being like family” that Japanese staff members emphasized. But for the Burmese staffers and trainees, it was a key aspect of their sense of relatedness. This was an understanding of kin ties that transcended national- cultural boundaries as well. Several of the Burmese staff members who had been trainees and became staff during Kawaguchi-san’s directorship had photographs of themselves taken by his side, which they carefully displayed on tables and shelves near their beds. When I visited their rooms for the first time, they would pick up these framed images to proudly show me how much the photographs meant to them. Many of them called him “grandpa” (hpōhpōkyī). Burmese staffers were aware that their relationship to the former director was a hierarchical one, with the Japanese director being in charge of the training center and the staffers following his direc­ tion. Yet, as in a family, the unequal relationship was not in contradiction to their sense of intimacy and affection, nor to the primacy of collective and emotional labor that Kawaguchi-san and Burmese staff members shared. Ultimately, there were differences between Japanese and Burmese actors’ conceptualizations of relatedness, but they all left hierarchical relations unchallenged or, to be more precise, non-problematized in the first place.

OISCA as Life To work “like family” corresponded to another modality of institu­ tional labor in OISCA: the merging of life and work. Kinship metaphors are about mobilizing particular aspects of what it means to be a family, while leaving out others, in order to mobilize people in desired ways (De Neve 2008). In OISCA, “being like family” often referred to a complete, unconditional commitment to the organization. This ethos appeared most clearly among the older Japanese staff members who had joined the orga­ nization in the early years of Yonosuke’s activities, but it also appeared in non-Japanese staffers as well. In this section, I showcase the life stories of three staff members: a senior Japanese staffer in the Tokyo headquarters, a Bangladeshi staff member at a training center in Japan, and a Burmese

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staff member at the Myanmar training center. Their stories reveal that the merging of life and work also entangled kinship and aid work, bringing together individual trajectories with collective commitments, private life with professional life, a phenomenon not often seen in NGOs but present in social movements and other workplaces around the world (De Neve 2008; Lazar 2017). I started all of my interviews with staffers by asking them how they got involved with OISCA. This approach proved to be more productive than I anticipated. Time after time, the question led to long stories about the person’s life, sometimes even reaching back to childhood. For instance, the answer from Shiraki-san began with him as a young man. An energetic man in his mid-seventies, he was one of the older staffers at the Tokyo headquarters, but he did not seem to occupy an influential position. When I met him, he was responsible for maintaining relationships with politi­ cians, a vague role that did not require him to report to anyone else. When I asked him for an interview, he suggested that we meet after work at a café. He chose a popular place on the basement level of one of the major train stations, where he could settle into a lengthy conversation over several glasses of beer. I asked my usual first question. In response, he recounted that he contracted a disease of the kidney when he was twenty years old and spent three days unconscious in a hospital near Toyota City, where he was from. “It was a miracle that I survived,” he said. After he came out of the coma, he stayed in the hospital for a while longer to fully recover. He shared a room with an older woman, who told him that while he was unconscious he had muttered strange things, mainly proverbial phrases. One day the woman had a visit from a younger woman. The older woman told the visitor that Shiraki-san had been saying strange things in his unconscious state, and the young woman seemed intrigued. Shiraki-san did not know why, but the young woman invited him to study at her specialized school (juku). He did not accept the invitation on that day, but when he was re­ leased from the hospital, he ran into the visitor again in downtown Toyota. She was with another woman, and although they were both young women walking along the streets of a major city, they were wearing monpe, the tra­ ditional loose trousers that farmers in Japan often wear. Shiraki-san found this odd. “Who are you?” he asked them. They explained that they were disciples of Nakano Yonosuke. Shiraki-san had never heard of this name. The women invited him to join the introductory course, the “first-time trainings” (hatsu shugyō), which would last four to five days. This time

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he agreed and followed them to the Ananaikyō headquarters in Shizuoka, over a hundred miles from Toyota. Shiraki-san chuckled as he said, “I just went, without any reason—I simply wanted to try new things at the time.” Shiraki-san told me that everything in the training course felt strange to him at first. All the talk about the universe did not quite make sense to him, but he was impressed. He recalled how Yonosuke and his disciples would explain the relationship between the universe and human beings in interesting ways, such as the fact that women give birth during high tides—that is, when the moon’s force is at its strongest—and that people often die during low tides. “I was extremely drawn to these talks about humans [ningen] and life [inochi],” he said. “It really resonated with me, somewhere deep. . . . I couldn’t help but feel that this place [the Ananaikyō headquarters] was like heaven,” he said with a laugh. After four days in Shizuoka, he returned to Toyota City, inspired by the experience. Soon after, Yonosuke began to build an observatory in Okazaki City, not far from Toyota. Shiraki-san received an invitation to listen to Yonosuke’s talk there, and he went. Yonosuke announced at this event that he and his disciples were organizing international conferences for world peace and called on everyone there to join. This was the begin­ ning of Shiraki-san’s involvement with Yonosuke’s projects and OISCA. He had been working for the organization ever since. Several beers and a couple of hours after we had sat down, he concluded our interview by telling me that he lived by a life philosophy, using a rather classical or religious form of Japanese: “The universe shall move the necessary people at necessary times to make necessary things happen” (Ten wa hitsuyō na toki ni hitsuyō na hito wo tsukawashite hitsuyō na koto wo nasashime tamau). He explained that even if you want to do something, it will not be possible to do it by yourself. But at a critical moment, someone will appear in front of you to make it possible. “I have had so many experiences where impossibilities were turned into possibilities,” he affirmed. During my time in Tokyo, I spent many days with Shiraki-san, as he took me to meet various OISCA supporters and politicians. In addition to his sudden affable smiles and his life story, what stayed in my mind were the objects that he always carried with him. One of these was a small red pocket diary that he bought from the shop in the Diet Building, the same type of diary that politicians use. Once, he opened the little notebook, which was barely larger than his palm, to show me that it came with the phone numbers of all the embassies in Tokyo, a map of the area around the Diet buildings, the names of elected politicians in each prefecture and district, and other related information. He then turned to the back cover,

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which was brimming with additional pages that he had sewn in. These contained the contacts of everyone he knew, and he attached the same packet to every new pocket diary at the beginning of the year. If he needed more space for new contacts, he simply added pages to the packet. He also showed me how he recorded the times and places of meetings he had with people each day, in neat, small letters written vertically from right to left in traditional fashion, even though the diary was clearly designed for people to write horizontally from left to right. He told me that he had diaries from twenty or perhaps thirty years back. At the end of each year, he placed the used diary alongside the others on his bookshelf at home. I imagined a bookcase filled with the red spines of these pocket diaries, perhaps the earlier ones faded from use and age. Seeing my interest in his diary, he told me that he also always carried with him a map of the world, Tokyo, and Japan and sometimes maps of other countries. Placing his signature leather shoulder bag on a table, he unzipped the top and took out a map of Myanmar, knowing that I was inter­ ested in the projects there. As we unfolded the map, it struck me how Shi­ raki-san seemed to carry on his shoulders a microcosm of the relationships and imaginations spurred by his life and work at OISCA. Yet, although he had spent over half a century working for Yonosuke and OISCA, he had never been posted to an overseas project site. Neither he nor I knew why, but human resources staff in OISCA seemed to work in mysterious ways. I had even heard that Yoshiko made unilateral decisions about who to hire and where to send them, but it was not the kind of information that staff or I could confirm. Shiraki-san’s role in maintaining relationships with politi­ cians also seemed unclear to other staff members, especially the younger ones. In the 1960s and 1970s, relationships with politicians had formed the backbone of OISCA’s funding and support, but in recent years financing from companies through their corporate social responsibility activities had become increasingly important. Given these changes, Shiraki-san’s work appeared out of step with the times, and the younger Japanese staffers seemed unsure of his role in the organization when I asked them. Moreover, during one of our conversations, Shiraki-san commented that he did not know the details of the international spiritual conferences of the 1950s and 1960s because he did not have as central a role in the organization as some of his colleagues, who continued to hold influential positions in later decades. OISCA was Shiraki-san’s work and life, but this sense of belonging was not without questions. Nevertheless, his inferior position vis-à-vis his contemporaries and the changes over time did not seem to detract from his sense of oneness with the organization. When he

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spoke of becoming one (ittai to naru) with other staff members, trainees, and participants across the organization in Japan and around the world, he projected his own life story, with all its passions and sorrows. Becoming one for Shiraki-san was about growing old with the organization. This was not so much about conceptions of cultural similarity in echoes of Japanese imperialism in Asia, but an intimacy of the self with an institution. The blurring of life and work existed not only for older Japanese staff members but also among non-Japanese staffers. When I first met Hasan-san in 2010, he had been at one of the training centers in Japan for a couple of years as a staff member. He spoke Japanese proficiently and worked on the administrative side of things at the center. He looked young, so I was surprised to hear that he first joined the center in Bangladesh as a trainee in 1983. When I interviewed him, a closer look revealed the soft laughing lines around his eyes that spoke of his years as well as his personality. We spoke in Japanese. He told me that as soon as he finished the training course, he became a staff member at the Bangladesh center. Eventually, he married a woman from his village, and they built a house near the training center, raising two sons there. His specialty was chicken farming. In 1984, as soon as he became a staff member, Kawaguchi-san, who was the director of the Bangladesh center at the time, encouraged him to create a poultry project for the center. It proved to be a success, and even nearby villagers came to seek his advice. In 2000, Hasan-san moved to the Myanmar training center to help jumpstart its poultry projects. Kawaguchi-san was the director in Myanmar by then, and he knew that Hasan-san would be the perfect person to take on the role. Hasan-san spoke fondly of his former boss. I asked him to describe how he created the poultry project. “At first, there was not enough money allocated to the Myanmar proj­ ects to begin this scheme,” he explained. The center had successfully won a grant from the Japanese govern­ ment, but the funds had not yet arrived. Moreover, the Japanese staff mem­ ber in the Yangon office was opposed to the project because he did not think that chickens would survive in the extreme heat of Yesagyo Township. “But at the training center, Kawaguchi-san and I wanted to rise up to the challenge,” Hasan-san said with a smile. So they made a surprising move. Because of arrangements they had made with the producers of the baby chicks and other factors, they knew they could not wait any longer for the funds to come through. So Hasan-san offered US$1,500 of his personal savings as start-up capital, most of the money he had at the time.

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“I was ready to just give it to the training center,” he recalled, “but Kawaguchi-san said that that would not be right, and so we decided that I would lend the money to the project.” Kawaguchi-san himself then added a loan of US$2,000 to the pot, and another Japanese staff member contributed an additional US$500. The following day, they sent the lump sum to the Yangon office, and the poultry project began. Hasan-san spent two years in Myanmar. He told me that it was not always easy. In an article in OISCA Magazine, he explains that, first of all, the harsh conditions of central Myanmar proved to be a major challenge: “The climates of Bangladesh and Myanmar are similar, but the [Myanmar] training center is in a place that can become as hot as 43 degrees Celsius [about 109 degrees Fahrenheit], and humidity is extremely low, and on top of that it is dusty. I struggled a lot trying to raise newborn chicks in this en­ vironment” (OISCA 2006). He also told me that the Burmese officials from the Myanmar Agriculture Service (MAS) sometimes insulted him, telling him that Bangladesh was not a developed country and therefore Hasan­ san could not possibly give them proper advice or succeed in his poultry project. Despite such racism and obstacles, he successfully established a poultry program that Burmese staffers and trainees continue to this day. Echoing many other staffers’ words, Japanese or otherwise, he concluded:

If we do our best, no matter how difficult things are, we can succeed on our second, third, fourth tries. We cannot just say, “I cannot do it.” If we do our best until the very end, we can do it. So if we follow the daily schedule in OISCA, if we bring fresh ideas to difficult problems, we can achieve things. That, I believe, is the “OISCA spirit,” the “human spirit.”

He had, indeed, proven that one could open new paths unforeseen at ear­ lier stages of one’s life, despite challenges. Such an unconventional career did not come without sacrifices, however. Back in Bangladesh, his sons were almost or already in university, but he had not seen his family for some time. He confessed that his wife did not want their children to join OISCA. He did not elaborate or frame this fact in terms of sacrifice, but I assumed that it had probably been difficult to raise and support a family while OISCA demanded most of Hasan-san’s life, not just his weekdays. “I am really grateful to my wife; she has supported me in every way,” he said. While Hasan-san’s nuclear family and the “OISCA family” seemed to be in tension, the situation was slightly more complicated for many of

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the Burmese staff members at the Myanmar training center. Often, the center was precisely where staffers found romantic partners and spouses and even where they raised their families. Ko Thein arrived at the train­ ing center in 1997, as part of the second group of trainees. He was one of three (male) staffers from this cohort, which meant that they had been together at the center for more than thirteen years. Ko Thein’s father had a friend working at MAS, and so he learned about OISCA from this man. He decided to join the training course because he had heard that OISCA would be teaching Japanese agricultural techniques. I knew from speaking with the other staff members from this cohort that they did not spend much time doing farmwork that year. Instead, they had to help build the training center—constructing the buildings and adding organic matter to the soil to make it viable for agriculture, for example. Ko Thein told me that trainees might complain about the hard work they had to do at the training center, but it was nothing in comparison with the physical labor required of them back then. Yet he found the work rewarding, and in 2000 he went to one of OISCA’s training centers in Japan for further training. He became a full-time staff member at the Myanmar center upon returning from Japan and received additional training in Japan in 2005. When he came back from Japan the second time, Kawaguchi-san put him in charge of the pigs. Ko Thein told me that, in the first year, he failed miserably. All of the piglets died because he had miscalculated when the mother pig would give birth and was absent from the training center at a crucial period. “I failed a few more times until I got it right,” he explained, with a shy smile on his face. Now he operated a successful pig farm at the center, establishing a profitable system of producing piglets to be sold to nearby villagers and using the pigs’ waste to make organic bokashi fertilizer. Ko Thein said that at first he did not want to work with pigs. But eventually Kawaguchi-san convinced him that the pigs and their organic waste were important for making fertilizer and compost, as well as their piglets being valuable for increasing income for the training center. During my time in Myanmar, the OISCA piglets sold for 35,000 kyats (US$35) each, a considerable amount for a rural economy. The usual market price for piglets in the region sold by the government was about 23,000 to 25,000 kyats (US$23–$25), so the OISCA price was high. Nevertheless, Ko Thein explained, their piglets were popular with villagers because the ones from the government tended to be raised on a lot of medication and did not do well once they were living in villages. The OISCA piglets received vac­ cinations but were not raised on much medicine, so they were smaller than

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the government’s piglets, but they survived better in village environments. As of 2010, the training center sold about twenty to thirty piglets a month, which gave them a good profit. Ko Thein was also preparing to sell the older pigs that were no longer giving birth, hoping to get 1 million kyats (US$1,000) for three of them. Although at first, Ko Thein confessed, he stayed in OISCA only be­ cause he wanted to have the chance to go to Japan, he realized over time that, without the Burmese staffers and the work that Kawaguchi-san was doing to help them become financially independent, the training center would not survive. Kawaguchi-san told him and the other staffers that the financial support from Japan would eventually end and so they needed to devise a way to become self-sufficient. Ko Thein believed in the work of the training center—not only teaching trainees skills in organic farming and values such as punctuality and discipline but also helping villagers and farmers nearby through the World Food Programme projects and the sale of bokashi fertilizer, piglets, and other products. “If, after coming back from Japan, we just went back home, we wouldn’t be using what we learned to develop ourselves or the training center,” he explained. “I need to teach others what I learned. If I didn’t do that, I would be a bad person.” He added that since the training center was in Myanmar, it was the responsibility of the Burmese staff members to teach the Burmese trainees and make the center successful for them and as a resource for nearby farm­ ers. The work that he was doing with the pigs, in terms of both teaching the trainees how to take care of the animals and raising income for the center, was meaningful in this sense. The work at the training center was professionally significant for Ko Thein, but it also had a personal meaning, since he had married a former trainee and fellow staff member. They worked together for a while at the center, but when they had a child, his wife quit, primarily because they wanted to be able to send their son to a good school, something that the village where the training center stood could not offer. This was the same reason why Ko Win had said that his family might move away from the center someday (see chapter 3). Yet Ko Thein’s wife was continuing to teach the things that she had learned at the center in her village, advocating for a move away from agrochemicals and making and selling OISCA’s recipes for organic fertilizers and pesticides. Ko Thein told me that since his wife and son lived far away, people in the training center felt like family to him. The other two men whom he had known since 1997 especially felt like brothers to him.

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Many people joined OISCA as staff members and stayed for many years, even a lifetime, for different reasons. Those who found meaning in their work had, in one way or another, chosen to respond to the existential call to submit oneself wholly to OISCA and to a larger cause. This was never a done deal, always in need of renewed efforts and struggles to under­ stand what the work was about and how they fit in it. The moral imagination of becoming one would not mean much without the daily, often difficult efforts to get to the final state of oneness, as elusive as this goal was.

The Gendered Work of Kinning The notion of “being like family” was oriented toward the work of becoming one, but this notion was not without distinctions, particularly around gender. In many ways, the imagination in OISCA was patriarchal, with all the senior Japanese staff members being men, except one female director of a training center in Japan. Everyone in the Tokyo office and the other training centers in Japan talked about her as an exception. It is not that OISCA’s senior staffers were uninterested in women’s empower­ ment; they saw the training center with the female director as a site where the organization could focus on such issues. In March 2016 this female director represented OISCA at an event in Washington, D.C., where US and Japanese actors discussed women’s empowerment and development cooperation in Asia (Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA 2016). During my research, I heard (male) senior staff members in Tokyo discuss women’s empowerment as a topic in which OISCA could expand its activities and influence in the global aid agenda. Despite this interest in women’s empowerment as a future project area for the organization, how the offices and training centers in Japan operated reflected a limited understanding of gender in terms of a “separate but equal” rule. In the middle of various conversations, for instance, some of the male senior staffers would tell me that men and women “naturally” had different roles to play. This worldview reflected how Ananaikyō followers spoke of gender relations: during a conversation at OISCA’s observatory in Shizuoka Prefecture in April 2010, an Ananaikyō man told me that it was the intersection of opposites that made up the world. “For example, you have positive and negative poles in electricity, and men and women; men have their role and women have their role; women have their kindness, beauty, and so on, and men have their sense of purpose, energy, and so on,” he explained. One was not better than the other; they fulfilled different roles in the world.

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A similar understanding of gender division was evident at the training centers. Senior male staff members often asked the female staffers to help the cook in the kitchen prepare lunches and dinners for the other staff mem­ bers and trainees. Female staff members were also the ones in charge of activities such as baking sweets using recipes from the trainees’ countries, which they would sell at local events. Whenever I visited the centers, the senior male staffers often asked me to help in the kitchen and with baking activities, rather than participate in the agricultural tasks. Furthermore, in addition to agriculture, the training centers in Japan had a “home econom­ ics training course” (kaseika kenshū) in which trainees came for a year or longer to learn various cooking techniques, Japanese recipes, traditional arts such as the tea ceremony, and kimono making, for example, and also helped out in the kitchen every day. The trainees were all women. The separation of men and women at the training centers made sense in a way, considering the ethical problems of romance and sex in a school- like environment. Love affairs between trainees and between trainees and staffers were prevalent, as we know from the many people who married and raised families in or near the training centers in Japan, Myanmar, and elsewhere, but such relationships were not officially sanctioned. Sleeping quarters were divided in the training centers, as well as in the Tokyo of­ fice. The Tokyo headquarters had a dormitory for some of the unmarried Japanese staff members, young and old alike, and for the one or two non- Japanese staffers who had come from the training centers overseas. When I learned of this arrangement during an early informal conversation with a group of young Japanese staff members and one senior staffer, I asked them if they ever got together for a movie night or to hang out. They replied that the men and women lived on separate floors, and there was no mingling between them. “Wow, that sounds strict!” I commented, lightly. “There are some things where we are a bit behind [okureteru] or old [furui] in OISCA,” said one of the few young Ananaikyō staffers. The one senior staff member in that conversation, a man in his seven­ ties, intervened: “But there is some truth in what is behind or old.” I did not have the chance to ask him what that “truth” was, but given that he was Ananaikyō, he may have been referring to the “natural” distinc­ tion between men and women that I heard about later in my fieldwork. This kind of thinking at times intersected with larger political projects in Japan. One day in April 2010 while I was visiting a training center in Japan, the senior staffers took all the staff members, trainees, and me to a ceremony that a nearby Ananaikyō branch was holding around a visit by

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the religion’s new and third leader, Nakano Etsuko. When we arrived, we found that several dozen other Japanese people, presumably Ananaikyō members from the local area, were also there. After a long day of talks by Ananaikyō officials about the religion’s history (touching only briefly on OISCA) and Yonosuke’s teachings, the official in charge, Tsuchiya-san, ended the event with a talk about Japanese identity. He explained that there was an urgent need for young people in Japan today to truly feel their identities as Japanese. To this end, he had begun taking groups of young Ananaikyō members to Tsushima, an island 130 kilometers from the main island of Kyushu and only 50 kilometers from the Korean Peninsula. The aim was to pray for “the peace and safety of the nation” (kokka antai) and to pay respects to soldiers who had died in the Sea of Japan during World War II. For Tsuchiya-san, the most important outcome of the trip was that when the young people stood facing the ocean, they could see the contours of the Korean Peninsula and realize that the edges of the national border were right there in front of them. “Japan could be invaded at any minute,” he emphasized. At the end of his talk, Tsuchiya-san pulled out a flyer with a picture of a politician in the Liberal Democratic Party. “Please vote for Yamatani Er­ iko in this coming election over the summer,” he announced.5 He stressed the importance of protecting Japanese traditions, concluding, “If we allow something like the law permitting foreigners to vote or married couples to have separate surnames, those who will be most affected will be our chil­ dren!” He was referring to recent challenges to, first, the law that permitted only Japanese citizens to vote while excluding other permanent residents (even descendants of Koreans who were forcibly brought to Japan as part of its colonial strategies in the twentieth century) and, second, the law that stipulated that married couples had to have the same surname, in most cases leading to women having to adopt their husband’s names. Tsuchiya-san and his colleagues wanted to maintain the status quo on both fronts. In 2015 the Japanese Supreme Court upheld the latter law, dealing a blow to women’s rights activists who had campaigned for the changes and a victory to groups such as Ananaikyō (BBC 2015). Even though staff members in OISCA did not explicitly refer to this law or other political projects, their views on gender (and kinship and marriage), especially those of the senior male Japanese staffers, were akin to the views of political power holders who sought to maintain a patriarchal legal and political system. In Myanmar, gender distinctions were not as prominent. Burmese women in the villages near the training center told me they felt neither unequal to men nor treated as such. Married women explained that they

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and their husbands were equal decision makers in their households. At the training center, male and female trainees and staff members ate at sepa­ rate tables in the shared canteen, but otherwise they tended to do things together—cooking, the agricultural tasks, and the cleaning—although they did spend their free time at night and during weekends separately. Yet when I asked one of the senior female Burmese staff members what the biggest problem for women was in the villages where OISCA works, she told me that it was the difference in wages. Sakurai-san, who was part of our conversation, stated that this difference was due to the different jobs that men and women did, not to a disparity based on gender. The staffer, however, strongly disagreed, explaining that men and women in these vil­ lages basically did the same jobs, so the differential pay was due to gender discrimination. At the training center, people did not speak about gender roles, but the senior staffers were mostly men, and they were the ones everybody talked about when discussing who might be chosen as the center’s first Burmese director, if that ever happened. If staffers married each other and had chil­ dren, it was usually the woman who quit the job to care for the children. Although such distinctions and separations happened to different degrees in Japan and Myanmar, the imaginations of being like family in both countries were similarly gendered, with women occupying a subservient role.

De-kinning Work Neither Japanese nor Burmese actors questioned the age-based, gen­ dered, and other hierarchies in the organization, but this did not mean that there were no frictions. Although “being like family” in OISCA often tran­ scended the biological and affinal definitions of kinship, such distinctions still mattered. For OISCA’s staffers and trainees, the problem of becoming one through notions of family-ness involved a challenge of prioritizing different relations. In order for a new kinning around the collectivity of the training centers and OISCA to be possible, de-kinning of other ties had to take place (Howell 2006). This was always an imperfect process, and people remained caught between different relational demands. As Kathryn Goldfarb (2012, 2016) demonstrates in her ethnographies of adoption and foster care in Japan, people today constantly negotiate the social constructs of blood ties and fictive kinship to navigate shifting boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, and we see a similar dynamic in OISCA. In particular, as Hasan-san and Ko Thein had intimated in their life narratives above, people struggled with the difficulty of prioritizing

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commitments and relations in OISCA when biological or affinal ties demanded other commitments. For Burmese staffers, this issue always seemed to be on their minds in one way or another, especially for those who had already spent several years at the center. One day Ma Su, one of the female staffers with whom I spent much of my time, told me about her parents. Although she was usually carefree and funny, often making others bend over with laughter, this time she had a pained look on her face. She told me that both of her parents had gone to school only up to the fourth grade, although they were avid readers and had a lot of life experiences. “But because all three of their children have gone to university, they seem to think of us as better than them and often ask for our advice,” she noted. Ma Su did not like this because she wanted to think of her parents as more knowledgeable than their children. Her father had diabetes, and when he initially found out about it, he became very depressed. Before, he used to wake up at three in the morning every day to work in the fields, but he suddenly stopped working. “He stopped moving altogether and would stay in his chair all day long,” Ma Su said. When Ma Su returned from her one-year training in Japan and found her father in this condition, she tried to motivate him by telling him that diabetes was not a fatal disease. She made him move about, taking walks with him and encouraging him to do some farmwork. Her mother would say that everyone was happy when Ma Su was home because her father seemed to do better when she was there. Ma Su felt bad that she could not be at home to help her father. I knew that she was committed to her work at the training center, but her biological family’s needs pulled her in other direc­ tions. She was not unique in this sense, for I heard other Burmese staffers talk about similar family obligations and emotions that they had to balance. Conflicts between biological and OISCA kin existed among Japanese staffers as well. One of the most senior staff members in the Tokyo office was a man in his late fifties, Tanabe-san. He came from an old Ananaikyō family, meaning that his parents and grandparents had been with Yono­ suke since before Yonosuke established Ananaikyō. Thus, Tanabe-san grew up with teachings, customs, and objects related to Ananaikyō as well as Ōmoto. Joining OISCA seemed to be a natural course for him. But it was not an easy decision for him. In explaining his trajectory, he told me that his father decided to serve (hōshi) Ananaikyō full-time during the same year that Tanabe-san was born. That is, his father went to live and work at the Ananaikyō headquarters in Shizuoka, leaving his family behind.

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“I do not have any memories of living with my father, because he was at the Ananaikyō headquarters my whole life,” Tanabe-san explained matter-of-factly. “In that sense, you could say that I was raised by a single mother.” As if to stress the point, he reiterated that this meant that his age equaled the number of years that his father had been at the Ananaikyō head­ quarters. Telling me indirectly that this had not been easy on his mother or siblings, he explained that, as a young man, he decided that he did not want to cause trouble and suffering to the people in his life and chose to become a civil servant, according to his mother’s wishes. Although he did not renounce Ananaikyō, he did not want to devote himself entirely to the institution at the expense of his biological family. He told me that it was only after he made sure that his mother and the rest of his family would not be hurt by his decision that he joined OISCA. This story took me by surprise because I had assumed that staffers from Ananaikyō fami­ lies joined OISCA without tribulations. Clearly, people’s lives were not as simple as that. For young Burmese staffers as well as for older Japanese and Ananaikyō staff members, becoming one with others and the organization sometimes demanded painful decisions, having to respond to divergent relational demands. The work of de-kinning was never complete for any of the staffers I met, and how different forms of relatedness intersected in OISCA also cre­ ated chasms between staffers. To be an OISCA staffer from an Ananaikyō family meant, not only having access to religious teachings and histories that might help clarify the NGO’s approach to aid work, but also having been involved in OISCA activities from a young age. Time afforded by biological family connections was something that non-Ananaikyō staff members could not share. An event will illustrate this. One day while I was at the Tokyo office, I sat at a desk and looked through old OISCA magazines to understand the organization’s history better. Staffers regularly stopped to look over my shoulder and comment on the old photographs or articles spread in front of me. Ogawa-san was one of the few young Ananaikyō members who had been hired recently at OISCA—or, rumor had it, she had been assigned to OISCA by Yoshiko. Whatever the story, she usually seemed to be no different from the other young staffers in the Tokyo office. On this day, she stopped by my desk longer than the others, flipping through the old magazine issues with great fascination. She stopped at one article. “That’s me!” she said in surprise.

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Other staffers gathered around us. Sure enough, her name and a pic­ ture of a child graced the page, accompanied by an essay that she had written as a primary school student. She had apparently won a children’s essay contest that OISCA staffers had organized for an event in southern Japan. Harada-san, another young Ananaikyō member and OISCA staffer, told us that he had also submitted an essay but did not win. He joked that he had been extremely jealous of Ogawa-san. She laughed. They began to tease each other, recalling their awkward junior high school days. I remembered how Harada-san had previously described “a sense of being relatives” (miuchikan) among Ananaikyō members. Soon other staff mem­ bers retreated to their desks, unable to join in Ogawa-san and Harada-san’s banter. What started as a shared interest in the organization’s history as it was captured in old magazine articles quickly turned specific, limiting the experience to those few who had grown up with Ananaikyō and, by exten­ sion, OISCA. If life was entangled with OISCA for some staffers such as Ogawa-san, Harada-san, and Shiraki-san and some older non-Japanese staffers such as Hasan-san, this was not the case for many others. One of the causes of this disparity lay in the temporal differences between biologi­ cal and fictive ties of “being like family.” Those who joined the “OISCA family” as an adult could not compete with the memories and intimacies forged among Ananaikyō staffers who had known each other from child­ hood. The relations via biological and affinal ties among Japanese staff members clashed against other forms of relatedness, not because of the categorical distinctions between them, but because of the different temporal depths afforded by each. The value placed on “smelling like mud” in OISCA allowed people from different backgrounds to come together and find meaning in the struggles to connect with each other. But the tension between different forms of relatedness suggests that the ethic of immersing oneself in muddy labor in OISCA depended on people’s ability and willingness to sever other relations. In turn, life and work in OISCA promised intimate relations and a sense of belonging, as long as people were willing and able to commit themselves to collective labor. In light of the notions of “Shinto” environ­ mentalism in OISCA, moreover, the intimacy of these relations not only mobilized a collective form of oneness but also called for connections across human and nonhuman divides. How were these kinds of human- nonhuman intimacies achieved in OISCA? We now turn to this question in the next chapter.

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eptember 2010 was my first month at the Myanmar train­ ing center. During this time, a group of Japanese university Sstudents came to visit for a few days. For most of them, this was their first time in a “developing country” or in an Asian country outside Japan. They were from the Tokyo area and had no experience doing agricultural or manual labor. One morning we followed Ko Win, who was in charge of rice cultivation, to the paddies, where we were to help staff members and trainees prepare bokashi fertilizer. To make organic bokashi compost or fertilizer, biodegradable waste matter is combined with other organic materials, a process that incubates microorganisms that ferment the waste matter and make it beneficial to the soil. Farmers, environmentalists, and others around the world have taken up this Japanese technique for sustainable practices in agriculture as well as in households. The ingredients for bokashi fertilizer depend on local resources. At the OISCA Myanmar training center, staffers used a mixture of chicken or pig excrement, rice bran, oil scraps, ash, soil, water, and what they call bokashi seed (bokashi myōzẹ in Burmese and tane in Japanese), which was the source of the microorganisms. Staff members could obtain most of these materials at the training center; other ingredients, such as oil scraps, they bought from nearby villagers. This day, Ko Win asked the Japanese students and me to help the trainees, staffers, and hired female laborers from the village carry chicken manure and mix the materials for the fertilizer. The bird excrement, which had been mixed with rice husks ahead of time, was dried and stored in a shed a few hundred yards from where Ko Win asked us to make the mixture. Rice paddies surrounded us on all sides, but we stood on concrete floor, half of it covered by a roof that would protect the bokashi mixture from rain and excess sunlight. The distance from the covered area to the storage shed did not seem far, but in the intense heat and under the weight of the baskets of manure, a couple of trips were enough to drain our energy. Each container probably weighed

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over eighty pounds once a trainee filled it. While it took two or three of us Japanese participants to drag a basket over to the covered area, the staffers and laborers hoisted one onto each of their heads. It was evident that we were slowing them down rather than helping. After transporting the chicken manure, we helped the trainees and staffers lay out the white-colored excrement onto the concrete floor in a neat rectangle of approximately two by five yards. Three of the trainees brought large bags of rice bran from another storage house, and we poured this evenly on top of the chicken manure. Next, Ko Win took out a small plastic bag of what looked like soil, labeled “bokashi seed,” and asked two of the Japanese students to mix this ingredient with some of the rice bran. The two women hovered over the bucket, at first shyly, but they soon squatted down and began to mix the material in the container with their bare hands. Once they were done, we all helped sprinkle the mixture over the first two layers. We followed this with a layer of oil scraps and then a layer of ash. By this point we were covered in the various materials, from the flaky residues of dried chicken excrement smeared on our clothes to the powdery gray ashes that clung to our sweat. Ko Win separated the mound into two long, rectangular piles and asked us to “turn it over” (kirikaeshi) so that the ingredients would be mixed together. This was no ordinary mixing; there was a systematic movement that we had to follow. Two staff members, each holding a shovel, stood at opposite ends of one of the piles and showed us how it was done. Starting at one end, one of them scooped up some of the mixture and tipped it away from the pile to his right. The other person, standing on the same side of the pile, did the same from the other end, turning over the mixture to his left (to the same side as the other staffer). The first staffer repeated the gesture on his end; then quickly the second one followed. They moved down the pile toward each other in this manner, scraping their shovels against the concrete floor in an entrancing rhythmic mirroring. Halfway through the pile, the staffers handed over the shovels to two of the students and asked them to continue the task. The work turned out to be more difficult than it appeared. The women giggled in astonishment at the unexpected strength that the task required. While we took turns laboring over the piles, some of the trainees went to the pond nearby to get water in large watering cans. They showered this onto the mixture that we had turned over. Then we had to repeat the process going the other way, the mixture even heavier with the added moisture. The trainees returned with water a few more times. We continued to turn over the mixture in one direction and then the other until Ko Win told us to stop. I stretched in relief. He bent down to check

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one of the piles with his hands. Taking a handful of the soil-like mixture, he gripped it tightly and then looked at the way it held together. “If it is too dry it will crumble, and if it is too wet it will be too firm,” he explained. The texture had to be somewhere in between. He urged us to feel the mixture with our hands as well. The soil was cool to the touch, and when I wrapped my fingers around it, the cylindrical form stayed on my palm like a misshapen rice ball. Ko Win seemed satisfied. Staffers brought over some blue tarpaulin sheets and covered the mounds so that the mixture could ferment for the following ten days. If the students and I thought that this was a lot of work, it was not until a few days later, after the visitors had left, that I became aware of the other layer of labor that had gone into that pile of bokashi fertilizer. One day Ko Win and four other staff members invited me to take part in making bokashi seed, an ingredient we had used in the fertilizer. Ko Win told me that the source of the microorganisms in the bokashi seed we were about to make was soil collected from ten different uncontaminated places around the paddies and fields of the training center, such as underneath shrubs. The bacteria-laden soil was then mixed with water from washed rice, fruit peels, and other material that would be food for the bacteria. The soil would then be mixed with rice bran and a bit of water and fermented for approximately ten days. Ko Win explained that at that point the quality of the bacteria would need to be checked, based on the color of the mold. If it was white, it was good; if it was green or black, it had gone bad. The smell was also important. If the fermentation had failed, a foul odor would be detected. “If it smells good to people,” he stated simply, “it means that good bacteria were made.” Once this starter culture of “seed bacteria” was ready, they would combine it with sawdust, rice bran, and oil scraps to make the bokashi seed, which was packaged in small plastic bags. This final stage was what I was witnessing this day. Two staff members began to set up a large vertical contraption con­ sisting of flat bamboo containers stacked on top of each other, resembling a tiffin lunch box but with space between the layers. One of the staffers started a fire on the concrete floor—after a bit of effort and teasing from the others—and placed a large pot of water on it. The bamboo contraption was placed in the pot, as might be done with a bamboo steamer for cooking. Ko Win explained that they were going to steam the mixing ingredients—saw­ dust, rice bran, and oil scraps—to disinfect them before adding the seed bacteria. While the water was boiling, the four staffers began to transfer

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each of the three ingredients into new bags to be weighed on a scale in the correct proportions: four parts sawdust, three parts rice bran, and three parts oil scraps. They laid out seventy kilograms of sawdust, sixty kilograms of rice bran, and sixty kilograms of oil scraps on the floor in beautiful circular layers of reddish brown, black, and light tan colors. We all crouched down around what seemed like a piece of abstract art and began mixing the chalky ingredients with our hands. The rice bran gave off a warm fragrance and my hands and forearms felt smooth—no wonder women in Japan had long used it as a beauty product. As we worked the mixture into a darker shade of brown, the men began to discuss something earnestly. Then Ko Win exclaimed, “If the proportion needs to be four-to-three-to-three, we needed to have eighty kilograms of sawdust, not seventy!” We half gasped, half laughed. None of us had realized the mistake until then. There was no more sawdust in this particular storage shed, so one of the staffers hopped onto a bicycle and hurried back to another part of the training center to get more. But in the meantime, the other people began to put the mixture in the flat bamboo containers and placed them in the contraption over the boiling water. As they loaded up the first set, they real­ ized now that they had forgotten the cover for the contraption. Laughing, another staffer jumped onto a second bicycle and went to retrieve this miss­ ing item. The first set of containers with the mixing ingredients continued to steam above the boiling water, without the cover. After ten minutes, the two men returned, one of them with a large tin cylinder on his head, and the other one swerving left and right as he balanced the ten kilograms of sawdust tied to the back of his bicycle. Ko Win and the others added the new sawdust to the mixture on the ground. Of course, now that a portion of the wrongly measured mixture had been steaming in the bamboo containers, the addition of ten kilograms of sawdust to the remaining ingredients could not correct the ratio anymore. But the staffers continued with their work, steaming the mixture in batches for fifteen minutes each and then laying each batch out on a plastic tarp on the ground to cool. In the afternoon, we would go back to add the seed bacteria to the disinfected mixture to finish making thebokashi seed.

A Circulatory Sociality The bokashi seed turned out well in the end, with a nice coat of white mold, although we would not know until it was used in the bokashi

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fertilizer and the paddies if the wrong proportion of ingredients would make a difference in crop yields. Making the fertilizer was a cumbersome process that required tiring physical labor but also attention to details: bodily movements, proper ingredients, and proper measurements. This at­ tentiveness was part of the training centers’ emphasis on discipline, which was not only about morning routines and strict schedules but also about careful and measured practices. But this was never a perfected affair, as we saw in the staffers’ mistakes in measuring the ingredients for the bokashi seed. In this chapter, I look at discipline as a particular modality of care in the context of efforts to create a sustainable environment in the training centers. Whereas discipline has been discussed in previous chapters as practices that were defined by claims of “Japaneseness” and efforts to “be­ come one” that were resonant with imperialist aspirations, in this chapter I explore how discipline in the training centers connected those “Japanese” imaginaries with visions of sustainable development. Most notably, discipline as a modality of care rested on how the atten­ tion to particular forms of practice enabled the circulation of waste matter through the environment of the training center. We saw this in the making of bokashi seed and fertilizer, a process in which people used chicken excrement and agricultural by-products from the training center to make organic fertilizer, allowing waste matter to circulate through the environ­ ment as it took on other forms. Here it was the attentiveness to practices that mattered most, not so much the perfection of precision. If we think of the making of bokashi fertilizer, we see the importance of a prescribed set of activities and lifestyle in ensuring that the agricultural by-products were collected, used, and recycled properly. The care that went into attending to details was paramount to how life and work were organized at the training center. Furthermore, the circulation of waste in this environment depended on specific human-nonhuman relations—namely, the interactions between people, animals, and effective microorganisms (EM). EM turned out to be a central character in these relationships. The discipline in making bokashi seed and fertilizer and in caring for farm animals at the center revolved largely around the creation and reproduction of these minuscule life-forms, which made the transformation and circulation of waste matter possible. I describe the circulation of waste and the interdependent relation­ ships between humans and nonhumans enabled through that movement as a “circulatory sociality.” I take this phrase from a purposefully literal and idiosyncratic translation of Japanese staff members’ explanation of the training centers as creating a junkangata shakai. This phrase is used among Japanese actors working on policies and activities in environmental

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sustainability and is officially translated as “material-cycle society” by the government. At the Myanmar training center, the use of materials from the immediate environment and agricultural by-products reflected this idea of creating a system in which materials are recycled and reused. OISCA’s Japanese staffers probably used the term junkangata shakai to reference their activities in light of these wider discourses. In many ways the ideas about junkan (circulation or cycle) in Japan’s Basic Environment Plan (Kankyō Kihon Keikaku) of 1994 echoes OISCA’s philosophies about the coexistence of humans and nature. For example, the plan’s section on long-term goals states that “the environment is founded upon a circulation [junkan] of materials [busshitsu] between air, water, soil, and life-forms, and the maintenance of an intricate balance of the ecosystem” (Ministry of the Environment 1994). This phrasing resembles the expressions of the interconnectedness of life-forms in OISCA’s mission statement. Contrary to these abstract conceptualizations of circulation in the environment, the Fundamental Plan for Establishing a Sound Material- Cycle Society (Junkangata Shakai Keisei Suishin Kihonhō) defines the term more narrowly in terms of waste management and the three Rs of waste (reduce, reuse, recycle) (Ministry of the Environment 2000). Despite the appeal to the idea of junkangata shakai, I suggest that OISCA staffers’ approach differed from this policy focus on waste management, largely due to the “Shinto” environmentalism underlying the organization. In 1963, Yonosuke wrote:

All life-forms, including humans, live in the womb of the Great Life of the Universe. Even after being born on earth through the power of Great Nature, we are connected to the universe by an invisible lifeline and protected by it, bathing in the great virtues of the earth, and breathing the air of the great skies. . . . When we sense the pulse of life running through our flesh and the honorable will of Great Nature residing there—that is, the flow of the Great Spirit of the Universe—our hearts tremble at the pre­ cious existence of humanity, and we cannot but be grateful for the Great Nature of the Universe. (Nakano Yonosuke 1963, 42; orig. Japanese)

Yonosuke’s teachings promoted an awareness of the connection between humans, nature, and all living beings within an all-encompassing universe. Many senior Japanese staff members echoed this worldview. For instance, one of them summed up the organization’s approach to sustainable agri­ culture and development in terms of the focus on the soil (tsuchi) as the basis of the circulation (junkan) of life. Drawing scenes in the air with his

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hands, he told me that there are trees on the mountains, fruits on those trees, animals that eat those fruits, and the animals’ feces that go back into the soil and nourish the trees. His hands linked in front of him. “All life is con­ nected.” Yonosuke’s teachings about the circulation and interdependence of human and nonhuman life appeared in various staff members’ explanations of sustainability, albeit often indirectly. Even though staffers rarely repeated Yonosuke’s philosophies verba­ tim in their everyday work, and not all staff members adopted or even knew about “Shinto” environmentalist views, the idea of junkangata shakai in OISCA cannot be reduced to waste management in the ordinary sense of the term. I consider “management,” in this context, as a process of subject- making through a rethinking of discipline, beyond orthodox definitions. Anthropologists and other scholars have studied questions of management in contexts of development aid and environmentalism, showing how is­ sues such as poverty and ecological degradation have become questions of techno-managerial intervention that sideline the role of politics (Adams [1990] 2008; Ferguson 1994; Ilcan and Phillips 2010; Li 2011). These analyses rely on Foucault’s theory of governmentality, which helps us understand how poverty as well as people are governed through diffuse managerial practices of calculation and regulation (Rose 1999, 212–213). In this framework, “development,” for instance, becomes an extension of governmental techniques that compel people to adhere to an instrumental logic of calculations, bureaucratic organization, and inputs and outputs within set time frames of projects (cf. Green 2003). In this sense, then, “management” orders social life so that everything fits within an instrumental calculation of inputs and outputs, means and ends, and it is also a process of making particular subjects of government. Thus, management is a way to make the modern workplace “a key site for the formation of persons” (Miller and Rose 1995, 428, cited in Cohen 2015, 328). In studying how “communication” is deployed in the manage­ ment practices of a US multinational corporation in Russia, Susanne Cohen (2015) proposes that, in management strategies, not only is communication being emphasized as an instrumental tool, but it is also “being moralized as an ethical way of relating to others in its own right” (328). Management is as much about a moral project of cultivating particular kinds of individuals and their relations to one another as it is about instrumentalism. It is this aspect of subject- and relation-making in processes of man­ agement that I want to highlight in approaching circulatory sociality. A relevant technology for managing waste that resonates with the approaches in OISCA is the growing attention to ecological sanitation (ecosan) toilets

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around the world. Ecosan toilets are designed to use little or no water and allow for the repurposing of feces and urine in fertilizers for agricultural uses. As the World Bank (2015) states, ecosan toilets can help produce rich resources from excreta while conserving valuable water. But the interna­ tional agency also points out disadvantages to this technology: because ecosan toilets need to be operated according to technical specifications, they demand great responsibility from users and a monitoring system so that people use them correctly. In other words, it demands a particular discipline from people. A founding father of ecosan toilets, Steven A. Esrey (2002), explained that ecosan is “about a way of life, and how we should live on this planet, not just about how toilets should be different.” He argued that this way of life should be “a closed-loop ecosystem approach” in which—instead of the conventional linear form of disposal, as in the “flush-and-discharge” model of modern flush toilets—we would relate to our environments in terms of circular flows that “close the loop” of nutrients and waste (see also Esrey et al. 2000). The circulation of waste in this imagination requires not only technical knowledge about the management of inputs and outputs of waste but, more importantly, a particular kind of attitude and disciplined practice. In order to become a closed-loop environment where waste is transformed into a resource, the participants in the system need to follow particular rules of production and consumption so that, for instance, only organic matter enters the circulation of waste. This need for transformed persons in visions of sustainability is not restricted to ecosan toilets. Advocates of organic and natural agriculture state that nurturing beneficial microorganisms in the soil requires measured and experience-based control of the specific microflora at hand (Higa and Parr 1994). Thus, projects of sustainability are in many ways efforts to make specific types of persons. The circulatory sociality within OISCA’s Myanmar training center, therefore, was not solely about the instrumentalist management of waste or the reflections of a vision informed by claims of “Shinto” environ­ mentalism. The circulation of waste was also, importantly, about making persons—trainees as well as aid workers—and other living beings who could become embodiments and agents of sustainability through certain forms of discipline within an enclosed environment. Staffers and trainees at the Myanmar training center watched what they discarded, cleaned the grounds diligently to ensure a proper environment for microorganisms, and cared for the farm animals around the clock for both their produce and their refuse. The making of a sustainable environment through the circulation of waste involved the shaping of both persons and other living beings such as

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microorganisms and pigs in particular ways. Discipline in OISCA, then, was not just about the regulation of the human body through capillaries of governmental power in the Foucauldian sense (Foucault 1977) or a Japa­ nese cultural tendency to enforce kinds of discipline aimed to prioritize the collectivity above individuals (Rohlen 1974). Discipline was also about the cultivation of nonhuman life in relation to human life in order to enable a circulatory sociality—that is, the circulation of waste matter and thereby of human-nonhuman relations. The aim was not so much to make “docile bod­ ies” (Foucault 1977, 135) as it was to foreground the value of a disciplined care necessary to enable such relations.

The Care of Discipline A few months after I left the OISCA training center in Yesagyo, I visited another Japanese agricultural NGO in Myanmar, where a former OISCA trainee now worked as a staff member. As we sat in one of the build­ ings that this NGO used for agricultural trainings, he told me (in Burmese) that he had enjoyed his time at the OISCA training center, learning about agriculture as well as the “OISCA spirit” (OISCA seikdhat) and discipline (sīkān). “Learning discipline was good,” he continued, “having to wake up at five in the morning, eat at six, start work at seven, and generally having to do things at specific times like that.” I asked him what he understood the OISCA spirit to be about. “It is about working hard to overcome difficul­ ties,” he replied. “For example, if I was working with the chickens and they were not laying enough eggs, the point is to try again and again without giving up [seikdhat ma chạ bē nẹ].” The emphasis on discipline and the virtue of perseverance despite uncertainties and failures seemed to go hand in hand in his memory of living and working at the training center. A sign on the wall above his head said in Burmese: “If you follow discipline, you will develop” (Sīkān laik hmạ tōtet mē). The value of discipline that he had learned in OISCA still seemed to matter to him in his new workplace. That this former trainee talked about discipline in the same breath as perseverance is interesting in that it points to the ways that we might think of discipline as a form of care. Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser, and Jean­ nette Pols (2010) suggest that practices of care are modalities of persistent tinkering and attentive experimentation. The authors explore “what failure calls for in an ethics, or should we say an ethos, of care: try again, try something a bit different, be attentive” (14). Care, therefore, can be about the kind of perseverance in a disciplined environment that the above young man talked about. If we think about care in practice as forms of attentive,

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choreographed movements (Law 2010), we can see that discipline can be a form of continuous labor and care. At the Myanmar training center, the choreography of care for farm animals revolved largely around the discipline of cleaning. Pigs, for in­ stance, needed to be cared for so that they would produce piglets that might be sold to villagers and, perhaps more important, so that their excrement could be used in the organic fertilizer for the rice paddies. When I was at the Myanmar training center, Ko Thein was the staffer in charge of the pigs. The pig farming section of the center that I saw was impressive. Housed in a large structure of concrete flooring and tin roofs, the dozens of pigs and piglets seemed to thrive. Adult pigs shared one stall per pair and had plenty of room to move about. The piglets ran around in one large stall, except when they spent time with the mothers to nurse. Ko Thein pointed out that the center had four types of pigs: Berkshire, Large White or Yorkshire, Duroc, and LY, a cross between Landrace and Yorkshire. Most of the adults had been originally purchased from the government’s livestock center in Yangon. Now the center’s pigs included four males, over forty females, and approximately a hundred piglets. The staffers and trainees cared for the pigs in a systematic way. Ko Thein explained that the feed for the adult pigs over the course of five days totaled one hundred kilograms of rice bran, forty kilograms of oil scraps, ten kilograms of fish meal, two hundred kilograms of corn, and ten to fifteen kilograms of rice husk charcoal. Piglets between twenty-one days and three months of age were fed the same amounts of the same foods as the adults ate, plus twenty more kilograms of fish meal. Piglets up to forty-five days of age were also given boiled rice mixed with weeds, raw garbage, oil scraps, and rice bran. Staffers and trainees fed the pigs four times a day, with each pig receiving approximately two kilograms of food each day. Giving them enough water to drink was also essential, because of the heat in the region for most of the year. Looking over at a pig lying on the floor, with a group of tiny piglets frantically tackling her for milk, Ko Thein told me that recently he had started giving the mother pigs with nursing piglets some broken rice and raw garbage from the kitchen mixed in with oil scraps and rice bran. He had seen villagers feed this type of mixture to their pigs, which seemed to help them grow, so he had decided to give the technique a try. Ko Thein then pointed to the most important part of the pig farming: the manure. At the back of each pig stall was a sunken area into which staffers and trainees pushed the excrement that they then mixed with rice husks from the training center’s paddies. Ko Thein told me that in Japan

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he saw farmers teach pigs to defecate and urinate in a central location where there was running water. He was not implementing this technique at the training center, but the pigs did not seem to do their business in their living spaces anyway. Most of them, he observed, did it generally toward the back of their stalls, away from the troughs of food and water near the gates. Staffers and trainees took out the manure mixed with rice husk every six months to be used in the rice paddies and vegetable fields. Ko Thein noted that they poured a liquid form of EM into the mixture once or twice a month to disinfect the excrement and eliminate the odor. “It doesn’t smell, right?” he asked, beaming. I cautiously breathed in the air and nodded in surprised agreement. Ko Win had told Ko Thein that, in the previous year, the bokashi fertilizer made from pig manure had worked better than that made from chicken excrement. They were going to experiment further with these different forms of manure to see what kind of mixture would work best. Making use of the manure meant that staffers and trainees had to spend significant time sweeping the urine and feces off the floor and into the designated spaces. They did this work four times a day. Cleaning was also important for the sake of the newborn piglets because they could easily get diarrhea if their living spaces became dirty. When I helped out with the pig farming, I also spent much of my time cleaning. The trainees in charge of the pigs for a given week had to sleep in the pig shed because the newborns required constant care. Their rooms were situated across from the pigpens. On the day that I joined the trainees to help them feed the pigs and clean the stalls at 9:30 a.m., they had already done the first round of cleaning at 7:00 a.m. So it should not have been that dirty at this point. But when a staff member asked me to help wash the water troughs and refill them with clean water, I hesitated at the sight of the murky liquid in the first of the containers. I could see specks of what seemed to be remains of food, probably dropped by a pig that had drooled into the water. The hole for the drain seemed to be plugged with a piece of cloth. After another few seconds of hesitation, I plunged my hand into the water to pull it out. Soon the inside walls of the trough appeared before me, brown water running past and over my flip-flops. I hosed out the container with clean water and watched unidentifiable bits slide down and out through the opening at the bottom. I inserted the wet cloth back into the drain hole, perhaps too gingerly. As soon as I filled the trough with water again, the stall’s occupant rushed to the trough. To my horror, the pig yanked out the cloth-plug and started to chew it. Water gushed out onto the cement floor. I desperately pulled the cloth out of the pig’s mouth and pushed it back into the hole.

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My hands were covered in pig saliva and dirty water. I did not make this mistake just once. It happened two or three more times. Our next task was to clean the floors. Using a long hose, we sprayed water into the stalls and swept it out toward the shared corridor between the pigpens. There must have been a logic and skill to the sweeping because I could not get the water out of the pens in the same thorough way that the trainees and staffers could. The ground was still glistening with water in the stalls I had swept. One of the staffers then showed me how to spray water at the pigs in order to wash the dirt off toward the back of the pens. He told me to squeeze the mouth of the hose to increase the pressure of the water flow and to aim in particular at the legs because they were the dirtiest parts of their bodies. Eyeing the feces in the spaces at the back of the pigpen, I could understand the reasoning. Dirty water sprayed everywhere as the pigs vigorously shook their heads. The traces of excrement trickled down into the sunken area at the back, where presumably the EM were working hard to transform the composition of the manure and erase the smell. Cleaning the pigpens in particular ways at specific times as part of the collective duties in the training center illustrated how discipline could be a modality of care. As with other forms of caring for a life, the regula­ tion of activities was necessary to keep the animals alive and enable the circulation of waste. Or rather, it was the attentiveness to these practices that marked discipline as care, because actual adherence to the rules and expectations was not always possible. Agricultural specialists often point out that farming is a highly variable practice that depends on the whims of specific environmental factors, and that is especially true in organic farming, in which the local and present conditions of the soil, weather, and other environmental and social elements matter greatly (Lichtfouse et al. 2009; Reijntjes et al. 1992). Sakurai-san also told me once that agricultural development aid was always subject to the indeterminate factors (fukakutei yōso) of nature, and as such, it could never be implemented in precise ways according to the instrumental logics of project management. Staffers could do everything according to plan, but a drought or an uncharacteristically heavy rainy season could change the outcomes of their agricultural work. Discipline constituted a necessary part of the functioning of the training center, but staffers were aware that people might diverge from expectations or that practices might not lead to the anticipated results. Discipline as a modality of care emphasized the importance of attentiveness to practice more than the achievement of precision. Thus, the tinkering that happened in moments of mishap or failure was valuable. The tactics and struggles to overcome failures involved a heightened awareness to the practice at hand,

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and this was what the value of discipline was about. Hence, we can see the Burmese staffers’ miscalculation of bokashi ingredients at the beginning of this chapter and Ko Thein’s experimentation with pig feed based on his observation of local villagers, as well as his failures over the years, as part of the framework of discipline as a modality of care, and care as a form of persistent tinkering.

EM One of the most important reasons for being attentive to practice in OISCA was to enable the circulation of waste matter. The regulated sched­ ule and collective cleaning duties existed in order to keep the pigs alive and healthy and to ensure that the excrement would be properly stored, collected, and moved so that staffers and trainees could transform it into fertilizer. Fundamentally, in saying this, I take the perspective that waste is not so much pollution or “matter out of place” (Douglas [1966] 2002) as it is a medium of social and material productivity through which one life becomes another—or in other words, it is a sign of life rather than decay or disorder or even excess (Evans et al. 2013; Hawkins 2006; Kevin Hetherington 2004; O’Brien 1999; Reno 2014; cf. Bataille [1967] 1991). Waste is material with social presence and is not necessarily that which is discarded or marked by symbols of death and exclusion.1 Waste can be a material process that generates new forms of sociality and values, even if those processes sometimes do involve the reproduction of inequalities (cf. Lathers 2006; Parreñas 2016).2 In OISCA, staffers and trainees treated waste as something other than refuse, and even as something beneficial and to be cared for, as they helped it circulate and transform into things such as fertilizer and eventually food. Materials such as animal and human excrement, food waste, and the by-products of farming moved through the training center in varying forms, and this process made visible particular actors, social relations, and ways of being. The circulation of waste coming out of the pigpens foregrounded one particular protagonist, or “actant”: EM (cf. Latour 1988). Microorganisms in the soil have garnered much attention among scholars, environmental­ ists, farmers, and aid and government officials interested in sustainable agriculture and development (FAO 2018; Insam et al. 2010; Lichtfouse et al. 2009; Satyanarayana et al. 2012). These people point to the advanta­ geous but understudied effects of microorganisms on agriculture, as well as the potential role of microorganisms in waste management systems. Japanese aid agencies such as JICA have been promoting the nurturing of

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microorganisms in the soil and the use of bokashi fertilizer in their sustain­ able agricultural and development projects around the world, including in Myanmar (JICA 2010). Among these microorganisms, EM are a particular set of bacteria identified in the 1990s by Higa Teruo, a former professor of horticulture at the University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa (retired in 2007). Called yūyō biseibutsu gun in Japanese and akyōpyụ thetshị anụziwạ in Burmese, EM consist of “a wide variety of effective, beneficial and non- pathogenic microorganisms produced through a natural process and not chemically synthesized or genetically engineered,” according to the EM Research Organization (EMRO) in Japan (2015b). EMRO is affiliated with Higa and produces trademarked EM products. The EMRO website states that there are three kinds of EM, all of which exist in nature and can be cul­ tivated through fermentation: lactic acid bacteria, yeast, and phototrophic bacteria. The EM that are used in agriculture and wastewater treatment are mostly phototrophic bacteria, which can be reproduced by “feeding” them with organic by-products such as rice bran, molasses, and water. As the EMRO website explains, EM “lives off our waste while we live off ‘their waste’ ” (2015b). That is, the microorganisms thrive by consuming our waste materials such as rice by-products and wastewater and, in turn, produce substances that improve the quality of soil. The EM solution that staffers used in the pigpens and elsewhere at the Myanmar training center came in the form of an amber-colored liquid that Sakurai-san kept in plastic bottles in his room. Years earlier, Kawaguchi- san had bought the original solution from a small amateur laboratory run by a veterinarian in Japan. When Sakurai-san took over, he tried to reproduce the EM. But he did not take the extremely high temperatures of the region into account and unfortunately failed to keep the microorganisms alive. Sakurai-san then turned to the Japanese magazine Gendai nōgyō (Mod­ ern Agriculture) and found a recipe for making EM solution—or rather, “indigenous bacteria” (dochakukin)—using one’s own paddy soil.3 He conducted several experiments using mud from the training center’s rice paddies and finally succeeded in making the amber bacterial culture. This EM solution was what staff members poured into the manure-filled troughs in the pigpens and down the toilets in the dormitories in order to catalyze the transformation of waste matter into something that could be used for agriculture. And in order for these EM to thrive and help the circulation of waste, people had to ensure that the manure was collected and stored properly and that the EM solution was used at designated intervals in their activities.

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The microorganisms nurtured in the process of making bokashi seed that I described above differed from those in the EM solution used in the pigpens. Nevertheless, both involved types of phototrophic effective micro­ organisms. The life-forms in the bokashi seed fed on the other ingredients in the fertilizer such as the chicken excrement and rice bran and then helped enrich the soil in the rice paddies and vegetable fields. Therefore, whether it was happening in the paddy fields or in the pigpens, the circulation of by-products and waste depended on the reproduction of EM and the care­ fully choreographed interaction between humans and bacteria. People’s attentiveness to measuring and mixing the proper bokashi ingredients, for example, aimed to create a mutual relationship in which people would rely on EM for turning waste matter into organic fertilizer, and in turn the EM would depend on humans to provide a desirable environment. Humans planned this interaction, but it was not a simple one-way regime. Unex­ pected occurrences, climate conditions, and the EM’s own trajectories in that particular environment also played roles beyond people’s control. Effective microorganisms were as common as chickens at the Myan­ mar training center, but I was intrigued to learn that only one of the four training centers in Japan used EM for treating manure or their wastewater. As far as I knew, the Myanmar training center was the only overseas proj­ ect site using EM. This disparity was due to controversies surrounding EM—some people in the public viewed Higa’s association with a new religion called Sekai Kyūseikyō (Church of World Messianity) as “cult­ ish,” and others from religious groups adhered to different ideologies of nature farming (shizen nōhō).4 Sekai Kyūseikyō was founded in 1935 and shares a lineage with Ananaikyō in that its founder, Okada Mokichi, was a onetime member of Ōmoto. In line with this tradition, Okada was a pro­ ponent of sustainable agricultural practices, most notably nature farming, which advocates an approach without pesticides or fertilizers (see chapter 2). As with Yonosuke, Okada’s predilection for sustainable agriculture echoed Onisaburō’s idea that agriculture should be based on the cycle of nature, whereby rice enters human bodies, becomes waste, and, through transformation into fertilizer, becomes rice once again. EMRO and Higa began their work in collaboration with Sekai Kyūseikyō and its affiliate organization, the International Nature Farming Research Center (Shizen Nōhō Kokusai Kenkyū Kaihatsu Sentā), but they presently deny any con­ tinuing relationships with the religious group (Higa 2014). Their use of EM also departs from the principles of nature farming. Given OISCA staffers’ efforts to distance themselves from new religions, it is not surprising that

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they would be cautious against affiliations with EM and Higa that might suggest ties with new religious movements. Another reason for the controversies over EM is interreligious con­ flict. The most prominent subbranch of Sekai Kyūseikyō is the Mokichi Okada Association (MOA), and its followers hold a position on EM that differs from Higa’s. MOA members advocate a form of nature farming that rejects the specific EM devised by Higa as an artificial and exter­ nal input and promotes instead only the nurturing of indigenous bacteria (dochakukin) found in local soils. EMRO officials themselves point to the MOA as the instigator of “EM bashing” (EMRO 2015a; Higa 2012). Other religious agricultural groups derived from Sekai Kyūseikyō also promote nature farming and oppose the use of EM, such as Shūmei Natural Ag­ riculture, part of the religious group Shinji Shūmeikai (Shūmei Natural Agriculture 2016). Despite these disagreements over EM, one training center in Japan adopted the use of EM, thanks to the conviction of Yamada-san, one of the senior staff members there. Yamada-san believed in the benefits of micro­ organisms for his training center, especially in making its waste system environmentally and financially sustainable. A few years earlier, in the mid-2000s, Yamada-san had begun thinking that the center needed to find ways to reduce the cost of cleaning its septic tank—more than 150,000 yen (about US$1,500) annually. He came across a book that argued for the use of EM in sewage treatment systems, which would make it unnecessary to clean the equipment for at least ten years. It had not been ten years yet when I spoke with him, but Yamada-san remarked that since they started using the liquid EM solution, the area next to the bathrooms, which used to smell bad from the sewage water, no longer stank. They had not cleaned the septic tank for five years now. “But ultimately,” he concluded, “indigenous bacteria are better than EM because EM are, in the end, external organisms.” He wanted to eventually be able to collect bacteria from the soil in the bamboo forests nearby, an ambition that still remained unrealized because of the time and labor it would take. He would probably envy how staffers at the Myanmar center were successfully collecting and reproducing EM from their rice paddies. The cultivation and use of microorganisms might not have reached Yamada-san’s ideals yet, but the presence of EM already played a role in shaping people’s actions at this particular training center. Every morning, pouring some of the EM liquid solution down the drains in the bathrooms formed part of the cleaning duties. As the liquid and its microorganisms

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traveled down the pipes and into the septic tank, it broke down the waste matter—at least in theory, since we could not actually see this happening. The EM transformed and circulated our waste in other ways as well. In addition to the toilets, the kitchen proved to be a place where the presence of EM and the circulation of waste were clear. Only one staff member was in charge of the center’s kitchen, a woman in her late fifties or early sixties, beautiful and elegant in her movements. I learned that Kusano-san was the mother of one of the young staff members in the Tokyo office and the daughter of a former director of this training center. They were an Ananaikyō family, except for her husband. Although she had spent her childhood coming to the training center, it was only after her youngest child—the thirty-year-old staffer in Tokyo—entered primary school that she decided to help out full-time. She had been working in the kitchen ever since. Her systematization of the cooking and menu was more thorough than that in any of the other kitchens I had seen at the training centers in Japan. She kept a set of recipes that she rotated throughout the year, making sure that there was one meat dish and one fish dish every day, in addition to something sweet at the end for lunch and dinner. During my two-week stay, the balance of tastes and textures, as well as the thoughtful lack of repetition made every meal satisfying despite the simplicity and delicate portions. As we chatted, she gently put me to work. She asked me to wash the rice but not to throw away the used water. Bending over a bowl in a large sink, I massaged the rice in ice cold water several times and care­ fully poured the cloudy liquid into a separate container. She told me to transfer some of the liquid—togijiru, as the water from washed rice is called in Japanese—into a large pot and the rest into a bucket. With the togijiru in the pot, she began to boil some daikon radishes. Then, lifting the bucket with the remaining liquid, she explained that we were going to add this rice water to the EM mixture that was fermenting in large tubs in the hallway outside the kitchen. The microorganisms would feed on the nutrients from this togijiru. Even though keeping and transferring the used water created additional work for us, given that the high nutrient content of togijiru has been said to contribute to undesirable bacterial growth in water in Japan, this reuse of the water made environmental sense. The presence of EM allowed us to reincorporate our waste, in this case togijiru, into the environment of the training center through the life processes of the microorganisms. Kusano-san also made use of waste matter in other ways in the kitchen. We had just finished deep-frying some chicken wings in oil, and

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I asked her how I should clean the pan. She took me to the courtyard outside. There was a bucket full of rice bran on the ground, the by-product of milling the rice harvested at the training center. Squatting and taking a handful of the fragrant brown powder, she showed me how to scrub the pan so that the bran would absorb the oil. I was surprised by how easily the oil disappeared into the rice bran particles. She told me that this oil-filled bran would then be used for the bokashi fertilizer in the rice paddies and vegetable fields. At other times, if there was not enough rice bran, Kusano- san made soap from used cooking oil with the trainees, an activity I had seen at another OISCA training center. We went back into the kitchen and finished preparing lunch. We had put the raw waste from the vegetables into a bucket, and at the end of the day we would take this to the poultry sheds in the far corner of the center’s grounds. Staffers and trainees would mix this raw kitchen waste with weeds from the courtyard, by-products from rice cultivation, and other miscella­ neous organic waste collected from nearby factories such as remains of tofu production, scraps of fish, and oyster shells. We would give this mixture to the birds, whose meat and eggs we would later consume. Our bodily wastes would then eventually “feed” the EM in the liquid solution that we poured down the drains. Although there was supplementary input from outside sources, it seemed as if most things produced at the training center—by people as well as animals and microorganisms—had a role to play in this enclosed circulation of materials and life processes. Waste, in this system, was not that which was discarded or out of place but constituted crucial nodes that connected one life to another. And for this possibility to be real­ ized, people had to be disciplined about waste collection and reuse. Anthropologist Joshua Ozias Reno (2014) argues that one of the rea­ sons we have come to see waste in terms of decay and death is related to the phenomenon of mass waste. In the large-scale productions of capitalist waste, the life-forms to which waste matter was and could be connected become invisible, and all we can see are the putrefying by-products of our contemporary existence. In contrast, then, we might say that small-scale environments that are not directly driven by capitalist principles, such as the environments at OISCA’s training centers, could be where we are able to see waste as processes that shape persons and relations. To go even further, disciplining people’s behaviors in such small environments might be a necessary component of the nonalienation of waste in achieving a sustainable system. The attentive work required around the uses of waste in a confined environment, such as the making of bokashi fertilizer in the Myanmar training center and the considered ways in which people made

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food in the kitchens, facilitated processes of circulation that interlinked people with nonhuman life-forms. And it was these relationships between people, animals, and microorganisms connected through the enclosed and small-scale circulation of waste matter that defined life and work at the training centers and the sustainable future that they promised.

A Protoecological Model? People speak of sustainability today in terms of sustainable develop­ ment, famously defined as a form of “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987). Coming out of the international discussions that led to the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, which strongly influenced the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the concept was first hailed as the dawn of a new approach that was going to take environmental crises seriously. But scholars and observers point out that the Earth Summit was in fact the beginning of the now mainstream thinking of sustainable development that reconciles environmental concerns with economic growth. Far from reexamining capitalist systems in light of the environment, sustainable development thinking has produced new ortho­ doxies of “market environmentalism” and “green businesses” in which economic growth and the technocratic management of nature have been foregrounded as interlinked keys to sustainability (Adams [1990] 2008; Corson et al. 2015; Escobar 1995; Fernando 2003). These approaches of market environmentalism are fundamentally “utilitarian, individualistic and anthropocentric” and “present the market as the most important mechanism for mediating between people, and regulating their interaction with the environment” (Adams [1990] 2008, 117). It is a form of “environmentality” that mobilizes not only diffuse technologies of environmental management as a way to govern populations but also an “intimate government” that shapes people’s subjectivities and relationships with their surroundings through everyday practices (Agrawal 2005). The shaping of subjectivities in this modality of environmental­ ism has resonances with the making of persons in OISCA. Discipline as a modality of care might appear to readers as a mechanism of pastoral power in a governmental regime. Foucault (2007) argued that the rise of the modern state saw a shift from sovereign power to forms of government that individuated citizens and managed populations for the sake of their welfare, like a shepherd might simultaneously control and care for his sheep (171–175). Thus, modern government is less about overt control and

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more about the intimate ways that people’s conducts are managed and nor­ malized. Although pastoral power has been tied closely to the emergence of governmentality, what we cannot overlook here is how pastoral power’s “only raison d’être is doing good,” and it is in this framing that Foucault (2007) states that “pastoral power is a power of care” (172). It is important to take note of this aspect of pastoral power because the discipline and care that OISCA staffers exhibited around animals, microorganisms, and their environment were not only a form of rule but also a form of doing good. Being animal or nonhuman, in this framework of pastoral power, is not only about being the subject of control but also about being enmeshed in relations of care (Pandian 2008). If we cross-fertilize these analyses of pastoral power with studies of sustainable development, we begin to see how the art of government from colonial to neoliberal capitalist regimes has often mobilized metaphors, practices, and relations of discipline and care in human-nature interactions. Like the shepherd and his sheep, those with authority in these modern regimes have taken on the responsibility of simultaneously controlling and caring for their subjects, presuming that the latter cannot take care of them­ selves. Although the combination of discipline and care here resonates with the practices I saw in OISCA, and although I recognize that the continuities between colonial and current capitalist systems of sustainable development are valuable, there is a significant difference between OISCA’s practices and the capitalist systems, in that pastoral power is based on an assump­ tion of radical difference between the shepherd and his flock (Pandian 2008, 92). In contrast, the circulatory sociality in OISCA training centers operated on an assumption and construction of oneness in which the move­ ment of waste connected different life-forms together in mutual relations of dependence. These were not egalitarian relations, but the underlying assumption was radical unity rather than radical difference. This meant that human and nonhuman life-forms were implicated in each other, even if they occupied unequal positions at the training center. The moral imagination to become one and the various practices that went into its realization in OISCA are not without their problems, as we have seen throughout this book. But it is also important to listen carefully to what OISCA staff members and trainees were proposing as a path to a better and sustainable world, a path that perhaps differs from the emphasis on capitalist growth and the neoliberalization of subjectivities and sociali­ ties. In discussing Japan’s environmental history and future, Julia Adeney Thomas (2013) proposes that we turn the discourse of economic and social decline in Japan on its head and see it as presaging a model for a different

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future. She suggests that if we let go of current standards of capitalist production, we could consider Japan today as a model of “a postcapitalist, protoecological nation” and see “how its declining population might rest more lightly on the land, leaving room for other species and for replenish­ ing renewable natural resources” (Thomas 2013, 297). Hints of this alter­ native future can be found in Japan’s history—spanning from (as Thomas notes) Ninomiya Sontoku (1787–1856), who adhered to the neo-Confucian validation of agriculture in his advocacy of independent rural communities, to (I would suggest) present-day OISCA. Thomas does not romanticize her proposition here. Her work has shown that Japan’s modern environmental history is not the exclusive purview of leftists; ecological ideologies have also compelled right-wing militarists and politicians (Thomas 2001). Regardless of political orientations, it may be time to examine more closely the imaginations and work of those actors such as OISCA staffers and trainees who posit a future outside the frameworks of neoliberal capi­ talism, even if they have not made a complete break from these regimes. This is akin to the calls by multispecies ethnographers to begin paying attention to how we exist in interspecies relations (Candea 2010; Haraway 2008; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010). In the context of this chapter, the practices in OISCA are even more tightly allied with ethnographies that focus on microbial life-forms as enmeshed in our politics and socialities (Helmreich 2009; Paxson 2008). Nevertheless, my argument is not only to take seriously microbes and animals in our social fabric but also to attend to the specific historical, political, and social implications of such proposals to think beyond the human, especially as nationalist politicians and conservative actors mobilize similar ideas in their claims of “Shinto” environmentalism. That is, the consideration of relations and practices be­ yond the human is not limited to liberal imaginaries, just as environmen­ talism has been part of both liberal and illiberal politics (Bramwell 1985; Dominick 1992; Pois 1986; Sharma 2011). In this book, taking seriously OISCA aid actors’ efforts to become one as a planet and a collectivity has helped us excavate alternative histories and futures of development in Asia, an unexplored set of practices of aid work, and unthinkable and even unsettling pasts and futures. Whether or not the political and social formations that this story depicts are desirable is a matter of debate that I leave with each reader.

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ll development aid projects are historically and re­ gionally specific. More than a reproduction of global Ainequalities or neoliberal regimes, the aspirations and activities I traced in this book drew from particular political ideologies, movements, and relationships in twentieth-century Japan and resonated with imaginations of a better world rooted in modern Japan’s relationship with Asia. Moreover, development aid work is not only about “develop­ mental” outcomes such as poverty reduction or empowerment; it also cultivates particular kinds of people shaped by ideas of professionalism, moral imaginations of the future, and relationships that cut across multiple boundaries. The Japanese concept of hitozukuri, used in OISCA and by other Japanese aid actors, captured this aspect of aid work (although I have used it to refer to the making of persons among aid workers—Japanese, Burmese, and other staffers) as much as it was about aid recipients (train­ ees and villagers). Following scholars of “Aidland,” I have examined the social world of “development professionals” as a productive site of inquiry, acknowledging that their knowledge practices and moral labor have an impact on how “development aid” is constituted and made meaningful for its participants (Fechter 2016; Fechter and Hindman 2011; Mosse 2011; Yarrow 2011). Some anthropologists argue that the focus on Aidland contains the danger of becoming too parochial, too individualist, and unaware of wider political and economic power dynamics that shape “development outcomes” (Harrison 2013). The case of OISCA, however, shows that an attention to the world of aid workers and their personal trajectories does not need to be apolitical or uncritical of development outcomes. First, the methods, pedagogies, and life stories of making persons have political sig­ nificance. In OISCA,how training activities happened—through collective labor, a communal lifestyle, kinship metaphors, disciplinary practices, and so on—pointed to important ideological and historical processes underlying

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OISCA as well as general approaches to aid among other Japanese aid ac­ tors. An attention to the personal and relational world of aid workers can reveal how the values that they hold important and the actions they take (or not) have histories and political implications themselves. These are also outcomes of development efforts that need to be interrogated. Second, examining the everyday practices and discourses of aid workers’ lives can destabilize standard definitions of the “development professional.” Analyses of Aidland tend to treat development professionals as existing in a managerial and rationalized world, even if they struggle within it. But a close-up of OISCA staffers’ activities indicates that the development professional looks quite different in this situation. Many of OISCA’s senior Japanese staffers and Burmese staff members resisted managerialism, and rationalism was not an unquestioned framework. Understanding the details of aid workers’ aspirations and practices can challenge generalized frameworks that present development professionals as a homogenous group of people. Lastly, looking at Aidland can be an opportunity for an interdisciplin­ ary analysis that goes beyond the ordinary confines of the anthropology of development or development studies. To understand OISCA, for instance, I had to draw on religious studies and analyses of secularism, Japanese stud­ ies, and works by historians and take inspiration from multiple theoretical frameworks. The book is evidence that, at the very least, perspectives of Aidland do not have to be insular. The historical and political contexts of the moral imaginations of becoming one were in themselves important outcomes of aid in OISCA, but what of the seeming failure to produce leaders of community-based development? The practical goals of the training programs were to teach trainees some skills in sustainable and organic agriculture and to give them the character traits and dispositions to become community leaders of sus­ tainable development. Many of the trainees from the Myanmar training center did go on to implement organic methods in their farms and even to disseminate this knowledge to neighbors, but most did not become leaders of a community-based movement or development project. In general, about a third of the graduates from the Myanmar training center returned to farm­ ing, another third became staff members, and another third joined Japanese companies in urban areas such as Yangon. What were the outcomes of aid in these instances, and how did OISCA staff members evaluate these results? On one level, staffers in Japan and Myanmar valued the fact that some former trainees were implementing OISCA’s agricultural methods, even if

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only on a small scale. Having an impact on one person was meaningful in itself. Yet the follow-up of trainees was an issue that constantly came up in OISCA Magazine as an issue to address, and Japanese staff members discussed it regularly. In the Myanmar training center, Sakurai-san had instituted a system for trainees to create action plans before graduating and a loan system to help recent trainees jumpstart the projects in their plans. During my research, it was still too early to tell the effectiveness of this strategy. But regardless of what trainees did after their year at OISCA, many of them stayed connected to OISCA in one way or another, visiting its offices and training centers, and remaining in touch with other former trainees and staffers on Facebook, and, of course, a number of them became staff members. Despite the “failure” of the supposed aims of the training programs, a strong international network remained. The OISCA Tokyo headquarters organizes an International Board of Directors meeting every year, inviting the directors of the training centers, a couple of the senior local staff members from some of the training cen­ ters, and other OISCA supporters from around the world, including former trainees. In 2015, seventy-seven representatives from the fourteen countries and territories where OISCA has chapters were in attendance, as well as the mayor of Toyota City, where the meeting was held, and the state minister of the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs of Bangladesh (OISCA 2015). After more than fifty years since its establishment, OISCA continues to have a significant network of supporters in Japan and elsewhere. Could this be considered an outcome of OISCA’s activities, even if it does not fit usual definitions of development? Does the growth in the number of people around the world who know about OISCA and support its mission and have learned to one degree or another the supposed values of Japaneseness constitute a measure of success for OISCA? If so, what are the politics of these outcomes?

The Ambivalence of Solidarity I return, in the end, to the politics of solidarity—the most signifi­ cant implications and consequences of OISCA’s work, especially for the times we are in today. In March 2011 an unprecedented earthquake struck the northern coasts of Japan, leaving tens of thousands of people dead or missing, hundreds of thousands displaced, and vast regions physically, economically, and socially devastated. The destruction of the nuclear re­ actors in the area and the subsequent leakage of radiation added to the crisis. In the wake of these disasters, a national slogan appeared: kizuna.

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Translated as “human bonds,” the term appeared on banners across cities and in discourses from politicians to volunteers and became the “kanji of the year” in 2011 by popular vote (Noguchi 2012). These events might not seem relevant to the current study of OISCA and Japanese international aid. But placed in a larger trajectory of the rise of political conservatism and the popularity of words such as kizuna, the moral imaginations to become one in OISCA appear as something of urgent importance. Since 2011 and especially after Abe Shinzō was reelected as prime minister in 2012, right-wing politics have advanced rapidly in Japan. Re­ jecting public opposition, Abe and his allies pushed through the 2014 State Secrecy Act (Himitsu Hogo Hō), which allows the government to withhold information deemed necessary for state security. They have also pushed for changes in security legislation, which most constitutional scholars argue violate the prohibition of “collective self-defense” and the general renouncement of war laid out in Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan. In short, these moves signal the militarization of Japan. Abe’s legal reforms have happened against the background of his long-standing support of historical revisionism regarding Japan’s actions in World War II and his affiliation with groups such as the ultranationalist Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference) (Narusawa 2013; Repeta 2015). The militarization of Japan in the context of Abe’s political and historical views, supported by other LDP politicians in his camp, is alarming for many people in Japan, as evinced in the mass citizen protests that have taken place since 2011 (Slater et al. 2015). Yet, despite widespread disagreements over the government’s direction, both Abe and the LDP have continued to be reelected. In his analysis of the LDP’s electoral victories in the wake of the 2011 disasters, Jeff Kingston (2013) suggests that those disasters, combined with events such as the right-wing Tokyo governor’s sudden announcement of plans to buy the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, a disputed territory between China and Japan, set the scene for a heightened sense of national anxiety. According to Kingston, these conditions, in conjunction with the ever-present sense of economic decline, helped the right-wing factions of the LDP win the lower house elections in 2012 and the upper house elections in 2013. Kingston’s analysis, however, is not about a new rise of the political right; it is that this is a continuation of the same trend that has been seen for decades. Scholars have analyzed an earlier spike in right-wing politics after the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 and the sarin gas attacks by the new religious group Aum Shinrikyō in 1996. These events propelled forms of nationalism by individuals and organizations keen to enhance the state regulation of new religions while reviving the public role of Shinto

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as a “civil religion” (Mullins 2012). These pro-Shinto nationalists included politicians largely from the LDP, representatives of state-affiliated Shinto shrines and organizations, leaders of new religions, and old and new right- wing groups such as Nippon Kaigi. In this light, we can understand the rise of proponents of “Shinto” environmentalism, such as OISCA actors, as part of an emboldening of nationalist and historical revisionist politics in Japan. This framing makes even more sense when we take into account that Yoshiko is one of the core members of Nippon Kaigi (2015), a somewhat unsurprising fact given her claims of Shinto values and OISCA’s affiliations with conservative LDP politicians. I find this decades-long surreptitious and now more visible rise of right-wing politics and politicians deeply disturbing, especially as they reveal connections with OISCA. But I also cannot help but be fascinated by the entanglements of one of the oldest Japanese NGOs—and, by associa­ tion, one of the earliest aid actors in Japan—in such political programs. This history upends much of my initial assumptions that international aid efforts arise out of “liberal” politics. My ethnographic encounters with OISCA aid workers also showed that, despite my discomfort with the right- wing tendencies of the NGO, the Japanese and Burmese staff members regardless of age found their work with OISCA meaningful. One of the ways that I understand this professional commitment among OISCA staffers is that the organization offered them a meaningful vocation and a place of belonging in times when they felt marginalized or lost. In reference to the contemporary era, Anne Allison (2003) has described in heartbreaking detail how increasing numbers of people in twenty-first-century Japan struggle to get by without secure jobs and, most significantly, without meaningful social relationships. Some of the people she spoke with referenced a sense of security lost and social relations dis­ membered as they expressed their sense of precarity and possibilities of hope. This sense of loss and nostalgic appeal to the past resonates with how OISCA’s Japanese staffers and supporters articulated their visions of the future. What Allison describes is not just a twenty-first-century phenom­ enon—although it is exacerbated by the current precariousness of jobs and social security—but a sentiment that many people who could not keep up with Japan’s rapid urbanization and industrialization also felt in the post­ war decades. In the congruence of nostalgic aspirations, we saw OISCA’s senior staffers, who were mainly of rural and poor backgrounds, join hands with LDP politicians and right-wing public figures. The aid workers I met had found an answer to their sense of marginalization and loss through the activities that these alliances enabled. If twenty-first-century Japan is

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increasingly precarious for a large proportion of its inhabitants, as Allison describes, could this situation push more people to join organizations and movements that espouse ideas of “becoming one” and “Japaneseness” such as OISCA? Could the intersection that we see in OISCA of global visions, nationalist-imperialist ambitions, and ethical values of laboring intimately with others help us understand the rising appeal of right-wing politics in Japan and elsewhere in an increasingly precarious world? A prevailing sense of everyday crisis in Japan, whether in 2011, 1995, or 1945, has fueled many people’s sense of loss and search for new ways to be together with others. There is a widespread concern over precarious lives that are socially alienated and unmoored from communities of belong­ ing. This prevalent sense of atomization might be one of the conditions that frame contemporary humanitarian motivations to help people in other countries as well—that is, “doing good” as a way for those who feel alone to connect with others, as Liisa Malkki (2015) has shown in the case of humanitarians in Finland. And under imaginations of becoming one, the distinctions between the political Left and the political Right no longer matter. The quest to make connections and find community can take many forms, but one of them that we cannot ignore has been the nationalist and nostalgic visions of people like Abe and members of Nippon Kaigi. Yet, in the hands of Yonosuke, Yoshiko, and OISCA staffers, becoming one is not just an inward-looking ideology. Throughout this book, I have described how OISCA’s Japanese staff members used claims about Japaneseness and so-called Shinto values to reach for universals. The key in this conceptual movement has been the claim that Shinto is nonreligious, neither reli­ gious nor secular, and is instead a globally relevant environmental vision. Through the lens of OISCA, then, the arguments by right-wing political actors today who promote the revival of Shinto in the public sphere ap­ pear significant not only because of the nationalism behind them but also because this kind of ideology has been central to Japanese actors’ mode of engagement with global others, especially Asian others. Cultural national­ ism and internationalism are two sides of the same coin. Becoming one as a vision in relation to Myanmar is also a fraught issue. The dangers of solidarity and its links with a violent form of cultural nationalism are visible today, when news of atrocities against Rohingya people are showing the world how “being Burmese” is a highly contested question. The country may have come together at one point around the figure of Aung San Suu Kyi, but this sense of temporary unity has given way to a long-standing exclusionary politics. The issue of ethnic minorities’

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and racial others’ status in Myanmar has been a challenge throughout the twentieth century, as highlighted in the 1947 Panglong Agreement. Many ethnic groups believe that the agreement’s promise of autonomy for ethnic minority regions has been unfulfilled (Ganesan and Kyaw Yin Hlaing 2007; Seng Raw 2001; Smith 1991; South 2008). Rohingya have never had a say in such negotiations, unlike the “recognized” ethnic groups such as the Kachin and the Shan, and have been treated as foreigners and, worse yet, as interlopers to be killed en masse (Selth 2003). As mentioned in chapter 4, the Japanese colonial aspiration of Pan-Asianism in Burma referred to a unity mainly with the ethnically Burman Buddhist majority. Thus, the historical inferences of becoming one in OISCA’s work in Myanmar today coincide with a Burman and state-centric view that has prevailed since World War II. Readers who know the history of Japan’s Pan-Asianism or the ambi­ tions of leaders of new religions such as Onisaburō already understand that nationalism and universalism have coexisted in Japan for a long time. It is important to highlight that what this history and OISCA show us is not the unfortunate transition from a fraternal and egalitarian worldview to an op­ pressive one but a perpetual simultaneous presence of the two orientations without paradox. In the work of OISCA actors, it was not that the visions of becoming one as an egalitarian community devolved into hierarchical and imperialistic ambitions but that they coexisted. And so we cannot rescue a “true” and egalitarian form of becoming one from the clutches of inequal­ ity and imperialist visions, because they have always been entangled. The work of actualizing solidarity in this sense, in the moral imaginations to become one, will always be ambivalent. The challenge is to determine if solidarity of a different kind can be possible, or if the current times demand a different politics altogether.

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Introduction: The Moral Imaginations of Becoming One 1. Throughout the book, I have indicated which language was used when­ ever that is unclear from the context. All translations, unless noted oth­ erwise, are mine. 2. Radio exercises are a set of stretching exercises created by the Kanpo postal insurance system in 1928, modelled after the Czech Sokol move­ ment and the American radio calisthenics by the Metropolitan Life Insur­ ance Company in the 1920s. After the practice was modified in the 1950s to remove allusions to prewar militarism, it reappeared on the radio and on the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) television station in the mornings and is now a ubiquitous activity used in various institutions in Japan, from elementary schools to companies (Kuroda I. 1999). 3. The naming of the country is a contentious issue, and for many years those who used “Myanmar” were thought to recognize the military junta, while “Burma” was used by those who opposed any engagement with the government (Metro 2011). Nevertheless, the debate has become some­ what obsolete in recent years. I use “Myanmar” to refer to the country today and “Burma” when referring to the country before its official name change in 1989. 4. The one training center in Japan that I did not visit operated differently, sending its trainees to small local businesses, and did not focus on agriculture. 5. In the fall of 2012 the Japanese government played a leading role in helping Myanmar settle its delayed debts to institutions such as the World Bank (Kōno and Nagata 2012). Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. announced in December 2012 that it would work together with the Co­ operative Bank Ltd. in Myanmar to provide technical and other support (Japan Times 2012b), and other Japanese businesses prepared to enter the Burmese market (Japan Times 2012a). In January 2013 the new finance minister, Aso Tarō (who also was and remains a senior member of the

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lobby group Japan Myanmar Association), visited Myanmar and met with the then president Thein Sein to strengthen ties (Slodkowski 2013). 6. In 2008 the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) was merged with the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) to centralize the three areas of aid—technical cooperation, loan aid, and grant aid— under the slogan “Inclusive and Dynamic Development.” The new JICA’s strategic mission to address global issues such as poverty reduction, im­ provement of governance and public services, and human security reflects efforts to harmonize Japanese aid systems with changing international norms. 7. Contrary to European and American traditions of rationality that tend to be skeptical of the imagination as “fantasy” or “unreal,” a number of scholars have explored how social and moral imaginations organize societies (B. Anderson 1983; Appadurai 1996; Castoriadis 1987; Gaonkar 2002; Ivy 1995; Mittermaier 2011; C. Taylor 2004). In these analyses, the imagination is no longer simply a foil for society but has a social presence of its own. The imagination here is not a product of the individual subject and his or her mental capacities but is profoundly relational and social. Also, unlike ideology, although not necessarily in opposition to it, the moral imagination does not merely constitute a naturalized and illusory “norm” that legitimates and masks a dominant political power (cf. Asad 1979). It is more ambiguous, multiple, interpretive, and aspirational than that (Crapanzano 2004). 8. I thank Naomi Leite for alerting me to this latter body of literature. 9. Religion scholar Shimazono Susumu (1992) defines “new religions” (shinshūkyō) as those that were established between the early nineteenth century and the early 1950s. Ananaikyō was established in 1948 and would thus fall under this category. Shimazono calls religious groups that were established or rose to prominence after the 1970s and 1980s “new new religions” (shin-shinshūkyō). 10. I will refer to Nakano Yonosuke as “Yonosuke” in order to make it easier to distinguish him from his successor, Nakano Yoshiko. To refer to the second Ananaikyō and OISCA leader, I will call her “Yoshiko.” The third Ananaikyō leader is Nakano Etsuko. 11. The OISCA website quotes part of the organizational charter (in Japanese): Article 4 (Ideals) We recognize that all life is closely interconnected and that their source is in the universe. We envision a world in which people coexist beyond differences of nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, and culture and strive to protect and nurture the basis of life on this earth.

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Article 5 (Mission) Our organization’s mission is to cultivate a consciousness of coopera­ tion and action for the prosperity of humankind among all people who are grateful that we are able to live, thanks to a great benevolence, and who love the home [furusato] that has nurtured people. (http://www.oisca .org/about/) 12. However, a couple of years after I finished fieldwork, some of the training centers installed private showers to replace the communal Japanese-style baths and created sleeping quarters that afforded more individual privacy. The relaxing of discipline will probably continue as the generational frictions and other organizational reforms indicate (see chapter 1).

Chapter 1: A History of the Nonreligious 1. Some organizations that conduct NGO-like activities of humanitarian and development aid have also registered as religious organizations (shūkyō hōjin) or educational foundations (gakkō hōjin). 2. The conversion rate between US dollars and Japanese yen is calculated at an approximate of JPY 100 per US$1. 3. In this book, all monetary amounts have been rounded to the nearest whole number. All conversion rates, unless specified in the referenced source, were calculated using the website www.x-rates.com, based on either the last date of the given year or, if known, the beginning of the month in that year. Here the exchange rate used is from December 31, 2015. 4. Although some aspects of OISCA resemble religiously inspired forms of development work (see chapter 4), the idea of being nonreligious calls for an analysis that is different from that of faith-based development (cf. Allahyari 2000; Barnett and Stein 2012; Benthall and Bellion-Jourdan 2003; Bornstein 2005; Hefferan and Fogarty 2010; Occhipinti 2005). 5. Article 20 of the constitution states that “no religious organization shall receive any privileges from the State, nor exercise any political author­ ity.” Article 89, most significantly for OISCA, ensures that “no public money or other property shall be expended or appropriated for the use, benefit, or maintenance of any religious institution or association or for any charitable, educational benevolent enterprises not under the control of public authority.” 6. In this discussion, I follow scholars who distinguish between “the secu­ lar,” “secularism,” and “secularization” (Asad 2003; Casanova 2007; Rots and Teeuwen 2017). “The secular” refers to a modern category that

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organizes certain behaviors, sensibilities, and social realms as differenti­ ated from “the religious.” Secularism is a political and legal project that institutes the separation of the secular and the religious through divisions of the private, where religions are allowed, and the public, where the secular reigns. Secularization captures the historical processes by which societies become more secular, whether through the decline of religion in general or the privatization of religion. 7. “Ananai” is written using the kanji characters for the numbers three and five (kyō is the kanji for “teaching” and is the suffix for names of reli­ gions). According to an Ananaikyō official, the number three refers to the sun, moon, and stars, which represent the workings of the skies (tentai). The number five points to the workings of the earth (daichi): wood, fire, land, gold, and water. He explained that this was similar to the Chinese concept of the five elements ofwuxing . The establishment of Ananaikyō was also prophesized by Nagasawa Katsutate, a Shinto reigaku (Spirit Learning) scholar, and in the Ōmoto scripture Reikai monogatari (The Tale of the Spirit World). 8. The Japan-US Security Treaty was first signed in 1952 as a framework that allowed the United States to have influence in Japan and a presence there in the form of military bases to ensure security in East Asia. When revisions for the treaty came up in 1960, activists from the political Left rose in opposition, leading to the largest and most violent public demon­ strations in postwar Japan. The religious leaders of the World Conference on Religions for Peace joined leftist movements to oppose the 1960 se­ curity treaty and its recommitment to a US-dominated security structure. See Nihon Shūkyōsha Heiwa Kyōgikai 1968. 9. The Yasukuni Shrine is the Shinto shrine in Tokyo where people who have died in wars since the late nineteenth century are commemorated. It is controversial because some of the World War II dead it commemorates are now considered to be war criminals, so the shrine has become a major point of conflict between Japan and other East Asian countries. Conserva­ tive Japanese politicians have continued to visit the shrine, despite protest from the Chinese and Korean governments. 10. As Sagami (2014) points out, this issue is not unique to Ananaikyō but is also prevalent in other religious groups. 11. When a non-Ananaikyō woman in her forties became the director of one of the training centers, she converted to Ananaikyō. Even though no overt pressure had been applied, some senior staffers and Ananaikyō members commented to me that they were secretly happy that she had done so.

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12. Article 34 of the Civil Code stipulates: “Any association or foundation relating to any academic activities, art, charity, worship, religion, or other public interest which is not for profit may be established as a juridical person with the permission of the competent government agency.” 13. Interestingly, echoing Ōhira’s speech and this JICA report, Foucault ([1979] 2008, 232) also cites the emphasis on human capital as the reason why countries like Japan were able to develop quickly. 14. See http://www.oisca.org/about/. 15. In 1975, Japan’s ODA commitment was 0.231 percent, whereas other DAC countries contributed 0.340 percent (OECD 2017). 16. In 1975, OISCA gained roster consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and was elevated to general status in 1995. Article 71 of the UN Charter stipulates ECOSOC’s consultations with nongovernmental organizations, and ECOSOC resolution 1996/31 governs relationships with NGOs today. By having consultative status with ECOSOC, NGOs can attend international conferences, make state­ ments at these events, participate in discussions, organize side events, enter UN premises, and lobby. The current levels of consultative status are as follows: “General consultative status is reserved for large international NGOs whose area of work covers most of the issues on the agenda of ECOSOC and its subsidiary bodies. These tend to be fairly large, es­ tablished international NGOs with a broad geographical reach. Special consultative status is granted to NGOs which have a special competence in, and are concerned specifically with, only a few of the fields of activ­ ity covered by the ECOSOC. These NGOs tend to be smaller and more recently established. Organizations that apply for consultative status but do not fit in any of the other categories are usually included in the Roster. These NGOs tend to have a rather narrow and/or technical focus” (UN DESA 2016). 17. Although this might seem a surprisingly powerful mobilization of politi­ cians for an NGO, other early NGOs have similar Diet leagues, such as the Japanese Organization for International Cooperation in Family Planning. 18. Political scientist Nakano Minoru (1993) shows that Diet leagues (gi’in renmei) in Japan have historically served to advance the interests of cer­ tain industries or policies, and politicians join them with the expectation that the personal relationships cultivated through such associations will help them obtain support for certain issues or overall political influence in the Diet.

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19. Nippon-kai website, accessed November 18, 2015, http://www.nipponkai .or.jp/index.html. 20. Other NGOs have also struggled against public suspicion toward religion and especially toward new religions in Japan. As a result, for example, the Japan Sōtōshu Relief Committee—Sōtōshu being a Buddhist sect— changed its name to the Shanti Volunteer Association in 1999.

Chapter 2: The Politics of “Shinto” Environmentalism 1. Josephson takes this concept of ideographs from Michael McGee (Jo­ sephson 2012, 136). For similar analyses of the secular as a sublimation of religious paradigms, see, e.g., Pecora 2006; Shulman 2006; Vattimo 1998. 2. Not to be confused with how the term kannushi is used in colloquial ways to refer to priests at Shinto shrines, as in the ethnographic vignette at the beginning of this chapter. 3. Presaging OISCA, in 1925, Onisaburō created a humanitarian organiza­ tion through which he hoped to transcend the boundaries of religion, the Jinrui Aizenkai or ULBA (Universal Love and Brotherhood Association), and promoted the universal language of Esperanto, which a Baha’i leader introduced to Onisaburō in 1922. ULBA spread its activities throughout Asia, the South Pacific, and South America, but it did not seek to con­ vert people either to Ōmoto or Japanese imperial subjectivity. Instead, its mission focused on humanitarian activities, such as providing relief in Manchuria, as well as agricultural and environmental efforts, activi­ ties in the arts, and martial arts (Stalker 2008, 162–164). Today, ULBA continues its work around the world, promoting international peace and global communication through Esperanto, in addition to other initiatives such as the opposition to the death penalty (Jinrui Aizenkai 2018). While the organization’s mission speaks of the principle of “one god, one world, one language” based on Onisaburō’s teachings of bankyō dōkon (“many teachings, same root”), this worldview also derived from Onisaburō’s belief in the specialness and superiority of the Japanese in leading the world toward global peace. 4. Some scholars have suggested that reigaku is the “true” path of Shinto, not kokugaku with its secular orientations. According to them, being at­ tuned to the spirit world through reigaku is how we can find the essence of Shinto, through which we are able to see how every object in the world embodies the life force of the whole universe, forcing us to see the earth beyond the human (Watanabe K. 2008). 5. It is important to note that this essentialist view has never idealized nature as pristine or wild, as I discuss in more detail in chapter 3.

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6. Rots (2015) argues that the Shinto environmentalist paradigm enables proponents of Shinto’s relevance in public life to claim that Shinto is secular. In the case of OISCA, what I call the nonreligious sidesteps the secular as well as the religious in that the references to a supernatural world described in this chapter are not “immanent” or “this-worldly” (cf. Rots 2017a), understanding immanence to be the rejection of “any form of interpenetration between the things of Nature, on one hand, and ‘the supernatural’ on the other, be this understood in terms of the one transcendent God, or of Gods or spirits, or magic forces, or whatever” (C. Taylor 2007, 16). 7. These views of Shinto and environmentalism, and the Orientalist tone, have also informed academic understandings of religion and ecology. An influential text that helped scholars make the connection between non- Western spiritual traditions (such as Shinto) and environmentalism has been Lynn White’s (1967) article “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologi­ cal Crisis.” He proposed that the global environmental crisis was due to Western Christianity’s dualism between humans and nature and its anthro­ pocentrism. In contrast, he wrote, Asian religions, paganism, and animism enable advanced ways of living rooted in an interdependence between humans and nature, conducive to making an environmentally sustainable world. Scholars have questioned this assumption that anthropocentrism leads to ecological destruction and, conversely, that ecocentrism enables environmental sustainability. The construction of the “ecologically noble savage” has also been challenged. Nevertheless, the belief that intimacy between humans and nature in “non-Western” societies could lead to better environmental conditions persists. Shinto and its associated ani­ mism and nature worship fit this environmental Orientalist paradigm. For Orientalist approaches see e.g., Chapple 2001; Grim and Tucker 2014; Pálsson 1996. For critiques of essentialism in ecological paradigms, see, e.g., Guha 1989; Headland 1997; Kalland 1996; Redford 1990. 8. When I asked Maria how these dignitaries had ended up coming to this ceremony, she whispered that this was also her doing: the mayor had been her teacher in primary school. 9. OISCA Children’s Forest Program website, accessed June 30, 2016, http://oisca-cfp.jimdo.com. 10. Takie Lebra (1992) has argued that unlike the “outer self,” which is so­ cially circumscribed, the kokoro is understood by Japanese people as a disposition that “can be free, spontaneous, and even asocial . . . a reservoir of truthfulness and purity” (T. Lebra 1992, 112). On another level, Lebra explains that if the kokoro is strong and pure enough, it “will eventually

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remove the communication barrier and reach another’s heart [kokoro ga tsūji au] . . . in heart-to-heart communication” (113). Kokoro is seen here as a domain that not only marks a pure inner self but can also become the basis for connection with others. Similarly, the increasing focus on world transformation (yonaoshi) and personal change through “healing the heart” (kokoro naoshi) in new religions points to this validation of kokoro as a way to create harmonious, universal human relationships (Hardacre 1986; Reader 1990, 59; Robertson 1991; Shimazono 1993). 11. Anne Allison (2013) describes some of these news stories in the open­ ing scenes of her book Precarious Japan and situates them in what has become a precarious existence for many people in contemporary Japan. 12. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2011) makes this point. Matei Candea (2011) explains that Viveiros de Castro’s theorization of the ontological is about “refraining from either assent or critique, in order to allow the people themselves to specify the conditions under which what they say is to be taken” (147). Other anthropologists have also engaged with this ques­ tion of “taking seriously” that has emerged from the “ontological turn.” Although I am not directly drawing on this body of literature, the debates over what it means to “take seriously” are informative in understanding the contexts, logics, and consequences of the nonreligious and “Shinto” environmentalism that some people in OISCA have defined.

Chapter 3: Making a Universal Furusato (Homeplace) 1. Although I do not have hard data, life history interviews indicated that most of them would not have owned land, at least not of a significant size, from before the land reforms. 2. One can also note echoes of Onisaburō’s visions of an “alternative to modernity” (datsu kindai), discussed in chapter 2. 3. Bokashi is made from biodegradable waste matter that is broken down by microorganisms and is widely used today in organic and natural methods of agriculture as a nonchemical fertilizer that can restore or enhance soil quality. At the Myanmar training center, it was a mixture of chicken or pig excrement, rice bran, oil scraps, ash, soil, water, and bokashi “seed” made from effective microorganisms (EM). See chapter 6 for a more thorough description. 4. Other methods to ensure productivity in rice cultivation include careful water control, leveled and manured fields, transplantation of seedlings rather than direct broadcast of seeds in fields, and appropriate use of fertil­ izers and pesticides (Bray 1986, 45).

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Chapter 4: Muddy Labor 1. “ Itadakimasu,” meaning something like “I humbly take this meal,” is what people say in Japan at the beginning of a meal. 2. All full-time staff members have spent at least a year in Japan and have a basic command of the Japanese language. 3. This departs from the argument I made in a Cultural Anthropology article, in which I showed how the ethic of aid work in OISCA worked upon collective forms of intimacy. Here I argue that, in fact, the imagination of becoming one in OISCA mobilized individual as well as collective forms of intimacy (see C. Watanabe, forthcoming). Nevertheless, my argument does differ from Elizabeth Povinelli’s (2006) discussion of intimacy in liberalism, where “what makes us most human is our capacity to base our most intimate relations, our most robust governmental institutions, and our economic relations on mutual and free recognition of the worth and value of another person, rather than basing these connections on, for example, social status or the bare facts of the body” (5). Ultimately, whether it was about personal intimacies or intimacies of a collectivity, what mattered in OISCA was the orientation to become one, sometimes over and above the recognition of the value of another person. 4. I thank Ju Hui Judy Han for provoking me into this line of thought. 5. I thank Kimberly Chong for these insights and references. 6. I thank Yamaura Chigusa for pushing me to think about these differentia­ tions in the efforts to become one with Asian “others.” 7. In fact, anthropologists have shown how concepts of solidarity in other contexts have also been central to nonliberals as well as liberals, fascists as well as progressives (Holmes 2000; Muehlebach 2012).

Chapter 5: Being Like Family 1. See the introduction for the difference between OISCA International and OISCA-the-NGO. 2. The phrase “universal family of man,” moreover, suggests a possible awareness of the international photography exhibition that toured the world from 1955 to 1963 under the title “The Family of Man.” The im­ mensely popular exhibit showcased images of people from around the world to impress upon viewers an idea of human commonality and a subtext of an antinuclear message. Curators rejected or removed scenes of nuclear destruction, racial violence, and human conflict of any kind, lead­ ing Roland Barthes (1980) to famously criticize the show for its depoliti­ cizing and dehistoricizing humanism (see also Malkki 1996). In OISCA,

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I did not see this tradition of liberal humanism, but the metaphor of family and the mobilization of various kinship ties played a central role. 3. In addition, his uncle on his mother’s side who lives in the United States is now the president of OISCA’s US chapter, and in late 2012 this uncle’s daughter moved from the United States to Japan after graduating from college, to work as a staff member at the OISCA Tokyo headquarters. 4. Since the ie was essentially an economic unit, blood relations were not the primary ways of defining family, and fictive kin were often incorpo­ rated into the ie in the form of adult adoption. The ie system was seen as the ideological foundation for the nationalistic and imperial regime of wartime Japan and hence was abolished by the Americans after the war. Yet the concept of ie is also said to form the foundation of postwar corporate culture in Japanese businesses. There is a rich and deep history of scholarship on Japanese kinship, which I can only reference here. See, e.g., Bachnik 1983; Bryant 1990; Kondo 1990; Nakane 1967; Norbeck and Befu 1958; Ochiai 2013; M. White 2002. 5. Yamatani Eriko was supported by the Shinto Seiji Renmei (Shinto Politi­ cal Coalition), a nationalist politicians’ league.

Chapter 6: Discipline as Care 1. Historians, anthropologists, and philosophers have analyzed how waste and its symbolic pollution feed into the politics of colonialism and post­ coloniality, projects of modernity, and government (W. Anderson 1995, 2010; Chakrabarty 1991; Esty 1999; McFarlane 2008; Scanlan 2005). But whereas these studies conceptualize waste as a symbolic tool of negative values and practices of exclusion, inequality, and oppression, I suggest that a different dynamic is at play in OISCA, one that takes waste as a valuable resource and a vehicle of life. 2. Marie Lathers (2006) makes an interesting argument in her analysis of women primatologists’ relationship with nonhuman waste, stating that these primatologists engage positively with primate excrement, making possible a shared sociality between humans and nonhumans and thereby the potential for a posthumanist future. 3. Organic farmers often distinguish indigenous bacteria (dochakukin) from EM because the latter are a trademarked product made from the secret recipes of Higa Teruo and EMRO. But in this book I do not distinguish between them because people at the Myanmar training center called the indigenous microorganisms “EM.” 4. For more on nature farming, see Fukuoka 1975.

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agriculture: and Dapog method, 112–113; unity, 124, 137, 138–139, 145, 150; in Deguchi Onisaburō’s teachings, in JICA discourses, 124; as planetary 68; experiments in, 81–82; and unity of ecological harmony, 13–14; nature farming, 68, 179; and organic taking seriously imaginaries of, 5. methods, 40, 68, 80–81, 111; and pig See also moral imaginations; muddy farming, 156–157, 174–177; spiritual labor; “Shinto” environmentalism cultivation through, 83; tensions bokashi, 110–111, 165–168, 182 between “Shinto” environmental­ Boltanski, Luc, 129 ism and, 80, 83. See also bokashi; Bornstein, Erica, 131, 132 furusato-zukuri; rice; satoyama Brundtland Report. See Earth Summit Aidland, 186–187 Burma: Aung San, 7, 136; debates over aid workers: and blurring with “aid recipi­ name, 193n3; Japanese colonization ents,” 10, 18; as Burmese staffers, of, 136. See also Myanmar 108, 114–118, 139–141, 156–157, 162; as Japanese staffers, 40–42, Candea, Matei, 200n12 97–100, 137, 151–154, 162–164; as capacity building. See hitozukuri non-Japanese staffers, 154–155; in care. See discipline; pastoral power OISCA, 9–10; representations of, 3. Ching, Leo T.S., 143 See also Aidland Chong, Kimberly, 132 Allison, Anne, 190, 200n11 civil society, 28, 56. See also nongovern­ Ananaikyō: establishment of, 67; and gen­ mental organizations (NGOs) der, 158–160; and meaning of Ananai, class consciousness, 98–99 196n7; number of members in, 38; Cohen, Susanne, 171 OISCA staffers in, 9, 14, 40–42, collectivity: as communal living and labor, 137, 151–154, 162–164; overview of 4, 48 119–121, 126–127 teachings in, 67–68; as Shinto, 62–63 colonialism: Japanese, 20–21, 134; in Arase, David, 8 Myanmar, 136–137; and postwar Arendt, Hannah, 129 Japan, 20, 142–143; settler colonial­ Asad, Talal, 36, 65, 76, 195n6 ism, 100–102 Association of Shinto Shrines (Jinja compassion, 129, 131 honchō), 35, 72 Deguchi Onisaburō, 66–67; antimodern Ban Shōichi, 55, 123, 124 agrarianism of, 68; combination of becoming one: as communal living and nationalism and universalism by, 69, labor, 4, 15–16, 122; as hierarchical 86, 198n3. See also Ōmoto

233

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development: as aid work, 18, 23, 27; ordinary, 17; as struggle (kattō), 58, anthropology of, 3, 186–187; limits of 79, 117–118, 141. See also moral conventional understandings of, 30. imaginations See also Aidland Ewing, Katherine, 5 developmental state: Japan and, 8 Development Assistance Committee faith-based development, 131–132 (DAC), 7–8 farmers: in Japan, 96, 97–98; in Myanmar, Diet leagues (gi’in renmei), 197n18; 107, 111–112; OISCA staffers as, 56, OISCA Diet League, 52–55 99, 109; and tensions with hitozukuri difference, 131–133, 138–141, 184 (making persons), 77, 82–83 discipline: and becoming one, 4; and Fassin, Didier, 12, 129, 130 Burmese trainees, 173; as care, 169, field (gemba), 51, 122–123, 125–126, 173–177; relaxing of, 195n12; spiri­ 128 tual cultivation through, 4, 48–49; for Foucault, Michel, 47, 132, 171, 173, sustainability, 172, 182 183–184, 197n13 discomfort: at allusions to militarism and Furusato-zukuri (making a homeplace): imperial Japan, 19–20; at disciplin­ in developing countries, 99–100; ary and communal lifestyles, 18; as as green imperialism, 100–102; method, 18–23 as OISCA’s mission, 88–91; staff discussions about, 102–105, 115–117; Earth Summit, 87, 183 theorization of, 96–97; in the training effective microorganisms (EM), 169, centers, 89–90, 91, 106; as utopian, 172, 177–178; connections to 105. See also satoyama Sekai Kyūseikyō (Church of World Furuta Jūjirō, 52–53; and new religions, Messianity) and Okada Mokichi, 53–54 179; criticism by the Mokichi Okada Association (MOA), 180; EM Gajaweera, Nalika, 131 Research Organization (EMRO), 178, gemba. See field 180; identified by Higa Teruo, 178; generational conflicts, 42–45 used in the Myanmar training center, gi’in renmei. See Diet leagues 178–179; used in a training center in Goldfarb, Kathryn, 161 Japan, 180–183; versus indigenous Grandin, Greg, 105 bacteria (dochakukin), 178, 180, Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere 202n3. See also waste (Dai Tōa Kyōei Ken), 135, 136 environmentalism, 71; as environmental­ Great Spirit of the Universe (uchū ity, 183; and green imperialism, daiseishin), 14, 39. See also Nakano 100–102; and Japan as a protoeco­ Yonosuke logical nation, 185; and nihonjinron green imperialism, 100–102 (theories of Japanese essence), 70, Grove, Richard H., 100 84–85; Orientalist studies of religion and ecology, 199n7. See also nature; Harrison, Elizabeth, 186 satoyama; “Shinto” environmental­ Higa Teruo, 178, 179. See also effective ism; waste microorganisms Esrey, Steven A., 172 hitozukuri (making persons): comparison ethics: “earth ethics” (chikyū rinri), of human capital theory with, 47; 88; ethical labor, 16–17, 22, 126; in Japanese aid policies, 46–48; in

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OISCA, 17, 82–83, 125–126; tensions Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers with making farmers, 77, 82–83 (JOCV), 49, 55, 123–125 hōshi (voluntarism), 42–43, 162 Jinrui Aizenkai (Universal Love and Howell, Signe, 145, 161 Brotherhood Association, ULBA), 69, Hsu, Carolyn, 132 198n3 humanitarianism: and cultural encounters, Johnson, Chalmers, 8 13; and faith-based development, Josephson, Jason Ānanda, 64–65 131–132; and humanitarian reason, junkangata shakai (material-cycle society). 12, 129; and humanitarian senti­ See waste ments, 13, 129; and humanitarian­ ization of the public sphere, 12, Kelly, William W., 98–99 128; and liberal altruism, 132; and Kingston, Jeff, 189 moral imaginations, 12–13; paradox kinship. See relatedness in, 129–130, 139; and relational kizuna, 188–189 empathy, 132 kokoro, 14, 38, 77–78, 83, 199n10 kokugaku (National Learning), 66–68. See ie. See relatedness also Deguchi Onisaburō imagination, 194n7. See also moral Kondo, Dorinne, 17, 22 imaginations Kumada, Naoko, 149–150 imperialism: Japanese, 134–136, 142. See also colonialism Lambek, Michael, 17, 126 intimacy: in colonialism, 134; individual Lathers, Marie, 202n2 versus collective, 201n3 laws: Article 20 of the constitution, 195n5; Ivy, Marilyn, 97 Article 34 of the 1896 Civil Code, 45, Iwabuchi, Koichi, 135 197n12; Article 89 of the constitution, 195n5; relating to legal incorporation Japanese aid: and developmental state, of OISCA, 51; relating to public 8; differences from Euro-American interest corporations, 45–46 cases, 3, 8; as diplomatic strategy, Lebra, Takie, 199n10 8; history of, 49–50, 197n15; as liberal altruism, 131 largest aid donor in the world, 8; in Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), 52, Myanmar, 6–7, 193n5; ODA Charter 54–55, 160, 189 of 1992, 87; scholarship about, 8; as Livingston, Julie, 16 traditional donor, 7; as war repara­ loss: sense of, 96, 99, 190–191. See also tions, 7, 8, 49 furusato-zukuri Japanese cultural values: collectivism and disciplinary practices as, 4, 49; as making persons. See hitozukuri commonsense (atarimae), 15, 70; Malkki, Liisa, 12, 191, 201n2 and nature, 70–73, 85; in nihonjinron management, 171 (theories of Japanese essence), 70, McLaughlin, Levi, 35, 41 84–85; Shinto as, 14–15, 69–70 Metro, Rose, 193n3 Japan International Cooperation Agency Miyazaki, Hirokazu, 90 (JICA), 49, 194n6; and OISCA, 10, Mokichi Okada Association 45 (MOA), 180. See also effective Japan NGO Center for International microorganisms Cooperation (JANIC), 27 Mol, Annemarie, 173

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moral imaginations, 5, 12–13; of com­ on, 29–30; Japanese governmental munal living and labor, 15–16; and schemes for, 51; Japan’s history of, humanitarianism, 12–13; and moral 27–29; legal registration of, 28–29; ambiguities, 16, 22; of a planetary OISCA challenging understandings unity of ecological harmony, 13. See of, 56; OISCA as exemplary type of, also becoming one; ethics 50, 55–56; reason for focusing on, muddy labor: as collective labor, 119–121, 8–9; as solutions to developmental 126–127; as “smelling like mud” problems, 50; UN consultative status (dorokusai), 16, 122 of, 197n16 Muehlebach, Andrea, 12 nonhuman life. See effective microorgan­ multispecies ethnographies, 185 isms; pastoral power; “Shinto” Myanmar: cultural nationalism in, environmentalism; waste 191–192; ethnic groups in, 107–108, nonreligion: claims of “not religion” 191–192; reforms in, 6; rice cultiva­ (shūkyō ja nai), 14, 69; as differ­ tion in, 109, 111; “special relation­ ent from secularity, 36, 76, 199n6; ship” between Japan and, 7, 136; OISCA established as, 13; and Shinto, Yesagyo township in, 107 14–15; and “Shinto” environmental­ ism, 63, 73; porous personhood in, Nakano Minoru, 197n18 76–79; and the miraculous weather, Nakano Tsuyoshi, 53 73–76. See also secularity Nakano Yonosuke, 9; biography of, 37; nostalgia, 100, 190. See also establishment of OISCA by, 13–14; furusato-zukuri and international religious confer­ ences, 38–39 Official Development Assistance (ODA), Nakano Yoshiko, 54, 60, 194n10; and 50, 87, 197n15 importance of the field gemba( ), Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko, 95 125–126; in Nippon Kaigi, 190; Okada Mokichi, 68, 179. See also effective and notion of furusato, 90–91; and microorganisms “Shinto” environmentalist views, 70 Ōmoto, 65–66; Nakano Yonosuke as nationalism. See rightwing nationalism follower of, 13, 14. See also Deguchi nature: contra a pristine nature, 92–93, 95; Onisaburō and the Great Spirit of the Universe, ontology. See “Shinto” environmentalism 39–40, 170; indeterminacy of, 176; Organization for Economic Co-operation and Japanese cultural values, 70–73; and Development (OECD), 7 and kokoro, 77–78, 83; “living in Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and harmony with nature,” 15, 63, 70, Cultural Advancement (OISCA): 73, 83; and nihonjinron (theories of and astronomical observatories, Japanese essence), 84–85. See also 38; Burmese staffers in, 114–117, furusato-zukuri; satoyama; “Shinto” 139–141, 156–157, 162; Children’s environmentalism Forest Program (CFP), 10–11, 74, 88; nihonjinron (theories of Japanese essence), compared with other Japanese NGOs, 84–85. See also Japanese cultural 11–12; focus on agriculture in, 40; values generational conflicts among Japanese Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), 189, staffers in, 42–45, 57; history of, 9, 190 13, 37–40; and legal changes, 45–46; nongovernmental organizations (NGOs): and support from Liberal Democratic defined, 3, 29–30; Japanese data Party (LDP) politicians, 52, 54–55,

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160; and membership (kai’in) system, rice: cultivation in Myanmar, 109, 111; 11; mission of, 14, 194n11; and the Japan’s declining cultivation of, 96; Myanmar training center, 7, 81–82, in furusato imageries, 96; in the 106–111, 113–114; non-Japanese Myanmar training center, 109–111; staffers in OISCA, 154–155; and the in postwar Japan, 97–98; symbolic OISCA high school and vocational importance of, 95–96 college (senmon gakkō), 35, 38, rightwing nationalism: and discomfort, 54–55, 57; and OISCA International, 20; and environmentalism, 185; in 11; seen as exemplary type of NGO, Japan, 21, 189–190; in the OISCA 50–51, 55–56; senior Japanese staff­ high school, 35; and OISCA staff­ ers in, 40–42, 97–100, 137, 151–154, ers, 20–21. See also “Shinto” 162–163; structure of, 9–11; and environmentalism Tokyo headquarters, 31–32, 61–62, Rio+20, 88 102–105; training centers in Japan, Rots, Aike, 72, 199n6 19–20; overview of training centers of, 9–10; with UN consultative status, Satō Eisaku, 52, 53; and new religions, 54 197n16; younger Japanese staffers in, satoyama, 92–95. See also furusato-zukuri 43–44, 102–105, 141, 163–164 Scherz, China, 130 secularity: Shinto as, 64–65, 199n6; Pan-Asianism, 13, 135–136, 142; in theories of, 36, 76, 195n6. See also Burma, 136–137, 192 nonreligion Pandian, Anand, 184 Sekai Kyūseikyō, 68, 179–180. See also paradox, 129–130, 139 effective microorganisms pastoral power, 183–184 Shimazono Susumu, 194n9 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 201n3 Shinto: history of, 15, 64–65; as Japanese problematization, 132–133, 143 cultural values and practices, 14–15, 33, 62, 69–70; and New Year’s rajio taisō (radio exercises), 2, 123, 193n2 Day, 60–62; and Yasukuni Shrine Redfield, Peter, 130 controversies, 21, 39, 196n9. See also reigaku (Spirit Learning), 66–67, 69, “Shinto” environmentalism 198n4. See also Deguchi Onisaburō “Shinto” environmentalism: defined of, relatedness, 145; consanguineal and affinal 69–73, 88; distinct from ontology, kinship, 145–146, 163–164; and 79; invisible in agricultural practice, de-kinning, 161–164; emotional labor 80, 83; and nihonjinron, 84–86; in, 148–150; and family ideologies in porous personhood in, 76–79; and Myanmar, 147, 149–150; and gender, rightwing nationalism, 185, 190; 158–161; and Japanese ideology of taken seriously, 85–86, 200n12; and ie, 147, 202n4; and kinning, 145; the miraculous weather, 73–76. See through communal living and labor, also Shinto 147–148, 156–157 Shūmei Natural Agriculture, 180. See also religion: as a contentious issue, 14, 34–35, effective microorganisms 44, 56–57, 198n20; and international solidarity: and difference, 131–133; peace conferences, 39; and new kizuna, 188–189; as the problem, religions, 14, 34–35, 194n9; and 13, 133, 192; solidarity-as-oneness, world renewal (yonaoshi), 14. See 130, 133, 138–141; solidarity- also nonreligion; Shinto in-proximity, 130–131. See also Reno, Joshua Ozias, 182 becoming one

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spirit (seishin): and agriculture, 40, 83; Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 200n12 communal lifestyle and cultivation of, voluntarism. See hōshi 48, 58, 108–109; cultivation through discipline of, 4, 48–49; in Japanese waste: circulation using effective micro­ colonialism, 136; OISCA spirit, 106, organisms (EM), 180–182; circula­ 155, 173 tory sociality (junkangata shakai), Stalker, Nancy, 69 169–171, 182–183; cleaning of, Stoler, Ann, 134 174; ecological sanitation (ecosan) struggle (kattō). See ethics; discomfort toilets, 171–172; management of, sustainable development, 87, 183. See also 171; and manure, 174–177; problem furusato-zukuri, waste of mass waste, 182; productivity of, 177, 202n2. See also effective Taylor, Charles, 78–79, 199n6 microorganisms Thomas, Julia Adeney, 184–185 Watsuji Tetsurō, 84 tinkering, 173, 176–177 White, Lynn, 199 training centers: “failure” of, 187–188; in World Conference on Religions for Peace, Japan, 19–20; in Myanmar, 7, 81–82, 39, 196n8 106–111, 113–114; overview of, 9–10 Yamaguchi Yōichi, 136 utopian orientation, 90, 105 Yamaura, Chigusa, 135

6827_Book_V4.indd 238 12/5/18 10:11 AM About the Author

CHIKA WATANABE is a lecturer (assistant professor) in social anthropology at the University of Manchester. She received her PhD from Cornell University and was a postdoctoral scholar in the InterAsia-Program at Yale University. She has published several articles on topics such as debt and gratitude, temporal­ ity, and practices of modeling and imitation in development aid in American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, and other journals, as well as chapters in edited volumes on religion and development, civil society in Asia, and global secularism. She received a master’s degree in refugee studies from Oxford University and has worked in several NGOs around the world.

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